Have you ever clicked on a link to a website, only to be met with a wall of jargon? You try to find your way through the maze of overblown claims and nouns contorted into verbs, but it’s all too easy to be distracted from this labyrinthine puzzle. You abandon the tab, resolving to return one day. But you never do and eventually it vanishes when you are finally forced to system update your laptop a month later.
If only there had been some plain English explanation so you knew exactly what the company actually did and whether or not it was relevant to you. Well, here’s our attempt to do precisely that.
What we do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpYyi2ip41Q
Desana is a platform that enables companies to give their employees much more flexibility (while reducing overhead) by giving them access to desks and meeting rooms wherever they are needed. Those desks and meeting rooms can be in the company’s own offices or in flexible workspaces, giving staff the ability to work from wherever is most convenient. Whenever.
So what’s the point?
For staff
“Nobody on their deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I spent more time at the office,’” goes the old saying. And the modern worker seems to have internalised that message — work-life balance and flexibility is now more important to employees than salary. Supporting flexibility and providing choice delivers that in a double whammy: it means staff don’t waste their lives commuting and gives them the ability to fit work around their lives.
You might argue that this could be achieved by allowing them to work from home. And for some people, working from home is better than eating birthday cake for breakfast. But — as recent events have shown — it doesn’t work for everyone. Maybe your employee lives in a glorified shoe box and has a serious case of cabin fever. Maybe they have a four-year-old who is physically incapable of just giving mummy five minutes while she explains these figures to her very important boss. Maybe they just like being able to say hi to a real-life person in the flesh once a day.
Setting aside personal preferences, even the most die-hard work-from-home advocate has to concede that doing anything collaboratively that is more complex than agreeing on the state of the weather is 100% more difficult over Zoom (other video conferencing software is available). So employers who don’t want to doom their employees to hours of barren broadband-based brainstorming need to provide a place where they can meet up to work together in person.
But in that case, why can’t they just use the office that they already have? I’m glad you asked…
For Employers
Let’s face it, remote working had landed pre-COVID but now it is very much here to stay. To attract and retain the best talent, companies all over the world will need to make remote work part of their standard perk-pack. As we transition to a much more remote (working) society, it then doesn’t make financial sense for organisations to keep large, expensive office space in city centre locations. Well, at least not as much office space as they used to.
For some companies, we can help them get rid of long-term office space leases entirely — instead their staff can book workspace and meeting rooms as, where and when they need it — and can choose to work from home whenever they don’t — so that the company just pays for what’s used.
For others, it will be important to retain existing real estate but, given that 40% of a leased building is typically unoccupied during any working hour (and that was before the pandemic), it’ll be important to ensure that these commitments are working as efficiently as possible (a strange expression, since buildings don’t really do anything…but you get the drift). We’re part of that solution.
Finally, remember all the things we mentioned in the previous section about giving staff the ability to make choices that are right for them? That makes for happy, productive employees and — here comes the real shocker — happy staff will stay with the company.
For flexible workspace providers
Everything we’ve said suggests there is a big opportunity for flexible workspace providers to welcome large companies. So why Desana?
Well, for one thing, companies that have staff living all over the place will need workspace all over the place — which is difficult for one operator to provide. Companies would rather pay a single invoice and one provider every month, instead of having to deal with loads of invoices for lots of different work spaces.
So for an operator it makes more sense to join the network rather than hold out to be noticed by themselves.
Most operators know that on any given day, there will be some seats sitting empty. By joining Desana, they can find a bum for these seats without any costs to them. Plus, in the longer-term, they can attract companies to take permanent space.
For the world (ambitious, we know…)
Like just about anyone who has ever had a vision for something, we like to think about what the world would look like if our idea was widely adopted. If that were to happen, it could have an impact on climate change, economic inequality, public health, urban development and much more.
But we’re keeping things simple here. So. We’re Desana. We help companies be more flexible (while saving costs) so their employees can be happier and more fulfilled.
Originally published at https://desana.io on August 20, 2020.
