Looking for an office space in London? You’ve come to the right place.
We know it can be difficult finding an office space that is right for you. At The Argyll Club, we have over 35 locations to give your business the office space it needs in a safe, secure way. We’ve gone above and beyond to follow guidelines to help you get your teams back together in the safest way. 
Below, we answer some questions about office spaces to help you find the perfect office space for you and your business. 

In the words of Prof. Jeremy Bailenson, Founding Director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, ‘just because you can… doesn’t mean you have to’. He is of course referring to video conference calls and doing so in light of Stanford’s new Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue (ZEF) Scale, which tracks the general as well as physical, social, emotional and motivational fatigue that comes with time spent in on-screen meetings...

With the first anniversary of lockdown just around the corner, now is a moment of reflection for us all. A great deal has changed in the workplace over the last year for the positive as well as negative, and numerous challenges still lie ahead.

The tide appears to be turning in terms of attitudes towards the office. Kevin Ellis, Senior Partner and Chairman of PwC, notes that after evidence of mixed sentiment last summer, the majority of CEOs are turning back to being pro-office, and David Solomon, Chief Executive of Goldman Sachs, goes as far as to say that working from home is ‘an aberration’ that requires ‘correcting’. While hybrid working is still the most likely scenario, leaders are getting serious about a return to the office this summer as vaccines continue to roll out and Government tempts commuters with the promise of flexible season rail tickets. There is, after all, no substitute for a stunning office building in a great location in terms of setting first impressions, welcoming customers, attracting talent and motivating employees.­

At The Argyll Club, we have over 30 flexible workspaces in London that can give your corporate business the temporary room it needs to bring your teams back together, safely. Finding a way to enable your teams to join together again, is critical as we move into this next chapter

There has been a palpable change in the national mood since Boris Johnson’s announcement this week that we may return to restriction-free life from 21st June. While this positive burst of optimism is welcome, it conceals the longer-term unknown impact that the pandemic has had on our wellbeing.

It comes as little surprise that mental health problems have worsened across all age groups in the past year, and the third lockdown has been particularly harmful thus far due to struggles with job security, home schooling, caring responsibilities, bereavement and lockdown fatigue all being prolonged. 

There is a famous quote by American author William Gibson, who said, ‘the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’. Never has that statement seemed more true than over the past year. We’ve seen an acceleration in the adoption of technology as consumers and businesses struggle to come to terms with virtual living and working, an effort described in one report by KPMG and Harvey Nash as a ‘huge and unprecedented spike in technology spending’.

In the workplace the initial challenge we have had to solve is one of virtual-to-virtual (V2V) communication, so that we may work together seamlessly while dispersed across the country.

Upside Down Management, the business philosophy centred around a culture of trust and autonomy, already had an increasing number of companies taking inspiration from it before COVID. One of the benefits of lockdown has been the opportunity to hold a large-scale experiment in the power and potential of this philosophy.

The originator of this way of thinking, retailer Sir John Timpson, described Upside Down Management as everyone having ‘the authority to find the best ways to do their jobs’ and in the words of current CEO James Timpson on its impact for the COVID era, ‘what I hope is that all businesses will recognise that the kinder, the more diverse and the less hierarchical they are, the more relevant they will be – and the more likely to succeed’. As the post-COVID business world shifts to a more hybrid workplace, combining face-to-face and virtual working, this philosophy of cultivating trust and autonomy will be central to corporate success.

It’s official: 11 months of working online is changing the way our brains function and our ability to work in teams. Neuroscientist David Eagleman tells us that due to our model of the world breaking down, our brains have been in a state of reconfiguration, forging new neural pathways to cope with our changed circumstances. Naturally, this affects how we function as teams. At its best, teamwork bonds us together, fosters innovation and improves efficiency. However, every driver of what makes a successful team, as defined by Tannenbaum and Salas in ‘Teams That Work’ (2020), has been challenged by the pandemic, affecting, for example, how we communicate and collaborate to how we coach one another and how motivated we feel as a result of our working conditions.

As the vaccine roll-out gathers pace, attention is gradually shifting to the horizon and what’s next for our cities. Alongside this week’s sombre milestone on COVID deaths, and news that 8% of Londoners have already left the capital, there is an emerging debate about whether the city will ultimately swing back to being a thriving centre for work or risk becoming a ‘Gotham City’, as Minister for London Paul Scully MP has warned, ‘deserted apart from those with the means to insulate themselves from infection, and those with no choice’. While it is true that London will be required to re-formulate itself into a safe, sustainable and technologically-enabled place to work, it is equally true that, to borrow from Mark Twain, reports of the death of London are greatly exaggerated.