If you look around your business facility and see more empty desks than you used to, you may be looking at the future of U.S. business operations – and not necessarily because of the economic squeeze. The shift toward remote and hybrid work environments i

nitially forced by the COVID-19 pandemic has remained intact. Just 11 percent of all businesses currently use all their available office space, and nearly half of them use less than half of their facilities’ available square footage.

Different businesses have responded to this shift in various ways. Some have started repurposing the empty areas into common meeting spaces or wellness resources, but many others have stated their intention to move into a smaller building. Downsizing holds a lot of appeal for its ability to reduce both a business’s operating costs and its carbon footprint at the same time. At the same time, many employees appear to prefer a hybrid or remote approach to work. Research shows that over three-quarters of employers who have worked from home recently would prefer to keep it that way.

If downsizing makes sense both for financial reasons and in terms of employee morale/retention, what do you need to do to adapt to this new normal in your own business? For starters, you may need to increase both the speed and the reliability of your Internet setup to accommodate virtual workers accessing your servers. If you’re creating a more flexible workspace to get better use out of unused square footage, you may want to invest in WiFi repeaters, additional routers, or other network modifications. Last but not least, you can make use of remote managed IT services instead of hiring additional in-house technicians.

Contact the Austin tech support team at Gravity Systems. We can help you slim down your business without losing productivit