Furnishing your office isn’t just about filling a space: it’s about creating an environment that reflects your brand, supports your team, and enhances daily performance. Read on to learn what it takes to furnish your office for comfort, style, and productivity.
Understanding Your Needs
The first step to deciding on the design of your office is to fully understand your needs. For the most part, gone are the days of boarded cubicles and boring, white offices with a seat assigned to each employee.
Nowadays, many companies are going hybrid, enabling their employees to work from home for a few days of the week and come into the office on the remaining days. Companies that do opt for a hybrid setup will have far more options when it comes to office design as this reduction in employee presence in the office enables companies to incorporate alternative desk setups and multi-use workspaces into their office design.
Hotdesking has become a much more common occurrence in the last few years than it was previously. Instead of having a dedicated desk for every employee, with over half the desks being empty most days due to the number of employees working from home each day, hotdesking enables employees to use whatever desk they would like during their in-office days, with no excessive number of desks going unused each day. This gives your employees a bit of variety in their working week and allows them the flexibility of choosing whether to sit in a quieter or busier area of the office on a given day.
Additionally, modern offices are also creating dedicated spaces for remote and physical meetings. With the growth of platforms such as Zoom and Teams, meeting rooms are adapting to the very new format of team meetings. Reconfigurable meeting spaces that incorporate features such as folding walls, mobile tables, and stackable furniture help to facilitate a more flexible work environment that can adapt to the demands of the day.
Achieving Your Office Design Goals
There are so many considerations and decisions that go into designing an office that it can feel overwhelming at times. To take some of that pressure away and guarantee an excellent final product, a contract furniture supplier can relieve some of that stress by taking the complexity out of choosing, finding, and installing your furniture, as well as guaranteeing your furniture is durable, easy to care for, and meets industry standards.
Style and Layout
When furnishing your office, selecting a design style that reflects your company’s identity is essential. A traditional style with rich woods and muted colours will be ideal for law or finance firm, whilst an industrial style with exposed brick and metal fixtures will best suit creative or techy businesses. Meanwhile, minimalist offices that emphasise simplicity and reduce visual distraction will create a calming atmosphere, a great choice for stressful industries such as insurance, recruitment, and customer service.
The layout of your office is another important consideration. When making this decision, thoughtful planning will ensure the office environment aligns with your team’s needs and goals. An open plan office design will promote transparency and communication, which is a great choice for startups and collaborative teams. On the other hand, a closed plan layout will likely be best for quieter teams that spend most of their time working independently.
Alternatively, hybrid office designs that combine elements of both an open and closed office will flexibly cater to a diverse range of work styles. By offering spaces for both collaboration and quiet focus, your office design will effectively support flexibility and employee satisfaction, especially in modern workplaces where adaptability is key.
Comfort and Productivity
Creating a comfortable office space is not only about physical comfort, but mental comfort, too. Ergonomic desks and chairs are an absolute must for any modern office space, but it’s the ways you go beyond that that create a truly relaxing office space.
Biophilic office design is one excellent way to bring the relaxation and calmness of the great outdoors into the office environment by incorporating elements of nature and the outdoors into your internal office space. This technique has been proven to benefit employee mental health and directly contributes to increasing productivity and lowering stress levels. Designs that connect employees to nature throughout the working day will boost both focus and productivity, making it not only beautiful, but a particularly worthwhile investment in the long run.
Similarly, giving your employees a place to go to take a break throughout the day will massively boost their comfort levels during the working day. Breakrooms provide a quiet space for employees to relax and refresh their mind throughout the day. This can help your employees to combat stress, which will in turn boost their mood at work, creating a more pleasant environment for everybody.
