10 office management mistakes that cost millions

The ten mistakes that cost the most

1. Superficial verification of costs under the lease

Almost every tenant checks rent and indexation. The problem starts in opex: what the landlord may recharge to tenants under the lease and what is its own capital investment. Maciej points out that even a single digit after the decimal point in an exchange rate or indexation figure, multiplied by twelve months and by every tenant in the building, is real money. It is also easy to justify a questionable cost as "common area refurbishment".

What to do: ask questions and request documents even without being certain an error occurred, because the lease usually grants that right. Every few years commission a service charge audit based on benchmarks from comparable buildings. With a portfolio, start by comparing your own locations against each other.

2. Missed option deadlines in the lease

An extension or early exit option not exercised on time is a measurable loss. Maciej describes a tenant that moved into a building in three phases and could have consolidated its expiry dates at no cost with a simple letter. It now has three dates, and the earliest of them dictates when renegotiation must start - at an unfavourable point in the market cycle. The root cause is usually turnover: one team negotiates the lease, and several years later someone else looks after the options.

What to do: put the date the decision process must start in the calendar, not the lease expiry date, and name someone accountable for deadlines. A well-structured spreadsheet is enough, as long as someone maintains it consistently.

3. Choosing a supplier on price alone

Without an agreed SLA there is nothing to compare. The parameters to set upfront are maximum response time, resolution time, service frequency, acceptable complaint levels, service availability and the consequences of missing those thresholds. Only then can you answer whether a price is high or low. There is also a hidden cost almost nobody counts: the team time spent managing a supplier that fails to deliver quality, plus the frustration of being locked into a two or three year contract.

What to do: define your own requirements before the RFP, ask bidders to propose an SLA and compare how ambitious they are. Invite the finalists to your office, walk the space with them and watch what questions they ask. The person your team will deal with day to day should be in that meeting.

4. Fragmented services and no total cost of ownership calculation

Every supplier is a separate unit to manage: more emails, more invoices, more contacts. Offices grow while the service model stays as it was, carried over from a smaller floor or a previous address. Filip raises the objection he hears most often: outsourcing and consolidation sound expensive. Maciej does not dispute that they are nominally more expensive, because an integrating partner adds a margin. He points out, though, that the calculation is almost never done honestly - project costs rarely include the salaries of your own team or the time the project consumed.

What to do: calculate total cost of ownership including in-house payroll and the risk of absence in a small team. The question is not "cheaper or more expensive" but "what do we get in return": a controlled service level and the ability to open new locations quickly can be worth the premium. Where consolidation makes sense, use the wider offering of a supplier you trust instead of hiring another subcontractor for one-off tasks.

5. Badly built contracts and no knowledge of the scope

A contract that fitted three years ago may be inadequate today. Agreements signed during and just after the pandemic deserve particular attention: if more people are coming back to the office and the scope adjustment mechanisms never triggered, employees will simply see an office that is not clean. It also happens that a service guaranteed in the contract twice a year gets added to the invoice, because both sides forgot about it.

What to do: do not sign service contracts for ten years, and revisit them on a cycle. Know the scope and check invoices against it. When the responsible person changes, make sure they are properly onboarded into the contract. Filip adds his own method: all contracts in one repository with an AI assistant connected to it that remembers dates and entitlements, on a company account assigned to a department rather than a person.

6. A reactive approach to the technical side of the office

A building is like a car: serviced regularly it keeps running, neglected it eventually breaks down - usually at the worst possible moment, for instance when the air conditioning fails in the middle of summer. The cost of emergency repair comes back to tenants as a service cost anyway, so a neglected building is the tenant's cost, not the owner's.

What to do: ask the landlord how often it services installations and equipment, and keep watching. On your own side, identify the critical zones. Server room cooling is a completely different risk category from the coffee machine, although - as Maciej notes - coffee is a highly emotional topic and worth an SLA of its own, such as a replacement machine within 24 hours.

7. Ignoring energy and utility losses

The starting point is the metering setup and access to data on your own consumption. Without measurement there is no management, and the data should arrive automatically, in an agreed format and timeframe. Some parameters, such as air conditioning settings, are configured at building BMS level, so this requires cooperation with the landlord and knowing what can actually be changed.

What to do: work through pilots. Introduce a change on one floor, communicate it to employees, measure the effect and only then justify a larger spend. Afterwards, check whether the saving actually shows up on the landlord's invoice. Even small investments, such as occupancy sensors for lighting, pay back with a year of lease left. Leverage depends on how much space you occupy, but the things under your own control are worth doing at any scale.

8. No data on how the office actually works

There is a belief that little can be measured in workplace. Maciej argues the opposite and cites one of his favourite indicators: how much coffee the organisation drinks, at what times and on which days of the week. It does not explain everything, but it says a great deal about an office. Even the fundamental question of why people do not come to an office that cost millions can be broken down into data. There is one condition: the data must be correct, because bad data leads to bad decisions.

What to do: look for cheap data sources and trends instead of waiting for a large system. Implement tools so that they are part of the process and cannot be bypassed with a spreadsheet kept on the side.

9. An inconsistent set of tools

Data spread across five tools is data the team uses reluctantly, because the admin takes longer than the process itself. On top of that come licences the company pays for without matching usage: according to the SaaS Management Index, 36% of the 40 million licences analysed go unused. Filip adds that workplace is not a one-off office design exercise but continuous analysis of needs - an office designed in 2020 answered entirely different needs from today's.

What to do: stop and design a coherent tool architecture, simple enough that nobody works around it. Before buying another system, check whether your current supplier already has a module nobody asked about. Include building and supplier platforms in that picture.

10. No feedback or change management mechanisms

Transforming an office is a continuous process, not a one-off project. Maciej describes a company of around a thousand people where eighteen months passed between the workplace analysis and the move. A thousand people still moved in, but more than three hundred had a different profile by then - developers. The organisation had become a technology business, and the office was not prepared for that group's different needs, including heavier use of its amenities.

What to do: build a regular mechanism for collecting observations and feedback, and pair it with data when making the investment case. Justified feedback from the organisation plus numbers proving the investment stacks up is, in Maciej's words, the game changer in managing office change.

Questions and answers

Can office service charges be negotiated?

Landlords usually answer that there is nothing to negotiate because they do not profit from service charges. It is true that they should not profit from them, but they are spending tenants' money, so checking whether they manage it efficiently is in the tenant's interest. The lease normally grants the right to inspect documents and settlements, and a benchmark-based audit reveals items that stand out against comparable buildings.

When should lease renewal negotiations start?

Early enough to have a genuine alternative. The calendar should hold the date the decision process starts, not the lease expiry date. A company that invests in a fit-out first and only then remembers the lease is ending sits down with no leverage, because the landlord knows about that investment.

What belongs in an SLA for an office services supplier?

Maximum response time, resolution time, service frequency, acceptable complaint levels, service availability and the consequences of missing those parameters. Without them there is no way to compare bids or to say whether a price is high or low.

Is consolidating office service suppliers more expensive than managing them yourself?

Nominally yes, because an integrating partner adds a margin. The calculation should be made on a total cost of ownership basis, including the time and salaries of the in-house team and the risk of absence in a small team. The gap then usually narrows, and in return the tenant gets a controlled service level and the ability to open new locations quickly.