#3-EN-What do Google and Starbucks have in common?-Avila Business Centers VideoPodcast

Avila Business Center VideoPodcast

The article "Work Smarter with a Virtual Office" recently published on the website officetoday.com by Karen Condi, CEO of the American consultant Alliance Office Strategies, came to highlight the importance that big companies have been giving in the last years to the new models of workspaces management. Recent statistics published in the United States of America indicate that big enterprises like IBM and Accenture have around 50% of their personnel working outside their facilities, and from the 115 thousand employees of the American IBM, 46.000 adopt regularly alternative work places. The Virtual Office concept was born in the eighties of the past century, gaining a greater awareness in the nineties, at a time where the new technologies and the Internet, in particular, contributed to a higher professional’s mobility bringing major advantages to the companies betting on internationalization. In practice, these companies did not need a physical space to settle in a country: it was enough to hire a virtual office service in a Business Center that gave them a prestige address on a central area, professional telephone attendance and meeting rooms for work sessions. Besides the financial amounts involved in this operations, much lower than the traditional option of renting or buying an Office, the “flexibility” and “efficiency” factors were decisive for the wide spread of the Virtual Office concept. Currently, dozens of multinational enterprises have settled in Portugal trough this service, seizing the competitive advantages herein existent at a technological level, with innovating multichanel solutions that allow an online contact and in real time with clients "anytime-anywhere". On the contrary of what might be thought, the Virtual Office does not belong exclusively to the universe of SME and independent professionals with limited budgets in the beginning of their activity. As an example, Google opened a virtual Office in Brazil and Starbucks adopted the same strategy in Portugal, being able to fulfil the objective of sustained growth that is a characteristic of these enterprises, following the principle defended by Karen Condi: "Work Smart".