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Why We Still Need Offices When Work is Now Digital

Why We Still Need Offices When Work is Now Digital

Why We Still Need Offices

Undeniably, our way of working has gone through drastic changes.

Today’s technology created a digital environment that allowed us to work in almost anywhere we want – spurring a question that a growing majority of us is asking; if work have become digital why do we still come to offices?

British economist Frances Cairncross – along with a number of other social and media theorists – predicted that distance will die during the year 1990s following the spread of the internet. They argued that space itself would become irrelevant when every place is connected instantaneously to every other location on the planet. It only makes sense that some of us would start asking if there’s really any need for offices – why go to work when it can actually go to you?

U.S. professor Melvin Webber’s well-known prediction is seemingly becoming imminent today. He said during the year 1973: “For the first time in history, it might be possible to locate on a mountain top and to maintain intimate, real-time, and realistic contact with business or other associates”. Traditional workspaces will soon be rendered obsolete as instantaneous communication to almost everyone is established.

But quite frankly, history has veered off a bit too far from what they expected. There’s no denying that we can now easily talk to anyone from around the globe yet ironically, we still go to work every day. Despite of its popularity, not everyone has picked up the trend of Telecommuting. On the other hand, corporations continuously invest in new or renovated office spaces located at the heart of urban areas so as to attract more talent.

What They Missed

Little do the early commentators know that though we now have the option of working anywhere in the digital world, it doesn’t necessarily mean we want to. Even if we already have the power to access a large quantity of information right at our fingertips, we still strive for places that allows us to share knowledge face to face, to generate ideas, and to create pools of talents and perspectives.

No matter how far humanity has gone in terms of modern technology, human aggregation, friction and interaction of minds remain to be vital aspects of work – most especially in the creative industries. The ability of a workplace to curate the aforementioned factors is becoming a vital requirement – stringing along with the other needs brought upon by watershed changes.

The past few years gave us front row seats to the transitioning of labyrinths of cubicles into free-flowing flexible workspaces. And due to its dynamic and sociable vibe, coworking has gained a large following amongst today’s labor force – serving as living proof that humans value shared spaces that allows them to take part in a community of like-minded individuals. Open to diverse disciplines, it promotes colorful interaction and ideation amongst its members.

New Digital Proximity

Mixing the long-established advantages of traditional offices – fitting tools and a reputable business address – and a new breed of intangible yet indispensable benefits, coworking spaces changed the ominous “death of distance” into what many perceive to be the “birth of a new proximity”

Striving to create a place that engineers creativity, pioneers took the much needed procedures to thoroughly understand how the workforce connects with one another through a flexible environment.  With the help of new digital tools that can measure human connections and how they correlate with productivity and creativity, they are creating workspaces that adapts to human needs, instead of the other way around.

Veering far away from what theorists of the 1990s have predicted, rather than rending offices obsolete, today’s technology will transform and revitalize our work spaces.

Experience a new kind of proximity to success with Sales Rain and talk to us today!

Creating a Middle Ground for Collaboration and Focus

Creating a Middle Ground for Collaboration and Focus

Today’s architects, interior designers, as well as engineers are fully engaged in a journey of discovering the different ways our run-down-the-mill offices increase our overall efficiency while promoting collaboration at the same time. Much to their surprise, they discovered a risk that was often swept under the rug by today’s large majority: distraction.

Architectural firm, Gensler, made headlines when its 2013 US Workplace Survey revealed the detrimental role of focus in effective performance. The aforementioned study showed that whenever we are distracted at work, our capacity to focus and collaborate is immediately undermined. As a result, this specific piece of information became the ammunition of critics going against the open plan setting. Only a handful of participants reported at least an hour of heads down, concentrated work during their shifts. Their headline finding led people to wonder how professionals can successfully execute individual focused work in an office that clearly prioritizes collaboration.

Understanding the Nature of Software Developers

Almost all industries carry complex work that requires a balance of focused individual activities and collaborative task but lead consultants of Genler decided to focus on software developers and engineers whose project require a lot of focus.

Developing software is an increasingly collaborative activity — self-organizing teams swiftly move through series of cycles. This fluid method of working splits tasks into small increments that would usually take one to four weeks with each one requiring a variation of periods of intense focus and intense collaboration. According to the interviews the team conducted within a global tech firm, it shows that about seventy percent of a developer’s time goes to individual work; some casual and uninterruptible by emails and instant messaging, while tasks like coding, testing, and debugging can only be interrupted at the expense of their productivity. At the same time, sit down conversations and brainstorming sessions are integral to a team’s progress.

The competition in today’s tech industry is fierce, with several companies prioritizing speed in marketing its services and products, and that pressure can easily inflame the problems open workspaces usually come with — it can be too loud and distracting for them. Despite of this, we don’t see it going away. The open plan setting is not going away any time soon and this is because of the mobility it offers as well as its cost efficient nature.

It became pretty obvious by then; people are doing more and more focused work but they feel ineffective at it. Solving it wouldn’t be as easy though, the organizational demand for collaboration hinders researchers from coming up with solutions as both work modes are attached by the hip. Their eureka moment came when they realized that in order for an office to be effective, it needs to serve both interests. It’s not just about the spaces anymore, how work happens matters as much as where work happens.

What Went Right and What Didn’t

The participants involved in the research were situated in a brand new “agile” workspace that carries a series of of open team areas with 15 workstations each. And according to the interviews and focus groups, developers and testers said that the setup fitted their team dynamics, culture, and individual work needs, perfectly. They were incredibly satisfied. It allowed them to sit together and interact with one another amidst focused work. Its size and proximity allowed both work modes to become productive.

Unfortunately, user experience designers weren’t as enthusiastic. Their tasks required them to collaborate with large numbers of teams yet they have the innate tendency to sit along side each other, resulting to distractions. Episodically conversing with developers and testers, it became a tenuous activity that gave them less autonomy on where and how they worked within the office. And in order to cope, they would often look for more effective acoustic spaces elsewhere.

Based on the input they have gathered, it suggests that people can perform well, even in interactive situations, if they have the liberty to utilize workspaces and processes that allowed them to balance both collaborative and focus activities in real time.

A Balancing Act: Collaboration and Focus

Gensler’s report entitled “My Work in a We World”, enumerated four strategies in order to perfect the balancing act: choice and control over surroundings, team discipline, united code of behavior, and decision-making autonomy. Each strategy should be tailored to the organisation, the team, and the project. Taking into consideration other factors aside from the setting, it integrates team dynamics, organisational culture, as well as work polices and practices. In order for your people to truly flourish, they must have enough control over both their space and situation.

Interested in performing the balancing act? Talk to us today and we’ll give you a helping hand. Sales Rain’s spaces are designed to improve both your team and individual performance by syncing collaboration and focus in one rhythm.

The Essentials To a Healthy Workforce: The Overlooked Fundamentals

The Essentials To a Healthy Workforce: The Overlooked Fundamentals

The physical and psychological health of today’s workforce is endangered as workplace stress creates an even higher toll on employees overall well-being. Affecting productivity and driving up voluntary turnover, the phenomenon has cost US employers nearly $200 billion yearly in healthcare coverage. And as a response, several companies come up with their own solution to alleviate the pressing predicament. From encouraging sleep and meditation through nap pods down to healthy snack bars, quirky perks can be found in almost every modern workplace today.

Yet amidst all of the clout and other activity going on, we have easily overlooked the fundamental factor that contributes to workplace stress: work environment – starting with the work itself. For years, researchers have advertised the benefits of better work practices for performance and productivity, enumerating two critical contributors to employee engagement: job control and social support. Moreover, it helps further enhance health – potentially reducing healthcare costs.

Companies from almost any industry can make use of the aforementioned elements to promote physical and mental well-being without breaking the bank.

Job Control

Research dating back decades have revealed that the autonomy employees have over what they do and how they do it plays a significant role on their physical health. Recent studies have also indicated that having limited job control creates ill effects that extend beyond physiological well-being, it actually imposes burden on a person’s mental health. Organizations can prevent these workforce dangers by creating positions or roles that have more fluidity and autonomy or by eradicating micromanagement.

Physical and Mental Health

British epidemiologist Michael Marmot and his team lead one of the most notable studies in the area popularly known as the Whitehall Studies. Together, they discovered that the higher an employee’s rank is, the lower their morality is to cardiovascular diseases. As it turns out, differences in job control correlating to job ranks is most accountable for the said phenomenon. Higher-ranked employees who enjoyed more autonomy over their jobs and had more discretion over what they do despite having greater demands.

Additional data connected work stress to the presence of metabolic syndromes – clusters of risk factors that predict the likelihood of getting heart diseases and type 2 diabetes. Employees who go through chronic stress at work are more likely to experience metabolic syndromes compared to those who don’t undergo work stress.

A separate study have also discovered a correlation between measures of job control and healthy. People who had a higher level of power over task control in reorganization processes had less illness symptoms for 11 out of 12 health indicators, less absences and less experiences of depression.

Control Over Workforce Surroundings

Control over work is just one part of the broad – and growing – culture of autonomy. Architectural and design firm Gensler said in its 2013 Workplace Survey that another form of liberation that creates not just an increased happiness, but as well as elevated employee motivation and performance, is the power of choice over their surroundings. One example of this is Facebook’s headquarters; their employees can tailor the layout, height, and configuration of their desks based on their respective preferences. Teams can also create whatever plan best supports their project by moving their desks.

Admittedly this element isn’t easy to achieve but there are ways for companies to offer their employees a wider range of options like providing them with passes to coworking spaces. These unorthodox offices offer its member different work environments depending on their needs or personal preferences. It’s a cost-efficient way of giving your team more choices on how they work. They can share desks with other professionals or get a private office of their own.

With so much light being put on the health of one’s workforce, we’re easily distracted by what we think is important – forgetting that there are certain essentials needed to be covered first.

Talk to us today and we can help you elevate your teams overall well-being through autonomy.

Wonder Women: How Ladies Are Changing the Corporate World

Wonder Women: How Ladies Are Changing the Corporate World

The youngest demographic of today’s workforce – the Millennials – have brought a ton of change in the world of business. From the way we do business and even our work area. This generation’s penchant for autonomy pushed several corporations to reconsider the modern innovations occurring in terms of work.

And though these modifications have helped us become even more innovative and flexible, it also brought in a certain trend that alarmed companies as well as experts. More and more members of today’s workforce are becoming disengaged with their respective work with a number close to 70 percent. Some have traced it back to despite having available resources around them to familiarize themselves with the work models, there are certain employers that continue to fail in creating a fulfilling path and culture for their employees.

To make things even more alarming, a large number of these young professionals walking away from the corporate track are women. According to a Deloitte survey conducted among 7,700 millennials coming from 29 different countries, one out of four respondents plan on quitting their respective job within a year. Moreover, women are most likely than men to have left the company.

A recent global ICEDR study orchestrated during 2015 to 2016, leaders believe that the majority of women at the age of 30 leave because of the struggle they experience creating a balance between their work and their life. Yet contrary to what the study entailed, the women themselves said that there are other factors that influenced their decision to leave their respective organizations.

Driving Force Behind Wonder Women

A few readers have argued that neither the work/life balance nor the compensation is their primary driving force for leaving, but rather the corporate environment itself have become taxing to them.

One of the most crucial factor is corporate politics – accompanied by incompatible values and toxic environment. Employees would often find themselves doing their best to dodge multiple stray bullets whenever they feel that their ethics and values is not in sync with those of the corporation. Women are frequently left burned out as they try to make a contribution to the business while making sure that their voices and opinions remain significant.

Another reason cited by the readers is impact. As most professionals would, they want to fulfill their purpose and make a difference. No matter the industry, most of us wish to give our own input into making the world a better place. We all want to leave an accomplishment of good, solid work as well as other recognizable achievements.

“Wonder Women” or ladies of the industry would often feel that their thoughts get easily drowned out by corporate noise. To them, they are helping a group of people build their dreams without being recognized for the contributions that they make in the process. Some women dream of their ideas coming to life right before their eyes. There are also certain young ladies who choose to continue their profession independently so that they have more control over their goals.

And the last most common reason is the overwhelming feeling of being undervalued or underutilized. The corporate world seldom fully recognize women’s ability to contribute, nor do they curate an environment that allows women to reach their potential and succeed at the highest levels. Whether it’s because of gender discrimination, family-unfriendly policies that take its toll on women with children or simply the overall unfair culture – when faced with these types of environment, females or workplace wonder women would make it their goal to ‘lean out’ of these corporations.

The Aftermath

As a result, the number of female entrepreneurs expanded, globally. Over the past 15 years, women-owned firms have grown at a faster rate and would have provided an estimated of more than 5 million jobs by the year 2018.

These office wonder women are crashing the glass ceiling as they continuously disrupt the traditional corporate culture by building their own companies, taking over executive leadership roles and curating workspaces that cater to both the needs and interest of women.

The fast growth of flexible workspaces brought upon the unexpected appearance of several coworking offices globally. Though as expected, majority of them are built for co-ed occupation. But as the years progressed, the presence of niche shared offices have been observed. More and more female-friendly spaces are opening up to fill in the gaps of the available resources to women.

Providers from all around the world are now coming up with more ways to invite female entrepreneurs into joining them. Specific spaces in the US have started providing on-site child care services so that mothers of their community could fulfill both of their duties.

Some Helpful Tips on Working From Home with a Kid

Some Helpful Tips on Working From Home with a Kid

Remember that cute kid in yellow and her younger sibling in a stroller barging in on their dad during a video conference with the UK broadcasting company, BBC? That video wherein their mom would later rush into the room to grab the two kids and the broadcasters – and their dad, too – were left baffled and in fits of laughter.

Yeah, that video.

It went viral not just because of how adorable and funny the whole scenario is, but because a large majority of the world can totally relate to the confused dad and the panicking mom. Working parents have been there before – some, too many times – and they all know the anxiety and the fear of your kid wreaking havoc as you participate in a conference call with at least five members of your management.

Parenting while maintaining a professional career is indeed stressful, but that’s the reality for almost sixty-one percent of married-couple families with a kid or kids under 18 in which both partners work. And because of the advent of remote working and virtual offices, more and more companies are encouraging parents to work from their homes.

Whether you’re a mom, a dad, or maybe both, here are a few inspiring stories and tips on how you can avoid your kid from going completely viral:

“Secrets of the Remote Workforce” co-author Teresa Douglas is a proud mom who has been working from home since 2010. And because of this, she learned how to set boundaries for her kids, even with a babysitter or a caregiver around. In order to establish this with her children, she puts a “STOP, in a meeting” sign on her door. In addition, she also implemented a house rule that if her door is closed, you can knock once, but if nobody answers, it automatically means she’s in a meeting.

The physical barrier that you would establish can help remind you and your kid of the difference between work time and play time. Digital lifestyle brand, Fatherly’s work-at-home dad, Patrick Coleman works on a separate room behind closed doors in his home to create a clear line between his work and his family. If your workspace is located in a shared space, baby gates can help keep curious hands away from important documents and equipment.

But if your kids are not old enough to be by themselves or if there’s a pressing need for you to have more uninterrupted concentration time, don’t be afraid to ask for help. There’s an invisible responsibility placed upon the shoulders of parents that they should be great mothers and fathers as well as great employee,s and though balancing both seems to be impossible, the greatness of a parent isn’t only measured by how frequent they take care of their kids. If you can access in-house child care, that would be great. If not, try asking a relative or a fellow work-at-home parent to trade tasks.

Other great alternatives would be setting up a virtual office. Certain shared office providers like Sales Rain offer virtual office packages that come with access to certain workspaces such as their coworking areas as well as meeting and conference rooms, so if ever you need to really sit down and work, you can just drop by their offices and go do your thing. The beauty of virtual offices  such as the one offered by Sales Rain is that it allows you to have a professional space to conduct meeting with clients, take conference calls, and do concentrated work while having enough freedom to take your kids out. Not to mention that this also means giving your business a modern and professional looking front, it’s a win-win right?

The viral video sure is funny but more than anything else, it’s heartwarming. It showcases the great lengths parents would go to in providing their kids with the best future that they can give – attesting to the theory that working parents are superheroes.

Talk to Sales Rain today! And we’ll help you be the best superhero for your kids!

Commending the Hallyu Wave Over Great Drinks in Mocktails and Poetry

Commending the Hallyu Wave Over Great Drinks in Mocktails and Poetry

Filipino iKONICS have showcased their talent in poetry as well as their never-ending love for the Hallyu wave at last Saturday’s Mocktails & Poetry, held at Sales Rain’s Mandaluyong office!

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Marketing Students Compete Head to Head in Marketing Genius 6


Aspiring marketers from different schools and universities have gathered together in Sales Rain’s Mandaluyong site last March 2, to participate in the prestigious interscholastic competition; Marketing Genius 6.

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PUP JME Holds Executives’ List 8 4th Boot Camp at Sales Rain


A sense of friendly rivalry filled the atmosphere of Sales Rain’s Mandaluyong office last Saturday, February 23, as PUP’s Junior Marketing Executives commence the fourth installation of the prestigious academic competition Executives’ List 8.

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DongHyuk: Kpop Convention and Exhibit, Celebrating the Hallyu Wave

DongHyuk: Kpop Convention and Exhibit, Celebrating the Hallyu Wave

Sales Rain’s Mandaluyong site was flooded by Filipino K-Pop fans last Saturday, January 19, to showcase the Hallyu fever in the country and to celebrate South Korean boy band iKON member Donghyuk’s 23rd birthday.

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Sales Rain Presents U Empowerment: Going Up & Beyond Limits

Sales Rain Presents U Empowerment: Going Up & Beyond Limits

Sales Rain opens the year with a successful event held last Saturday, January 12, in its well-acclaimed Mandaluyong office.

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