Each month we will be following 2 companies, both sharing their highs and lows and everyday business challenges, as they describe any issues or problems connected to their office any and the choices and solutions they come up with or are presented with. The companies will remain anonymous as we want an insight into their office situation and not create a branding or P.R. exercise for them. Both are SME’s with between 10-20 employees, in totally different industries where one company has decided to lease their own offices and the second is in a Serviced Office.
The first post is from the Company in a Leased Office and they will be posting every month. We hope you enjoy the insight……………
Wow…its been a hot one this year! We’ve had a fantastic summer with temperatures soaring to above 30 C on a regular basis. The ice cream vans have been firmly on the road, but staff in many offices including ours have been melting.
After the first few days of heat in early summer we did the obligatory thing and made sure there were fans placed around the office to cool everyone down. However it soon became apparent that the warmer weather was with us to stay and we turned our attentions to a longer term solution.
As employers we have legal obligations for our employees health, safety and wellbeing and our office does not provide the best ventilation especially when we get hot weather.
It was decided that air conditioning would be the best way forward as fans just didn’t do the job in our large but stuffy office.
We are in a leased office and so our first port of call was to speak to our landlord about whether or not we were able to get a system fitted.
After waiting a number of weeks for a decision we finally got the go ahead with outlined caveats and clauses.
As we are responsible for the building maintenance, insurance, security and utilities we were advised that we could go ahead with the fitting on an air conditioning system however we were wholly responsible for all associated costs including any damage caused to the building through fitting, any leakage and also on going maintenance of the system.
We are in our third year of our current five year lease and we had to weigh up the level of responsibility and investment.
We decided to go ahead with the system based on our responsibilities to our employees.
The company we used was great but there was an inevitable amount of disruption to the office whilst everything was fitted so productivity was down that week.
On reflection to add an air conditioning system to a leased building is a large undertaking and investment by a business, after all we may not be in the same office in 2 years time and we have invested capital, a short dip in productivity and ongoing maintenance costs.
Now as the weather is starting to cool off we are evaluating our purchase and the value of our leased office contract.
Until next time…
*Image credit: Ravica.com