Over the last few years, businesses have shifted from leasing massive spaces for their offices to finding working models that work for them and their staff. The shift to working from home, which escalated during the pandemic disruptions, reduced the need for office spaces, but it also created a new set of challenges.
While it saved companies money that would have been spent on rent and saved staff critical time that would have been spent commuting to and from work, and allowed for collaboration remotely, its emerging challenges could not be ignored. Employers, for example, faced issues determining employee productivity and fostering teamwork. For employees, the issues included an indeterminate work-life balance, emerging household overheads, as well as the lack of opportunity to network and collaborate in person.
There has been a significant shift in the post-pandemic years to finding a model that works for both enterprises and their employees. Known as the hybrid model, it combines the best of both realities, allowing for employees to work and meet in physical offices on some days of the week and work from elsewhere on the other days. Freed of the need to hold expensive leases that can often not be adapted to changing business realities, more companies are now experimenting with serviced offices in locations that work for them and their staff.
“I was solving my own problem when I started Horizons. I’d cut my teeth working in the corporate world in Kenya and Ghana,” Ian Kabiru, founder and Managing Director (MD) of Horizons Offices said at a recent webinar hosted by The Kenyan Wall Street.
“When I was transitioning to entrepreneurship, the major problem that I encountered was setting up offices that were fit for purpose. It takes up a lot of your capital and time. I just felt that there was a solution,” he added.
The solution was Horizons Offices, which provides enterprises with serviced ready to use offices in niche locations in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria.
Horizons’ business model is location driven, which means setting up serviced offices in prime locations. In Nairobi, for example, the company’s offices are based within the Two Rivers Special Economic Zone (TRIFIC) where its offerings mean that companies seeking to set up operations within the special economic zone do not need to get their own leases to operate.
“TRIFIC has created a fantastic business district with world class offices where we are establishing a serviced office, coworking event space within that environment. Through our partnership, our clients have an extremely low cost of setting up. Simply by renting a desk, $450 minimum, you are eligible for going through a vetting process to see whether your business qualifies,” Kabiru said.
In Ghana, the company’s serviced offices are based at One Airport Square, within a walking distance of the Kotoka International Airport.
“In Ghana, the major headache is advance payments where every landlord will expect two years of rent in advance. With our concept, you have the flexibility of paying in daily, monthly, or quarterly and you can downscale if need be,” Carlis Arko, Horizons’ Country Manager for Ghana, said.
While coworking spaces are now a familiar offering in many cities, they carry some downsides that make established companies shy away from them. They, for example, do not offer enough opportunities for proper branding, fostering organisational culture, or just the privacy required to run business operations. Horizon’s solution was to offer spaces within spaces, offering enterprises the freedom of paying for distinct furnished office space that suits their needs but also provides networking and collaboration opportunities, as well as hospitality options.
“We were a little bit ahead of our time,” Kabiru said, “since our niche has been with corporates looking to set up their operations on the continent. A co-working space will probably come in at 30 to 40% cheaper than a serviced office which comes at a different price point.”
Among the shifts the company has noted is that there are now more organisations that are willing to allow their people to work remotely, but from a serviced office or a coworking space. The reasons are multiple; for example, working from home requires a dedicated workspace with sufficient digital tools such as WiFi, computers, and printers, which a significant number of companies did not provide for staff.
