Virtual Office Fails to Connect

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If you run a business, particularly if it’s a small one and a new one, you may be tempted to create a virtual office.

And with good reason. As explained in the article about the company Niner Bikes on page 5 of this issue, virtual offices have real advantages. Niner Bikes is in Torrance but it found people with the skills it needed in places like Colorado and Utah, and it was able to employ those folks without having to convince them to move to Los Angeles. Plus, it didn’t have to incur the expense of relocating them.

In fact, the big virtue of virtual offices is lower cost. After all, such a business needs less square footage, fewer parking spaces, less office equipment, etc.

Los Angeles would seem a perfect locale for virtual offices, what with its day-slaying commute times; high gasoline prices; and long roster of small, creative businesses – the kinds best suited for virtual offices.

We could go on. The point is there are a lot of advantages to virtual offices.

But wait. Let’s think about the disadvantages.

For one thing, not all people work hard or effectively on their own. Oh, sure, you’re probably a self-starter, but if you leave me alone at home, by lunch time I’ll be working mostly on Spider Solitaire.

Another big downside is the lack of a competitive spirit. There’s something compelling about putting on your work clothes – like suiting up for the game – and going into the field of corporate battle to outduel your competitors and even your colleagues. I mean, how can you climb to the top if you’re not in the office to, say, surreptitiously put a tack on the chair of the Golden Boy employee just before he sits down for his big presentation to the directors?

But to me, the biggest disadvantage to virtual offices is that you lose that magic mixture, that spontaneous combustion that occurs when people are together, brainstorming and reacting to each other. How many ideas have you shared at the water cooler, or how much advice got passed to you over the cubicle wall? And how many of your out-there notions got tugged back to Earth by one of your more sober colleagues before you embarrassed yourself by formally proposing it?

You might remember a few years ago that a couple of 70-something-year-old local women were imprisoned after it was discovered they had befriended homeless men, took out big life insurance policies on them and then ran over them with a car, killing them.

That scam was cracked after one Los Angeles Police Department detective idly mentioned to a second detective about the circumstances of the death of a homeless man he was investigating. The second detective said that sounded much like a case he had worked on seven years earlier, according to the show “American Greed” on CNBC. The second detective checked his files and discovered the two women who were beneficiaries of the insurance policies in the old case were the same women in the then-current one.

Had the cops worked in a virtual office instead of a real one, that conversation probably never would have occurred. And the women may well be driving around today, crushing more heavily insured victims.

Beginning a couple of decades ago, there was a fair amount of talk about how what was then called telecommuting would become a trend, thanks to fax machines, home computers and those new cellular telephones. It never really did.

But today – with cloud computing, Skype, smart phones and the like – virtual offices are more compelling. It wouldn’t be surprising to see them really take off today, especially since so many businesses need to save money. Some aspects of virtual offices may make sense for you.

But before you plunge into complete virtual office-dom and shrink your headquarters to the square footage of an average-size master bedroom closet in Encino, please do one thing: Ask one of your most sober colleagues what they think. Maybe they can tug you back to Earth.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].

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