The simple fact that the end of the calendar year coincides with holiday season is a huge source of stress for many employees and business owners right about now. There’s always a big push for end-of-the-year sales, year-end reporting, and lots of people are looking to use vacation time to travel and spend time with family.
These holiday season stresses are amplified even more if you work from home, thanks to guests dropping by and the kids being out of school. Fortunately, virtual office space can help you get organized, be productive, and give you the peace and quiet you need to close out the year on a positive note. Here are some tips for how to effectively utilize virtual office space while working during holidays, especially if you work from home.
Focused Space for Year-End Tasks
The end of the year is an especially busy time in many different industries, and this applies to well-established businesses and new start-ups as well. A virtual office provides a distraction-free work environment so you can get down to the tasks at hand without making them take any longer than they should.
Not only are virtual offices quiet and refreshingly removed from your personal life and holiday plans, but they are also well-equipped with the latest technology and even administrative staff to help out with tedious details. This means that you can finish your work faster and with greater accuracy than you would while working on a holiday from home.
Plan Employee Meetings to Tackle Holiday Issues
There are lots of great opportunities to generate new business during the holiday season, but it may take some extra planning and coordinating to take advantage of those opportunities. A virtual office is very useful during the holiday season to plan employee meetings and discuss end-of-year sales, address increased staffing needs, and set goals for the new year. It’s a smart idea to pick an easily accessible and convenient location for these meetings so that employees aren’t overly inconvenienced to attend them.
Host Clients Visiting from Out of Town
Everyone’s holiday schedule is different, and some of your clients and customers may have spare vacation days to use. Meanwhile, potential investors may be in the city for other reasons and be willing to stop by to chat about your business plan.
A virtual office provides a much more professional space for these types of meetings compared to your home office, and this can make a significant difference in securing your business. Take a few moments to think about which clients, customers, and investors are based in the area or who may want to travel to New York City to experience the magic of the holiday season. You may want to take a proactive approach and extend some invitations to these individuals to suggest meeting in the virtual office that you’ve set up for the holiday season.
Throw a Virtual Office Holiday Party for Employees
Just because you and your employees work remotely and don’t see each other every day doesn’t mean that you can’t throw a holiday party! Office holiday parties are a great way for work from home employees to reconnect with each other and to show your appreciation for all their hard work.
A virtual office in Midtown New York City is a great starting point for you and your employees to come together for meetings and then head out to a nearby restaurant or bar to get the party started. This is a much more fun and engaging option than just hosting an online “party” and asking your employees to log on to a video chat at a certain time.
Unplug During the Holidays with Virtual Phone Service
While most of the tips in this article are centered on working during holidays, this is also a great time of year to take a break and unplug from the hustle and bustle of your professional life. Virtual office phone solutions help businesses keep up with every phone call without being tied to the phone every single day.
This means not missing new leads or disappointing clients even while you and your staff are on vacation. Virtual office answering services are becoming very popular during the holidays to take the burden off of small, overworked staffs.
You can establish or maintain a New York City voice presence with call answering, call forwarding, call screening, and onsite live receptionists. Other useful features of a virtual office phone service are voicemail-to-email recording, portal call out, and physical handset login.
Holiday Mail Management
The U.S. Postal Service and other delivery carriers are especially busy around the holidays delivery cards, packages, gift baskets, and year-end promotional materials. Keeping up with increased company mail can be time-consuming and a big burden if it’s all coming to your home address.
A virtual office can help with this as well since this holiday solution includes mail collection by attentive virtual assistants and secure mail storage for when you’re out of town or until you’re ready to deal with the bundles. Not only will you get a high-profile company mailing address for added prestige and professionalism, but you can take advantage of easy mail forwarding so no important letter or festive package will be missed.
Efficiency Tips for the Busy Holiday Season
Whether you continue working from home, work full-time in an office, or choose to rent a virtual office for the holiday season, there are certain ways that you can be more efficient with your work at this time of year. This is an important reminder because it’s far too easy to lose focus and work motivation during holiday periods because of everything else going on.
To stay on top of holiday season expectations and demands, plan for time off early and communicate with management and staff about your schedule. It’s perhaps more important now than ever to prioritize your most important tasks and create to-do lists for the things that need to be done by the end of the year and the things that can wait a bit longer. Technology can be used to boost productivity around the holidays too, especially if you use software that monitors how you spend your work hours or that batches emails together in categories to help you get organized.
Even with a busy schedule, it’s certainly a good idea to take a few days off to spend time with loved ones and take care of shopping, cooking, or decorating tasks so that you aren’t distracted by these things during work days. This can also help prevent holiday burnout and resentment towards your company. Also for this reason, don’t over-commit yourself around the holiday season or sacrifice your own health and happiness for your job. A virtual office can help you achieve a better work-life balance by allowing you to focus on work during work hours and the joy of the season when you’re done for the day.
Virtual Office Options in NYC
As you can see from these examples, renting a virtual office space for a day or two per week, or even just a few hours, can limit the stress that the holidays bring to work. In New York City, NYC Office Suites is your go-to source for virtual office space, and we have multiple locations in vibrant Midtown Manhattan.
We provide temporary office spaces for rent, on-site virtual mail assistants, local live receptionists, and app and portal access to make this your most productive and enjoyable holiday season yet. We also have connections with other U.S. and global office locations and can help configure your customized domestic or international office space solution elsewhere as well.
Before we get even deeper into the holiday season, give us a call to learn about virtual office spaces that may work well for you and your company. Now is a great time to try out a virtual office setup and test its impact on your productivity in order to guide your working strategies for the new year!