When people ask me what our company does I usually say “we are saving the world… one desk at a time!”
It often turns out that the costs companies incur maintaining a single workstation are comparable with the cost of living in an apartment in the same region. According to REIS, the average US office rental is $23.23 per sq ft (Q3 2013) and the average space allocated per employee is 176 sq ft according to CoreNet Global.
We can work out an annual rental cost from that but the total cost is much higher with Actium’s Total Office Cost Survey suggesting that rent is only around a third of this cost with the rest being energy, IT, management, communications and annualized costs like furniture and refit.
This means the true annual cost of a desk is over $12,000 on average with areas like New York being double that. New Yorkers wont find too much accommodation below $2,000 per month in Manhattan but many of the people commuting from the tri-state area sit at desks that cost more to maintain than their homes!
Energy usage “per-desk” can also range from about half the consumption of an average home right up to parity when there are a lot of elevators and air conditioners to run so, depending on the source of their energy, some office blocks have an annual carbon footprint of about 1 ton per desk.
So a lot of resource is being wasted if the average figure of 60% utilized that we (and other companies measuring this) are obtaining is accurate.
There are 3.4 billion sq ft of office space being occupied in the USA according to REIS in Q3 2013. With the average rent and space per person figures noted above, this means that if 40% is not being used, that’s a total wastage of $96 Billion each year!!
So, how do we help alleviate this problem? Accordant is inexpensive, highly flexible and very simple to use. It measures space accurately and quickly requiring 80% less CAD drawing work than all of its competitors by using its unique “Optimal Polylining” technology. Our users get on to tackling the utilization issue quickly and easily and typically show 20% increases in efficiency within the first year or two of use.
Our web-based software puts up-to-the minute information at the disposal of all and not just people driving CAD. We have multiple remedies in our toolkit including desk release, hot-desking, hotelling and flexible/agile working areas.
We work with multi-national corporates but also with companies with less than 100,000 sq ft – building a solution for you may not be as simple as building with lego but I know you’ll be pleasantly surprised.