Select a Branch, Satellite Office or Short-term Office in Tokyo

A growing business hiring more employees or opening more locations is a positive sign but brings new challenges in terms of finding enough space for employees.

Here are some tips to help make your project go smoothly.

■ Challenges to find more office space
■ Leverage serviced offices as your satellite office
■ Key points to select the right private office
■ Benefits for office administrators
■ Compass Offices to meet your tough requirement
■ Enquiry

Challenges to Find More Office Space

Common scenarios:

“We want to launch a new project and hire some experts for it, but we don’t have enough room in our current office. We also want some of those people to work in other divisions. We can’t make any changes to our current office so we need short-term temporary space for the project team”

“Our Headquarters are located outside of Tokyo but most of our clients are in the city. Our back-of-house team can stay at Headquarters, but we want some of our sales people in Tokyo. We need something flexible to suit the team size and in a central location”.

“We are growing fast and employees are increasing, but our office is becoming too crowded now. Ideally, we want to move to a bigger office but it is not so easy to find and we can’t move out so quickly because we are still in the contract with the current office. We need a temporary office to deal with the new people and keep our existing people happy”.

“Our headquarters are overseas but we would like to establish our business in Japan as well. We are planning to hire a local expert in Tokyo for this plan but we want to have a flexible office contract to manage the potential risks of starting in a new city”.

If you fall into any of these scenarios, you’ll realize that finding an office that meets all your requirements may not be easy. Chances are your satellite office may not be as nice or comfortable as your HQ office. Keeping employees happy in the new office is important to help them settle in quickly and feel valued. You’ll also need to pay close attention to costs to make sure your budget isn’t exceeded.

Leverage a Serviced Office for Your Satellite Office

Serviced offices are ideal solutions when you need flexibility, manageable costs and low risks. There are many types of serviced offices on the market, but private serviced offices are the perfect fit for your satellite office. Here’s why:

1. Established companies expect that business partners are working in “secure, private offices” and they don’t expect their confidential information will be leaked. It’s possible you could lose some trust and credibility if you base your business in an open plan co-working space, where risk of information leakage is high.
2. Serviced offices generally provide more secure internet access than networks in shared open spaces.
3. Private offices allow your colleagues to concentrate on their work and relax sometimes by chatting with co-workers. It is a big difference from noisy open-plan office environments where you can hear multiple conversations and in which you need to lock your PC each time you leave the seat (if it has highly confidential information, you might even need lock the PC away).
4. Business centres with private offices tend to also have meeting room facilities. This means you can host private meetings with clients or suppliers in a high-quality professional setting. Although access to these rooms will be chargeable the benefit of a secure, quiet room is easy to justify.

Key points to select the right private office

There are many types of private offices. Generally we call offices with a lockable door “Private Offices”, but the actual specification can vary between business centres. Consider the following points to select the right office.

1. Office wall (material)
   The trend in co-working centres is for big open spaces comprised of glass walls. Although this creates an impressive space with lots of natural light it can also create challenges when it comes to privacy. If your business uses a lot of confidential information be careful when selecting an office where the walls are predominantly glass.
2. Office wall (height)
   Some private offices walls are not connected to ceilings and air conditioners are shared with other working spaces. In this case, you might hear the noises around the office and the voices in your office can be also over-heard. People tend to be relaxed and speak loudly if they feel that the area is surrounded and conversations over the phone can be also loud. Others walking on corridor might also overhear important information.
3. Meeting rooms
   Most serviced offices are not designed with meeting space inside. The space is usually maiximised for chairs and tables and, if required, cabinets. If you expect to regularly meet with clients or suppliers, having access to external meeting rooms will be an important factor in choosing your office locations. Also be sure what size the rooms are, what the charges are and how to cancel if required.
4. English support
   If your colleagues are multi-nationality, you expect many foreign guests will visit the office, and there are many phone calls and mails from overseas countries, you should try to find a business centre where the receptionists can speak English.
5. Multi-functional printer (MFP)
   You might allow colleagues in satellite offices to have a local printer inside of the office. But you may have more requirements to copy documents, send faxes, scan documents to pdf etc. It is not realistic for your colleagues to run to convenience stores for those requirements. Having access to a multi-functional printer in the business centre will solve this problem.

Benefits for office administrators

Besides addressing the above concerns, the following are also benefits for office administrators when choosing a serviced office:

1. Serviced offices are provided by service providers. This means you have someone who can help solve your office related problems. If you take conventional space you need to fix your own problems or in some cases seek help from the landlord.
2. Serviced office front desk teams can assist with admin tasks which might otherwise take up the time of your own staff. Jobs such as receiving calls, welcoming guests, dealing with mail, printing and copying documents can all be handled by the business centre team. This means your team can focus on their important work and let the small tasks be handled by someone else.
3. Serviced offices contracts tend to be simpler than legacy office space contract. And you can start from very short-term contract period like 3 months (some serviced office providers even allow you to start from 1 month contract). Desks and chairs are already included so you can minimize the inventory cost and management.

If your company is expanding or looking for temporary project space, a serviced office really is the ideal solution to give you flexibility and transparent stable overhead costs.

Compass Offices provides serviced offices in 2 locations in Tokyo, Toranomon (directly connected to Kamiyacho station, Hibiya line) and Meguro (1 min walk from Meguro station, JR Yamanote line).

We have all business essential items like meeting rooms, MFPs and bilingual reception staffs. With convenient central locations it’s is also easy for your staff and visitors to get to. Our offices offer privacy, security and flexibility with a variety of configurations available from 1 to over 50 people.

Book a tour of our centres in business hours (Mon-Fri, 9:00AM-6:00PM). Please submit the web form below or give us a call to arrange a time.

Contact us now to discuss how our offices can support your satellite or temporary space requirements!