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Office Space for Rent Paranaque: 2019 Office Design Trends

What are popular design trends for office spaces in 2019?

Urban nature
More relaxation spaces
Smart technology

Office spaces for rent in Paranaque were designed in 2018 to be collaborative. There were no work cubicles and rooms allowed for several people to work together in a single space. In 2019, they will continue to have designs geared towards collaboration, with a few changes. These are the popular design trends which will change the way work spaces look next year:

Urban Nature

Businesses will be adding more greenery to their office work space in 2019 through these different means:

Placing a small cactus plant on a desk
Planting a vertical garden inside with plants that can survive in an office environment (ex. English ivy, Jade plant, Spider plant)
Placing artificial moss on the walls as decoration

According to numerous studies, people naturally love having greenery in their jobs surroundings because it brings about these numerous benefits:

Plants can reduce stress – A study from the New University of Technology Sydney focused on the effects of indoor plants on the negative mood of office employees over 3 months. At the end of the period, employees who worked in a space with the plants admitted to feeling 30 to 60 % less stress, while those without plants felt their stress increased by 20 to 40% over 3 months.

Plants can reduce sick leaves – 7600 workers in 16 countries became participants for a Human Spaces report in 2015. ⅓ of these participants were the only ones with houseplants inside their office spaces, and they reported a 15% higher score in terms of well-being compared to the ⅔ of the participants with no plants whatsoever. Additionally, introducing plants to one office in the 1990s led to a 25% decrease in illness symptoms.

This greenery trend can be easily implemented in any type of office, including co-working spaces in Manila.

More Relaxation Spaces

These spaces will serve as areas for employees to relax and recharge before they go back to work. With office spaces becoming more open to adding leisure in their design, it makes sense that companies like Google would also be open to investing in relaxation rooms for their people.

These spaces were meant to be a solution to the lack of work-life balance among office staff.

For 2019, these are different types of relaxation rooms that can easily be created in any office space for rent in Paranaque:

Meditation room

Just 5 minutes of mindfulness can greatly improve your workplace focus. Companies can make a room for meditation by just supplying yoga mats for their employees to use and have relaxing music playing in the background.

Nap room

Providing employees with the means to sleep is one of the most efficient ways of caring for their well-being. Working adults sleep less than 7 or 8 hours on average and it has caused offices to lose money because their staff’s productivity is low as well.

You can easily make a nap room by placing bean bags, hammocks, or even a few couches in one area.

“No electronics” room

Here, employees will not be allowed to bring their laptops and smartphones inside. People are allowed to fully rest without checking on social media and texts. Using electronics has been shown to make us more tired than energized to work.

Another relaxation space that will become more popular is a pantry. While this is not exactly a room, pantries have become sacred spaces for employees.

Smart Technology

More technological advancements will be placed in 2019 office spaces to fulfill specific purposes. These advancements include:

Shared screens

Office spaces will dedicate meeting rooms to video teleconferences. Companies frequently deal with planning challenges when it comes to meeting conferences. Since everyone needs to be present in one, just one sudden absence can cancel it and these leads to wasted time for all parties involved. This is the same for meetings with several teams involved.

To remedy this, offices in 2019 will link screens in of each team’s room together. Here, teams can have a shared conference, even in separate places, because their screens will allow them to talk to other people through video.

Electronic Trackers

With technological advancements, it will become easier for HR to track which staff members are coming on time and who are not. Trackers, thanks to technology, have become more accurate in capturing late and absent employees than ever before.

Electronic trackers for employees which will become more popular are:

Fingerprint scans
Voice recognition tools

Multi-Faceted Security

Good office security should be so subtle that no one knows they are being watched. Security will expand to other facades, besides the usual video camera in the wall. Other forms of security that will appear more in 2019 include:

Facial recognition
Fingerprint recognition
Doors that open to employee’s IDs

Key Takeaway

Office spaces in 2018 were designed to be collaborative. While this trend will continue well into 2019, there will be new design structures that will shake up the way work spaces look. These trends include more nature, relaxation spaces, and smart technology.

Virtual Office Philippines: How to Make Your Work Breaks Productive

How can you make your work breaks more productive?

Connect with your co-workers
Meditate
Walk away from your desk
Take a nap

In this age of technology, work breaks are commonly thought of like time to check social media. Being up to date with events and people is now a popular way of relaxing during these moments. Different aspects of life involve being social, even the popular co-working trend at virtual offices in the Philippines involves connecting with people through online means while doing your job.

While it may seem relaxing to scroll down your feed, using your phone during all your breaks can make you feel even more stressed out. It worsens the way you feel by isolating you from your surroundings because you spend all your time on the phone. It also makes you compare your circumstances with the circumstances of others, thus, increasing your insecurity.

All this stress will obviously drain your energy and make you less productive. Instead of using social media during your breaks, these are a few activities you can try:

Connect with your co-workers

Conversing and socializing with people online just does not feel the same as conversing with people face to face. When you talk to people face to face, you tend to feel more excitement and happiness. This is because having connections makes you feel less lonely by making you feel like you belong in a place. It makes you feel more positive about the environment you are in.

At work, you experience different types of stressful situations because of your responsibilities. It can become really difficult for you to keep those negative feelings every day, and there will be times when talking about those stresses are the best way to solve them. Your coworkers are the perfect people to converse with about those problems because they usually face the same issues since all of your share the office space for lease in Paranaque.

Meditate

One of the most stressful things that a lot of employees do is multi-task. Multi-tasking at a virtual office in the Philippines seems good in concept, but actual implementation usually falls flat because doing many things at the same time tends to lead to us not finishing anything in the end due to lack of focus. Multi-tasking also makes your attention span shorter in the long run since you are used to moving from topic to topic.

Social media encourages us to have a short attention span because we can quickly move from a post or page to another one.

Meditating counteracts that effect on our attention span by:

Calming our mind – When we make peace with our negative feelings, we can move on and completely focus on our work.

Make us think more critically – When your mind is calm, you become more aware of what you are doing. You start to see what is inefficient in your movements and actions.

Walk away from your desk

Sitting down for long periods of time can have a serious impact on your brain health. Staying on your chair can make it harder for you to remember short-term memories because it can thin out the medial temporal lobe. You need good short-term-memory at work because it makes you alert to changes in the office.

A good way to prevent is by actually moving away from your desk and to start moving. Walking is an easy exercise to do outside any workspace, such as an office space for lease in Paranaque. Exercise makes you remember better because it keeps all of the parts of the brain fit, including the medial temporal lobe, just like the rest of your body parts.

Besides making you remember, walking also gives you these benefits:

Feel more positive about work
Make you more creative
Make you focus better

Take a nap

Every employee wants to get enough sleep, but most of them don’t attempt to get enough sleep. The act of slumbering makes up for lost energy. When you don’t recharge your energy, you become less productive at work. A lack of sleep makes you less aware of your surroundings, thus making it harder to finish tasks and you more prone to error. It also makes you too tired to think and be creative.

People find it hard to sleep enough hours at work. If you constantly complain about being tired because of lack of sleep, a good way to make up for that is by taking naps at work during your lunch.

A 30-minute nap on your desk is enough to make improve your alertness and performance without disturbing your night sleep.

Key Takeaway

It has become a habit for many employees to use social media as a way of relaxing during their breaks. While social media makes it easy for us to connect and gain friends, it makes us less productive because of different reasons. Instead of gaining energy during our breaks, we lose energy over feelings of isolation and insecurity. We become less productive. Instead of using social media, you can try the ways discussed above to make the most out of your breaks.

Office Space: How to Celebrate Halloween

What are a few simple and fun ways to celebrate Halloween at the office?

Decorate the office
Have a Halloween-themed day at work
Turn the office floor into a murder scene
Make Halloween-themed drinks for the after-party

When it’s Halloween, working at an office space for lease in Paranaque doesn’t have to stay the same. Businesses can take this time as an opportunity to spice up the workplace by taking time to celebrate Halloween with their employees. These are the activities people can celebrate this special season in the office space:

Decorate the Office

There are many parts of the office you can choose to fill with decorations:

Walls – You can choose to stick different ornaments on the wall. Good Halloween ornaments that are easy to buy are webs. On the other hand, offices such as the events space in BF Paranaque, have glass walls that can be drawn on.

Doors – Choose a door in the office and decorate it based on one supernatural creature with paper cutouts. For example, if your department chose a vampire, you can cut from different colored papers fangs, eyes, skin, and hair.

Tables – Make mini creepy terrarium jar gardens and use them as decorations for the table. All you need is a mason jar with a sealable cap.

Have a Halloween-Themed Day

Companies who use an office space for lease in Paranaque can have a Halloween theme workday that is fun yet productive, as long as the activities don’t distract them from working.

To make a Halloween theme day, employees can:

Enter in costumes based on the theme of their team

To make the costumes more interesting, each team can be assigned a different theme to base their costumes on. IT Team can have movies, the Marketing team can have Disney, etc.

Team decorating contest

Halloween decorating is an easy way of making everyone engaged. So that the employees do not get rushed, the decorating contest can already be announced weeks or a month before. Company teams get to decorate their work area any way they want as long it follows the event. Executives get to judge, and whoever wins, gets a prize.

Set up a candy and sweets station

Since employees don’t have time for trick or treat anymore (or do they?), replicate that experience for them by setting up a candy and baked sweets station they can go to within the day whenever you feel like it. Each team can contribute to the station by bringing their own candy or baked goods. To be more organized, teams can also already state what they will bring a week before.

To make the station more Halloween-like, you can black cloth over the table. Then, top the cloth with some decorations. Place skulls, fake bloody hands, eyeballs, plates to act as space for the baked goods, and pumpkins to place the candies. Lastly, place black candle holders with lighted candles to make it spookier.

Office Floor Murder Scene

When one thinks of Halloween, death comes to mind because it is something so many people fear. Therefore, having a murder scene in the office space as a decoration seems to make so much sense. To stage a fake murder scene, you will need a space that no one really walks on:

Washable Red and Blue Acrylic Paint
Paintbrush
Duct tape

To make the tracing a person, you will need duct tape. Let someone lie down on the floor. Next, trace their body by placing duct tape near his or her body. Afterward, mix 3 parts red paint and 1-part blue paint to make fake blood. Afterward, dip your brush on the mixture and paint near the duct-tape body.

Halloween-Themed Drinks

If you plan on having a small Halloween party at an event space in BF Paranaque, all you need is to serve some food and drinks. Make it more fun, by creating some spooky alcoholic drinks that can easily be made in your workspace:

Bloody Vampire Kiss

3 tbsps. vodka
3 tbsp. Champagne
2 tbsps. strawberry juices
1 tbsp. strawberry syrup
1 tsp red food coloring

Pour all of the ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Pour the mixture over a small glass with ice. Put more food coloring if the drink doesn’t look bloody enough. Lastly, top it with a clean syringe as decoration.

Zombie Green

4 tbsps. rum
1 tbsps. lime syrup
1 tsp green food coloring
1 tbsp. Mountain Dew
1 tbsp. chocolate syrup
2 tsps. honey
1 tbsp. red food coloring

First, make the fake blood. Mix the chocolate syrup, honey, and red food coloring until the mixture replicates the color and texture of blood.

Next, make the drink. Mix the rum, lime syrup, food coloring, and mountain in a cocktail shaker. Shake and leave it in the container.

The last step is to decorate a martini glass with fake blood before serving the drink. Pour the fake blood mixture in a plate. Dip the rim of the glass upside down into the blood. Afterward, turn it back, put the glass in a tissue and wait until blood drips are formed from the rim. Now, put ice and pour the drink from the shaker into the decorated martini glass.

Key Takeaway

When Halloween season comes, the office doesn’t have to be monotonous, dry, and boring. Businesses can take this time to make the office space more fun and exciting by doing several activities to celebrate the season. In the office, you can celebrate by decorating the space, having a Halloween-themed work day, faking a murder scene, and making Halloween theme drinks for the party after work. But besides these, the most important idea to keep at heart is to celebrate and be festive about the child-like charms and mischief of this sacred holiday. Happy Halloween boils and ghouls!

What to Look for in a Virtual Office in the Philippines

What should you look for in a virtual office in the Philippines?

Convenient location
Cutting-edge technology
Spacious conference rooms

Virtual offices in Manila and other cities have been steadily gaining popularity among small business owners, startups, and freelancers. While it was originally thought of only as a way to “look like you are there when you are not”, virtual offices have evolved to become an all-around solution to the different problems businesses face.

It can provide small businesses and startups almost everything they need to give an appearance of professionalism, from a simple shared space and/or access to meeting rooms, a business address for your company, to fully furnished boardrooms and executive suites.

Because most companies are being forced to optimize in order to remain profitable, some of them are even choosing to have their employees to work remotely to reduce the cost of maintaining the cost of office rent in the Philippines. If you are in a situation where you need to explore the different choices of virtual offices available, here are a few things you should look for:

Convenient Location

Just because your business is probably going to be remote most of the time, do not assume that your clients or anybody else will not visit your offices. Clients will want to meet with you in a place that is professional in nature, so it is not out of the question that they may choose to meet in your offices.

When you are looking for a virtual office in Manila or other cities, make sure that it is located somewhere convenient. Aside from clients and customers, you might also have to call in your current employees or new hires for training and onboarding. This means that you want to find a virtual office that is located somewhere that is in a relatively central and accessible location and easy for everyone to drive or commute in.

Cutting-Edge Technology

If your virtual office has a full suite of office tech like large, easy-to-use printers that can scan and print a complicated array of paperwork or high-speed internet, you might find that your employees are more eager to come in the office. Workers that have an easier time when it comes to doing their job are more encouraged to come into work every day.

Choose a virtual office that can give you that additional value through the technology they can provide you and your employees. Make sure that your employees will have easy access to any office infrastructure they might need during the rare occasion when the resources they need are not available at their home.

Spacious Conference Rooms

You should actually visit the virtual offices you plan on using and take a look at their facilities before committing to them since you are probably going to spend a considerable amount of time in those offices and conference rooms.

You should consider looking for a place that has at least one private and elegantly decorated conference room. Aside from having a nice, spacious area for training your employees, this can also be the perfect place for you to impress your clients who want to meet in your office.

Key Takeaway

A traditional office for rent in the Philippines can be a good option for other companies that may have already been established or have grown too big, but a virtual space might just be the perfect thing for a freelancer or a small startup business.

Having the freedom to let your employees work from home or anywhere else can be great for modern businesses and professionals alike. However, no matter how easy it may be, you are still going to need a physical location and address with a mailbox from which your business can be officially reached.