How to Choose an Office Location When You Are Hiring

A founder we worked with last year took an office because the rent was ₹3,500 a seat cheaper than the alternative. Sixteen seats, so roughly ₹6.7 lakh a year saved. Over the next eight months two engineers left citing the commute and three candidates turned down offers for the same reason. The saving did not survive contact with reality.

Location is a hiring decision that arrives disguised as a real estate decision. Here is how to treat it as one.

Start with where your people already are

Not where you want to be. Where they live now.

Open your last ten CVs and your current team's addresses and put the pincodes on a map. Most teams cluster in two or three pockets, and it is rarely the pocket the founder lives in. If six of your ten are in south Bengaluru, an office in Hebbal is a decision to replace six people slowly.

Do the same for the roles you are about to hire. Engineers, designers, sales and support people do not live in the same places, and a sales team that spends its day in client offices needs different connectivity from a backend team that arrives at ten and leaves at seven.

The 45 minute rule

People tolerate a 45 minute door to door commute. Past an hour each way, they start looking, quietly, about four months in. That is not a scientific law, it is what attrition conversations sound like.

Measure it properly. Not distance, and not what Maps says at 11am on a Sunday. Check the drive at 9:30am on a Tuesday and again at 6:30pm. In Bengaluru, 8 km can be twenty minutes or seventy.

Metro beats road, by a distance

A building within walking distance of a metro station widens your hiring radius more than any other single factor. It also lowers the cost of a late evening, because people stop worrying about the drive home.

Every workspace on Dexwork shows its nearest metro station and the walking distance, so you can filter for this directly instead of guessing. In Bengaluru, Indiranagar, Jayanagar, MG Road and Whitefield all sit on operating lines. Koramangala and HSR Layout, for all their startup density, do not.

What the difference actually costs

Median coworking prices per seat per month, from live Bengaluru listings:

For a fifteen person team the gap between HSR Layout and Hebbal is ₹5.4 lakh a year. That is real money, and it is also roughly the cost of replacing one engineer. Decide which risk you would rather take.

Six things to check on the visit

• Food. Somewhere decent to eat within a five minute walk. This sounds trivial until it is 2pm every day.
• Parking. How many four wheeler and two wheeler bays, and what they cost. In central buildings, ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 a bay a month is normal.
• The last mile. Metro is 900 metres away, but is the walk safe and shaded, and is there an auto stand?
• Evening safety. Walk the approach road after dark before you commit, especially if anyone works late.
• Client convenience. If customers visit, how far is the airport and is there anywhere to park a cab.
• The neighbours. Which companies are in the building. Talent moves between neighbours in both directions.

When you cannot make everyone happy

Sometimes the team is genuinely split across a city, or across cities. Two options that work:

Anchor plus passes. Take your main office where most people are, and give the outliers day passes near home for the days they do not need to be in. At about ₹450 a day this is cheap compared with losing them.

Two small offices. Coworking makes this practical in a way leases never did. Six seats in Pune and twelve in Bengaluru is one conversation with an operator, not two lease negotiations.

One last check before you sign

Send the address to the three people you most want to hire in the next six months and ask them, honestly, whether they would make that trip. If two of them hesitate, keep looking.

Browse by area and metro connectivity: coworking spaces and managed offices across eleven Indian cities.