A long time ago in a village far far away two humans were working together on a new product for cutting trees. This is (perhaps) how the first office came to existence. It wasn’t a corner office but it had a beautiful view, garden, plenty of space, natural light, air conditioning and music in the background. Humans were working in these perfectly conditioned open spaces for the next few million years until the ancient Roman bureaucracy reimagined this space and named it officium – the Latin word for ‘service’.
The office as a working environment did not become popular until after the rise of the complex organizations in 18th century. The office buildings were born. Quickly and rapidly they spread across the globe. People were dreaming to have a job and work in an office. This is when the first office problems started to get momentum. The more people were working in offices the more privacy they wanted – from cubicals to corner offices – people strived for isolation. These new offices weren’t open, spacious and green anymore. Natural light was a rare treat and the air conditioning wasn’t ok at all. The new office was dividing instead of connecting people.
In the early 21st century a new office trend emerged – the coworking. It is a brilliant idea to share the same office with other like-minded humans. This was an important step towards bringing people together and removing the office barriers created in the office. A new profession, the community manager, also was born. The community manager engineers new ways of communication between people in a shared office so they can create more value together. But the community manager was overwhelmed with administrative tasks, totally unrelated to … building the community. They had to deal with invoices and contracts, manage payments, book meeting rooms, deal with facility management, availability & occupancy of desks, marketing and hundreds of other tasks. They were using spreadsheets, custom tools, and sticky notes to manage the office and their members.
Runway East
We started OfficeRnD with one simple idea – to make the office management easier and more transparent thus making everyone in the office happier, healthier, more productive and innovative. Our mission is to make the office a better place through innovative technologies.
We love the coworking idea, so it was an easy decision to start by making the coworking spaces better. OfficeRnD offloads the boring, repetitive tasks from the community (office) managers so they can focus on creating a real community by bringing people together and helping them build better businesses.
For less than a year we developed a great product and released 173 versions of it. Our first paying customers are among the coolest coworking spaces in London – Central Working, Rainmaking Loft and Runway East to name a few.
According to Grant Powell, Managing Director at Central Working, London:
Office RnD has enabled greater clarity around our business through it’s business intelligence platform, allowing us to plan and deliver the best service to our members. Their flexibility in shaping this tool to our core business needs has made working with them effortless. At Central Working we had searched for many systems before selecting Office RnD, we would highly recommend them.
We raised two times during 2015. We started at PiLabs – the first proptech accelerator in Europe. Just a month ago we closed our next round of investment led by Launchub – one of the best Southeastern Europe seed funds. The round was joined by two of the founders of Telerik, the world’s most famous provider of development tools.
Now we have a simple task ahead – to make the office a better place through innovative technologies. From the coworking spaces to the serviced offices and business centres, OfficeRnD will set new standards in the shared workspace management.
To be continued. Until then sign up and join the coolest London coworking spaces using OfficeRnD.
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