How the internet made having an office MORE important instead of obsolete

British economist, Frances Carncross, proclaimed that “distance will die” shortly after Al Gore invented the internet. The gist of what he and other web prognosticators were telling Willowbend Service Park is that the internet connects everyone instantly and work would come to you, you wouldn't go to work. Offices would become obsolete. That couldn't be further from the truth when it comes to Willowbend tenants.

The office warehouse concept caters to businesses who can position themselves as a locally based service with face-to-face contact with their customer. Small businesses zig – encourage interaction – while larger ones zag – with a high-tech rather than high-touch approach.

Other benefits of having an office include:

1) Separating the home from work. This was a key point in one of our earlier articles. 

2) Providing a space for employees and customers to share knowledge, to generate ideas, and to pool talents and perspectives.

3) Working in a more sociable and productive way, and not from the top of a mountain or wherever you can get a decent signal.

One of the newest trends in the offices of small businesses is the co-working concept. In a nutshell, it is space 'when you need it.' Having a full-time office receptionist and scheduler, for example, might not be in the cards for a small business. When you have an office with co-working desks, it might be the scheduler sitting in the office mornings, clients or vendors making deals at the same desk with you in the afternoon, and an accounts payable or payroll person sitting there every two weeks. (If you haven't already outsourced AP/payroll functions.) You're curating talent to share a desk, rather than buying different desks for various roles.

Understanding how the employees connect within a flexible co-working environment is crucial… but what's more critical is how the staffed office appears to the outside: The customer. The customer who's going to stick around for repeat business is the customer who is treated right. They're going to want to come in to talk instead of hitting a voicemail box, a phone tree, or being routed to the web. Interaction creates the traction for growth.

Far from making offices obsolete, as the smug digital pioneers of the 1990s forecasted, technology has made one-on-one business interaction in an office more important, not less. It's just a matter of how productively you use that office space within the confines of a small-business budget.

Image by Olivier Le Moal, used with permission.