Virtual Office Creates Actual Efficiencies

A fellow nonprofit manager is walking around the office space we are about to give up. I see the look in her eyes. It is the abject fear of signing a five-year lease for more than 2,500 square feet of office space in Washington.

I understand that fear all too well. The space will run her organization close to $40 a square foot, and that will not include a separate bill at the end of the year that covers the landlord’s maintenance costs — typically about 10 percent of the base lease. Her organization’s total bill could well exceed $100,000 a year. We are not talking about a luxury suite, but rather seven offices and a conference room in a nice, but aging, grade B building.

While my compatriot sweats about the price, my organization, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, is moving out and moving on into what I call the modified virtual-office plan.

After seeing too much of our precious resources going up in smoke, and struggling to make rent for a couple of months, I decided that it was time to figure out how to cut our overhead expenses.

It’s not that there is anything wrong with nice office space, but I began to wonder whether it was crucial to our mission and a good use of our donors’ money to spend so much of it on rent. Moreover, much of what we do is research and writing, activities that could easily be accomplished from a home office. Following some research and discussion with our board and staff members, we made the jump into a new way of operating.

Five members of our seven-person staff now spend a majority of their time working from home. Nearly three months into the process, it is still a work in progress, but we have already seen some strong benefits from our new plan.

We decided not to plunge into an entirely virtual plan in large part because we sponsor two to three interns at any given time and the quality of the young people we have attracted to the posts has been phenomenal. That was a resource we could not give up, but interns were unlikely to work well without supervision, nor would they probably want to work from cramped dormitory rooms or apartments.

But we certainly did not need as much space as we had in our old offices, so we focused on how much new space we needed. We decided we didn’t need offices and a conference room anymore, but space for five workstations.

As we looked for a new space, we discovered something we did not expect — that moving to the suburbs offered no better deal than staying in a downtown location. Staying in the District of Columbia meant that all the staff members had easy access to the office whenever we needed to work together as a staff or if one of us needed to stop by the office to pick up letterhead, use the postage meter, or do anything else that couldn’t be done from home.

Our old landlord worked with us to find new space that fit our needs within its family of properties. We opted for part of a town house, because the rents are cheaper than in the typical high-rise. The hardwood floors — plus windows we can open anytime — are an added bonus.

One of my biggest concerns with the virtual office was how it would affect my management approach. I know I have the heart of an activist, not a manager, and management has not always been my strong suit. But thanks to some very supportive foundations, who paid for me to receive training over the years, I have learned to become a competent manager.

Changing the office routine has helped me become even stronger at managing. Because I typically see my staff members in person just once every week or so, I have been forced to become a much more active manager. At the office, I tended to rely on informal means of communication — management by walking around, if you will.

But now I require easy but constant check-ins — setting goals for each employee through morning e-mail messages, and assessing progress each evening. Sure, I could have done that at the office, but the new plan makes me do that. I can already see an increase in productivity, in part because everybody now has clear daily goals and in part because people aren’t wasting time commuting.

We have also increased efficiency — and reduced our costs — by paying attention to technology. With the help of a consultant, we assessed what systems we had in place. We discovered that we had some duplicate capabilities — for example, we had multiple ways to handle credit-card donations. We immediately started saving money by eliminating repetitive services.

We then put in place new technologies that make working at home easier. As we made the transition, we said good-bye to the telephone lines, saving us hundreds of dollars every month. All of our phones now connect directly to the Internet and have many cool attributes. For instance, my “desk” extension rings wherever I connect my phone to a high-speed connection — in my office, in my home, or in Hawaii — and messages automatically get converted to e-mail and are sent to my BlackBerry as a sound file.

We have also moved to a Web-based e-mail server that allows any of us to open our Outlook desktop — all e-mail folders, contacts, calendar, etc. — from any computer with access to the Internet.

Those technological upgrades have not only saved the organization money but also allowed staff members to be productive almost anywhere. I am sure that there are fancier fixes at for-profit companies, but for our nonprofit organization, it feels high-tech indeed.

I approached moving day with some trepidation. I have had a corner office of my own for well over a decade. How would I respond to a mix of working at home and “grabbing” a workstation when I came into the office?

It is still early in the process, but so far the move has been an unqualified success. I have found that when I need to think and write, which is the bulk of my professional life, being at home is essential, but when I did so in the past, I often felt disconnected. With our new technology, I don’t feel out of touch or out of step when I am at home.

Surprisingly, I like the feel of the new office — we have two big rooms accessorized with multiple workstations and an adjoining kitchen and bathroom. I understand that the new trend among mayors around the country is to work in a bullpen, essentially an open space with key staff around them, and now I understand why. It is invigorating to be in the middle of the din made by interns and employees. It also has made communication and handing out assignments very efficient.

In short, we seem to have created an office environment that is dynamic while enhancing the home-office experience and efficiency of key staff members.

The most important result: We have cut our overhead by two-thirds. Our modified virtual-office plan may not be the best solution for every nonprofit organization, especially those that provide direct services, but so far it is working for us.

Joshua Horwitz is executive director of the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, in Washington.