We’ve moved office!
It was the easiest office relocation in history.
We sat in the coworking space we’d been using in the morning. At lunch, we picked up our laptops and walked to the new office. That was it. We didn’t have ‘things’. When the desk isn’t yours you can’t make it your own.
Such a simple action didn’t feel like a big event. But we didn’t yet know what a change it would make. In our first week, we found more spaces, wrote more content and made more commits. We powered through work. We felt less tired. We had more fun.
Tom even bought us doughnuts!
So how did we get there? And why did our new space make such a difference to our productivity?
Search criteria
Finding the right office space means knowing what you want. Our needs fell into 4 parts: location, company, atmosphere and flexibility.
-
- Location: we love Shoreditch. There. We said it. Being in Shoreditch means we are close to our core customers, both hosts and potential tenants, as well as a the centre of the London startup and creative scenes. We’d been hovering around Shoreditch before the move anyway and love it because there’s a new place to eat and drink everyday!
-
- Company: we were determined to share an office with other companies, particularly creative and/or tech companies. As a startup dealing in the traditionally stuffy commercial property sector, we wanted to immerse ourselves in an atmosphere of creativity, innovation and design to keep us thinking differently.
- Atmosphere: we see so many amazing office spaces on our platform every day, so our bar was pretty high. We knew we could find somewhere which ticked the boxes: big windows; natural light; super cool decor; beautiful meeting rooms; chilled, fun but hardworking atmosphere.
- Flexibility: we’re doing a hiring round at the moment, so know we’ll soon be expanding. We’ve also been getting investment. A one month rolling contract means we can accommodate new hires joining the team, and even move at short notice if things change.
Every box was ticked by the Culture Label office – it was already one of our favourites on the platform! We’re in with great creative and tech companies: Gatherly, Nuji, Befittd (a fellow EF company), Compucorp and Culture Label themselves. It’s decked out amazingly – we keep spotting new art on the walls and quirky little tidbits from the incredible Culture Label store. Probably our favourite thing is that the office’s collective passion for good music… (check out our office playlist) and Gatherly’s speakers are ace.
Productivity rockets
We knew we’d found a great space, but once we’d moved in, the magic started. Hotdesking is great for flexibility and getting you out of the house in the morning, but there’s no reliability. It’s a step up from working in Starbucks (we’ve got 8 reasons you shouldn’t). Yet each day you can’t tell whether you’ll end up next to phone-shouting recruiters, or on the comfy seats everyone fights for. Settling down at our new desks, we looked a bit silly – there was nothing on the table. Other teams had monitors, piles of papers, coffee, nic-nacs. We just had the same four laptops we’d left our hotdesking seats with.
Nothing seemed very different, but the impact on our work was huge. Big windows with natural light meant we weren’t spending our days staring at glaring LED screens lit by LED lights. We had access to meeting rooms when we needed them, and space to store our favourite snacks in the kitchen. Our backs didn’t ache from sitting on barstools and getting to know other teams in the office gave us a whole new set of people to bounce ideas off and be inspired by.
And we saw the results. Not only were we having fun meeting new people and getting to know our surroundings, but we felt more energised at work and did more work. There was less time spent working from home to get things done – the office is our new hub of productivity. We’re staying later, working harder and enjoying it more.
What moving taught us about offices
Finding the right office, with the right people, means everything. Just like moving house is better with friends, and choosing the ones you won’t want to put on a boat to Timbuktu after two weeks is important, moving into an office is about finding a space where your team is happiest, and works best. To do that, you need to be surrounded by the right people, in the right space. It reminds us why we started – not just to make finding office space easier, but to make finding the right office space easier. You spend most of your waking hours in your office; it’s your second home. It’s so easy to neglect the impact of where you work on how you work, but putting the time into your office search (or letting us put the time in) really makes all the difference.
