Jessica Rose Brian | The Great Room

In Great Demand – Making Flexibility Your Superpower

October 17, 2023March 10, 2022 by Jessica Rose Brian

Flexibility is the way of the future in the world of work, and on-demand space opens up a whole host of opportunities for businesses taking a hybrid approach.

When it comes to work trends for 2022, flexibility is the name of the game. People are choosing – in fact, many are demanding – flexibility; in where they work, when they work and how they work.

Flex is the way forward for everyone from start-ups to established organisations

This shift shows that hybrid, flexible working arrangements aren’t just for start-ups and solopreneurs. It’s not simply for those who are bootstrapping their business, or who are trying to save on costs (although that’s a definite benefit of flexible arrangements). It’s for any and every business that wants to be agile and that wants to expand and contract its workspace based on their needs that month, that week – or even that day.

Take OnTheList, for example. The members-only luxury flash sales company didn’t need a full service office; what they needed was somewhere to host client meetings in Hong Kong’s dynamic Quarry Bay district. “I was looking for a space that could accommodate different needs: meeting clients for coffee to catch up in a formal yet cosy environment with coffee and tea available; somewhere relatively quiet and with private space for business meetings,” says Mathilde Betinas, APAC Business Development Manager for OnTheList.

Ethica Wines, meanwhile, was expanding into the Asia-Pacific region from the US and they needed a Bangkok base for their Regional Sales Manager, Diego Sebastian Todone. “Being the only person from my company in the region and having to travel most of the time (in a normal world), I wanted to find a place that would cover all the needs of a full-scale office with the flexibility that a shared office offers,” says Todone.

“When I was looking for a place to use as an everyday base, I came across The Great Room. When I visited, it was love at first sight!”

For Todone, The Great Room offered all the advantages of having your own office. “It gives me access to concierge and printers, meeting rooms, a high-speed network, and a beautiful space to talk business with clients and partners.”

At the same time, however, a coworking space such as this one does away with the hassles that a traditional office entails: This includes a long-term lease, buying furniture and office equipment and committing to larger floor space to make room for facilities like meeting rooms and pantry areas that are necessary, yet will be underutilised. With a luxury coworking space like The Great Room, you shift to variable costs that you can control.

On-demand workspace supports greater flexibility

The best part? You get to choose what your costs look like by working with The Great Room to create a tailor-made package you can change whenever you need to. The Great Room offers a whole realm of on-demand services to support maximum flexibility.

You could, for example, choose to combine a private office space with hotdesking, like Bangkok-based luxury hospitality group AZOTELS does. This hybrid arrangement gives AZOTELS staff the flexibility to work in a quiet space when they need to focus, or to mingle when they want a more dynamic vibe. They can also purchase The Great Room’s Day Passes on-demand, when they have more staff coming into the office.

Perhaps, like Ethica Wines, you may want to work flexibly and meet your clients somewhere that feels aligned with your brand – somewhere that evokes five-star style. The Great Room’s Hot Desk memberships are the perfect solution, giving you access to the Workhall and Drawing Room, where the elegant surroundings, coupled with an array of lounge seating options, set the scene for connecting with clients and working productively.

Flexible access to the Drawing Room is part of The Great Room’s appeal for OnTheList. “You can select your working space depending on the number of guests you are expecting: you can go for a small coffee table for a one-on-one catch-up, or you can go for the sofa area for larger gatherings,” says Betinas. And “I can create my remote office space whenever I need I can just walk in with the day pass without having to worry about availability.”

For Ethica (Wines), The Great Room’s premium aesthetic and hospitality mindset suits their needs nicely. “The environment is very work oriented; it’s friendly, but at the same time very professional and upscale. This is really important for (us), as it mirrors the image that we want to give to our customers and partners that visit us at The Great Room,” says Todone. “Anything you need, the staff will always help you with a smile on their face. This is super valuable, because it puts you in the best mood to focus on what you have to do.”

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With hybrid ways of working increasingly the modus operandi, these businesses demonstrate just how well on-demand solutions can support their businesses in an era when flexibility is the only way forward. Whether you’re looking for regular desk access, a private office for a few weeks, or a meeting room for that important meeting, or a prestigious corporate address, it’s all possible at The Great Room.

The Great Room has seven locations across Asia’s gateway cities, including five in Singapore. All are located in prime neighbourhoods, with a range of options available – from on-demand space to fixed, private workspace for larger teams. Find out how we can help your business adapt to the future of work. Select your city below to learn more.

Find oUT HOW WE CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS ADAPT TO THE FLEXIBLE FUTURE OF WORK. SELECT THE CITY BELOW FOR MORE DETAILS.

The Great Scheme of Things

July 25, 2024November 2, 2021 by Jessica Rose Brian

For founders trying to focus on the bigger picture, coworking offers fully customisable, hybrid solutions that take care of all the details, so you can focus on what matters.

The last year and a half has been a rollercoaster ride of changes: companies were thrust into remote working, pivoting to operating online almost overnight. Since then, it’s been a push-me-pull-you scenario amid ever-changing distancing and numbers regulations. The constant shift, and the trajectory it ignited for the work-from-anywhere approach, have powered changes that were beginning to happen already, albeit slowly.

Businesses need to adapt their technology, and their people

As Kevin Sneader and Shubham Singhal point out in McKinsey Global Institute’s piece, “The next normal arrives: Trends that will define 2021 – and beyond”, the combination of Covid-19 and advances in digitisation and automation have been a potent one. They quote Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said in April 2020, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital change in two months.”

We’re not on the other side of this yet — what changes, then, are yet to come? While this is anyone’s guess, the consensus is that businesses need to be ready for change, and they need to be positioned for adaption.

The role of the office plays a significant role here. It looks like hybrid strategies that offer a mix of remote and in-office work are the way forward. As Sneader and Singhal argue, businesses also need to adapt their workforce “to the requirements of automation, digitisation, and other technologies.”

Coworking offers change-ready solutions

Organisations need solutions that reduce the burden: solutions that can adapt to them rather than the other way around. In particular, they need office solutions that are primed for change. This is the benefit of a coworking environment like The Great Room. Offering a mix of hot desking, fixed private offices and meeting space, The Great Room delivers flexibility: you choose the combination you need, and you can sign on for as long or as short a time as you want.

When compared with the rigidity of long-term office leases and fixed floorplates, coworking is a dream. With coworking, you’re no longer paying for empty desks and excess square footage you don’t need because half your staff are working remotely three days a week. At The Great Room, for example, there’s an in-house app that allows team members to book their desks in the office. This takes the load off office managers, and it reduces the risk of team members coming all the way to the office, only to find it’s at full capacity.

How coworking provides uncompromising solutions in real-life scenarios

Let’s look at a real-life example. AZOTELS Hospitality, a high-end hotel group founded by Adrian Zecha, needed a mix of privacy and connection in a vibrant work environment.

The Great Room in Bangkok was able to offer them a hybrid solution that matched their needs perfectly, setting them up with a private office, which supports confidentiality when they need it, as well as space in which to focus.

AZOTELS Hospitality also has hot desks, giving the team space to work in dynamic surroundings when they want to. “The Great Room delivered a turnkey solution that gave our hotel company the ability to scale without the initial overheads costs associated with a more traditional office set-up,” says Leanne Reddie, Commercial Sales & Marketing Director at AZOTELS Hospitality.

Plus, as their team grows, depending on the team’s needs, they can simply add more hot desks into the mix or move to a larger private office. In addition, the hospitality-driven nature of this coworking environment speaks to the AZOTELS Hospitality brand, making The Great Room the perfect partner. Says Reddie, “With the evolution of the working environment in this post pandemic era, The Great Room represents the office of the future.

Coworking provides on-brand settings and on-time support

In this way, The Great Room was able to quickly cater to AZOTELS Hospitality’s needs for a workspace in the right location, and one that felt on-brand. Indeed, this is one of the (many) perks of The Great Room: it’s luxurious enough to represent the quality of your brand to clients and stakeholders.

With facilities such as the ‘great room’ itself – that ultra-comfortable, stylish community space – premium in-house events, the barista-level coffee, as well as wellbeing spaces and outdoor areas at locations such as Afro-Asia, there’s a strong foundation from which to reinforce your brand and build corporate culture, as well as bolster employee engagement. All without management, marketing or HR having to lift a finger.

Support is another key benefit of coworking spaces. Premium coworking environments like The Great Room have expert, in-house support staff that are ready to handle any issues that come up – from helping with VC technology and booking meeting rooms and event spaces to adding extra desks when companies suddenly find unexpectedly high numbers of staff coming into the office.

For many organisations, it’s a weight off their shoulders to have someone else take care of the fit-out and all the admin associated with workspace. And, in the grand scheme of things, in a working world that’s constantly in flux, it’s details like these that make all the difference.

A Workspace That Moves With You

The Great Room by Industrious is coworking inspired by hospitality, with 150+ international locations across APAC, US and Europe where members have access to all workspaces in our global network.

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The Future is Flexible, The Future is Coworking

June 8, 2022October 12, 2021 by Jessica Rose Brian

When it comes to the way we work, the data is clear: the future of work resembles a different beast entirely from the one that it was in 2019. The events of the past year-and-a-half have been largely responsible, leading to a global work experiment that we’ve all participated in. Our findings? Hybrid strategies are the way forward.

The modern workforce wants Flexibility

Hybrid ways of working revolve around arrangements that combine remote and in-office work, facilitated by technology. The exact ratios of office and work-from-anywhere time vary from company to company, but the essence is the same, and for most companies, so are the outcomes. The data indicates that hybrid strategies contribute to engagement and productivity – and that most people prefer working this way. Just 15 percent of Southeast Asian respondents to the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey said they want to work from the office full time. Seven in 10 respondents, meanwhile, believe that hybrid work arrangements encourage productivity and creativity.

Similarly, a 2021 Willis Towers Watson survey of employers in the APAC region found that 62% of employers identify flexible work arrangements as a priority; one that could boost the employee experience.

Hybrid arrangements benefit both employers and employees

For employees, flexible working arrangements improve the overall experience of work for a host of reasons. If they’re able to work when, where and how they want, it puts the power back in their hands. With autonomy, people feel more excited about work. Studies have shown that greater engagement can improve presenteeism rates. And, if people work when they want, they’re more likely to focus when they do work

For employers, aside from more engaged, productive workers – which a Gallup study showed can lead to increases in business profits to the tune of 21 percent – flexible work arrangements can also translate to reduced floorplates, leading to massive savings in rent.
As a business leader or owner, you could of course simply rent a smaller, one-company workspace. But that leaves you with no room to grow. There’s no space to scale up, or to scale down, as your workplace needs shift and change.

So why not simply adopt a blanket work-from-home policy? Well, people tend to find working from home a lonely and isolating experience. They crave the human interaction and connection that a shared workspace provides. At the same time, they increasingly shy away from the overly structured, stifling traditional corporate office environment.

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Co-working at The Great Room supports flexibility, bolstering business operations and corporate culture

The ideal alternative, then, is a coworking space like The Great Room in Singapore. Here, flexibility has been a key aspect of the modus operandi right from the start. Companies are increasingly realising that coworking spaces provide an effective solution to the demands of the new working environment – and the desires of the modern worker. For organisations in flux – which is every organisations in today’s world – the coworking space facilitates agility.

When a company expands, a coworking space has desks at the ready. When fewer people are in the office – whether due to a pandemic scenario that requires remote work, or because of reduced staffing needs – a coworking space enables you to scale down in a flash, minus fit-out costs, and without incurring the penalties that come when you break an office lease.

Plus, the coworking environment facilitates sharing of resources. You no longer need to fork out for multiple printers, staplers, water coolers, dedicated front desk staff – these are all at your fingertips, courtesy of your coworking provider. The financial benefits are therefore apparent straight away, as well as in the long-term. (For boutique businesses, for example, the financial benefits of choosing a coworking space are significant: they report savings of 25 percent a year.)

For employees, one of the core benefits of a coworking space – and indeed, one of the central tenets of the coworking movement – is community. At The Great Room, for example, there’s a mix of SMEs, established global organisations, solopreneurs and freelancers. All of whom can come together in the coworking space provider’s ‘great room’, a luxe yet comfortable living room-style communal space designed to foster connection, new conversations, new ideas… and a sense of belonging.

While a coworking space offers greatly enhanced opportunities for connection, it also provides privacy benefits on par with those you would find in a traditional single-business office. Coworking spaces are primed to answer confidentiality and security requirements: all you have to do is ask for what you need. At the same time, coworking environments steer away from the pitfalls of the traditional office. Naturally flexible, coworking is the antithesis of rigidity: no more fixed locations, fixed desks or fixed hours. And, since you’re no longer limited to interacting with a small, fixed pool of colleagues, you’re less likely to grapple with groupthink (coming to a consensus just to avoid dissent) or office politics.

By saving companies time and money, and by fostering engagement and productivity, coworking spaces solve a whole host of workplace problems. And, by supporting hybrid working strategies, coworking demonstrates its staying power in the brave new world of work.

Mark Teng, Executive Director of That.Legal LLC

One law firm experienced significant financial and interpersonal benefits when they made the transition from traditional office space to The Great Room. Want to hear their story? [Read more here]

The Great Room has seven locations across Asia’s gateway cities. All are located in prime neighbourhoods, with a range of flexible options available for businesses keen to grow but struggling to figure out how to do so. The Great Room’s expert staff are also on hand to provide advice on how to customise your workspace to suit your business needs.

Find out how we can help your business adapt to the flexible future of work.
Select the city below for more details.

Breaking with Tradition: From Conventional to Co-working

April 1, 2024June 14, 2021 by Jessica Rose Brian

With the traditional idea of ‘the office’ rapidly evolving, outdated inflexible office spaces no longer best serve the needs of forward-thinking teams. Find out how Law Firm THAT.LEGAL has made a break with conventional legal offices by shifting to The Great Room and the surprising benefits they’ve discovered in the process.

For law firm That.Legal, leaving the safety of a corporate office for co-working space at The Great Room was a major shift.

Driven by client confidentiality requirements and old-school internal hierarchies, “Law firms typically choose traditional office spaces,” says Mark Teng, Executive Director of That.Legal LLC.

The legal office model is one that dates back a century. Featuring private offices for directors and senior lawyers, it’s based on the belief that private rooms equal success and status, and that legal work is alone work.

For That.Legal, the impetus to make the change to a luxury shared workspace came as the effects of the pandemic on how they worked began to take shape. “The pandemic changed the way we work,” says Teng.

That.Legal specialises in intellectual property law – not only as a protective measure, but also as a way of helping organisations optimise their intangible assets for commercial gain.

Like a lot of businesses in Asia, they were obliged to work remotely. “The laws didn’t allow us to be at work at all for about 2.5 months,” says Teng.

Luckily, That.Legal is tech-savvy, so they were able to “shut down and set up in our homes within 48 hours,” he says. “Initially our productivity dropped to 80% of what they were pre-COVID, because we were building new habits, but soon after, it increased to 120% … due to savings in commuting time.”

Even in Phases 2 and 3, when not everyone could be in the office at the same time, the rent on their corporate office remained the same. “In 2020, the losses in underutilisation outweighed the financial assistance we were entitled to,” says Teng. “I’m sure we’re not alone in this.

Fortunately, That.Legal’s office lease expired in February this year, giving them the ideal opportunity to reimagine their real estate. Did they still need to subscribe to that conventional office layout, they asked themselves? Or could they fulfill client confidentiality and convey a sense of luxury in a shared working environment?

They decided to find out, moving into a private office space at The Great Room at One George Street that complies with the confidentiality requirements.

Making the change and discovering asset efficiency

Mark Teng, Executive Director – That.Legal LLC

“If COVID taught us anything, it’s that we can adapt,” says Teng.

It turns out adaptation brings with it benefits—some of them unexpected.

Under the traditional, private-office model, if a director doesn’t come in, their office remains empty. This leads to inactive space and spatial inefficiencies. Not so in a co-working space.

The Great Room doesn’t require the same long-term contractual commitment that a traditional office requires. This gives us the flexibility to reconfigure our real estate requirements as the team constitution changes. Expanding the number of desks we have is easy,” says Teng.

Shared workspace and community benefits that prime teams for performance and productivity

That.Legal’s new private office at The Great Room also brings the team together in one space, “breaking down the barriers across ranks and democratising our real estate. Breaking down the physical barriers also dissolves mental barriers,” he says.

As well as bringing the team together physically and demonstrating the collaborative nature of much legal work, The Great Room move has resulted in rental savings of 40%. That.Legal plans to reallocate these savings to human capital, including expanding their team from six to nine people.

The Great Room has seven locations across Asia’s gateway cities situated in prime neighbourhoods, with workspace solutions to fit all sizes and customisations.

Find out how we can help your business adapt to the flexible future of work. Select the city below for more details.

Working out of The Great Room is sure to help with talent acquisition and retention too. Along with comfortable, design-centric workrooms and chic central meeting spaces, the luxuriously appointed offices in The Great Room all deliver community benefits – from the hospitality mindset of staff to the thoughtful food and beverage touches.

There’s the Monday Breakfast Club, with power grub like scrambled eggs, bagels, local delights and gourmet coffee. On Mondays, there’s the Turndown Cart, serving hot chocolate and cookies to perk staff up at the end of the day. And then there are monthly (virtual) networking nights, engaging team-building and learning sessions, such as Great Thirstdays and the Spend the Night with… series (a fireside chat with influencers and changemakers).

Teng also points out that even legal staff need an inspiring space to work in—something that The Great Room perfectly caters to. “Quite contrary to popular belief, lawyering is creative work. Just as inspiration is a necessity for art, legal professionals also need to find a way to enter and achieve a state of flow in our work.

“It’s not just about the hours of hard work we put in every day. The productivity gains from being in a state of flow are what’s necessary for us to do great work.”

With panoramic city views, landmark buildings and perfect sunset moments, That.Legal’s new home at The Great Room “helps to inspire creative legal solutions for our clients,” says Teng. “We’re happy coming to work.”