Future Work by Alison Maitland & Peter Thomson

Author:Alison Maitland & Peter Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

From office to virtual to ‘creative hub’

When Mark Thomas set up Word Association as a marketing and PR agency, he took on staff and opened an office in Leicester, England. After a few years of growing the business, he decided to take a ‘sabbatical’ year and travel around Europe with his young family in a motor home. He kept in touch with the UK by phone and email so he could still be involved at a distance.

When he returned, he questioned why his employees needed to be in the office at all. If he could run the business from hundreds of miles away, why couldn’t his people also be remotely located? So he closed the office down and everyone started working from home in 1998 – an early example of a virtual business. Over the following decade, turnover doubled, and overheads were kept low. ‘We have had high levels of productivity and staff satisfaction and very low levels of absenteeism,’ says Thomas.

The agency survived the tough recession and in 2013 decided to start recruiting again. With growth in mind, Thomas decided to rent space in the Atkins Building, a former hosiery factory in the Leicestershire town of Hinckley, which has been redeveloped and divided into serviced office space, studios, meeting rooms, an art gallery and a café.

New recruits will spend most of their time here while they learn the ropes. ‘Some new members of staff in the past found it difficult to feel part of the team and learn their job in a home-working environment,’ he explains.

Experienced staff will use the space for meetings and as a drop-in workplace. ‘It’s somewhere we can take clients back to, and being a creative hub it gives us a good opportunity to network with like-minded businesses.’19

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