Henley Offices is the leading UK provider of personal office buildings for remote workers. The company also provides a choice of larger multi-purpose buildings. Requiring minimal foundations and only requiring planning permission in exceptional circumstances, Henley buildings are typically installed by the company?s fitting teams in a single day.

Professional
Henley personal office buildings are sited in the garden and not in the house, so they allow staff to work from home free of domestic distractions. A Henley office not only provides the remote worker with a 'neutral' environment for meetings, but alleviates family resentment at the use of personal 'homespace' for professional activity.

Comfortable
People working in Henley buildings are comfortable all year round. While the buildings themselves are finished to an extremely high standard, double glazing and superb insulation characteristics allow remote workers to stay cool in summer as well as warm in winter.

Secure
Henley buildings are designed to be as secure as a typical home, with locking windows and mortice-lock doors as standard. For extra security, the flexibility of portable and wireless communications allows laptops to be taken into the house at the end of each day. Through their location outside the main home, Henley buildings are inherently more suitable for conducting sensitive discussions and meetings.

COMMERCIAL & PUBLIC SECTOR
Many large commercial organisations are already wise to the benefits of operating progressive home-working policies. Consequently, alongside the self-employed, Henley customers can be found in a wide range of blue chip companies and public sector organisations. Henley offices are the natural choice because planning permission is rarely required and facility managers generally have no need to conduct a survey of the employee?s home before installation takes place. A single post-installation usually suffices to cover off communications technology and health & safety issues.

BUYING A HENLEY
In most cases, remote workers purchase Henley?s offices privately, using their home working allowances to cover or offset the costs of a mortgage extension. (typically £30-40 per month) Given that a Henley building can also add between 3 and 5% to the value of a standard property, private ownership has obvious advantages.

Of course, not every home worker can afford to purchase a Henley office outright or via the choice of financing schemes we now offer. Moreover, organisations sometimes have a need to deploy our buildings on a temporary basis. In such circumstances, Henley is able to discuss fleet purchasing and management, whereby we take responsibility for installation and removal of multiple units across the client organisation.

HOME WORKING, HOME TRUTHS
Supported by comparatively recent advances in communications technology, large corporates like BT and IBM are already saving millions of pounds every year by encouraging staff to work from home rather than sit in expensive headquarter buildings. Not that they need too much encouragement: a survey conducted by Henley Offices in 2002 confirmed that 84% of white collar workers in large and medium sized companies would prefer to work from home.

However, as many people used to conventional office environments soon discover, home working is not all its cracked up to be. Domestic distractions ? young children, for example - can have a marked effect on professional performance, while some workers can begin to resent the invasive presence of a working environment within their private living space.

Such factors need to be considered alongside positive research by the Teleworkers Association that home-based workers tend to be 35% more productive than their head office counterparts. Fortunately, working from a Henley office in the garden can alleviate most negative aspects of remote working.