An office makeover can become an enormous task to tackle. Even on small projects, where all you need to decide is what kind of furniture you’d like to have in the room, you’ll get to a point where you realise every little decision can have a huge knock-on effect.
The best thing you can do to manage the project effectively is to work with a professional office fitout interiors team.
But you can also get a handle on the task by considering some important questions you’ll need to address. A good way to get started is to think about the essential elements of your operation. Ask yourself: What are the key areas you want to improve on and how can you make them work better?
You might get a headache just thinking about it.
Lucky for you, we’ve compiled a list of advice for your office interiors.
3 Important Areas In Your Office Interiors
Desk Space For Your Staff
To a large extent, the plan of your office interior will spring from your desk requirements.
Of course, this is for a obvious reason: The main objective of an office is to get work done!
For starters, you should ask how many staff you expect to have employed in the foreseeable future. If the company is growing, then you should plan for that in how many stations you intend to have available. On the flipside, you might think that you’ll be able to limit the amount of new hires and utilise excess space to fulfil some other objective.
Next, you’ll have to decide what kind of environment you intend to create. Choosing your furniture and how its arranged will have a massive influence on this.
An open floor plan with no desk partitions will encourage co-operation, socialisation and teamwork. You can group certain departments of your office together so that they can create an effective workflow. On the flipside, your staff might need to fulfil their duties with some degree of peace and quiet. A call centre, for example, will require individual desks to be boxed off in order to allow for private phone calls.
Finally, will upper management need their work areas divided away from the rest of the staff? Or do you want them down in the trenches?
These are simple points to address, but you can already see how they will affect the output of your office for years to come…
Social Areas In Your Office Interiors
Ensuring that your staff are operating at peak efficiency is as much about making sure they’re happy as anything else.
Don’t worry, we’re not saying you should double their salaries and give them 6 months holiday time a year!
We’d actually suggest an idea that’s as good for them as it is for your business: Make sure they’re happy coming to work.
But how can you achieve this in a lasting way?
Here’s a buzzword you’ll have come across if you’ve spent 5 minutes Googling office interiors: Breakout Zones.
For a person to be happy, they need to experience a certain amount of human interaction a day. It can be exhausting talking about work all of the time, so it’s important that your staff have the option of casual conversation as well. This is where breakout zones can come into play.
By allowing an area for people to walk away from their desks and have casual interactions, you’ll find that they’re mentally rejuvenated, satisfied with their work environment, and enthusiastic about getting into the office – even on a Monday morning. What’s more, breakout zones are an essential method to encourage creativity from your staff. After all, what better way is there to stimulate out of the box thinking than by taking them out of the box?
Storage & Wires
Nothing can make a room seem more cluttered than a bad storage plan and computer wires knotted in strands across the floors. It might not be anything you can throw away, but a mess like that sure can make your office feel more like a rubbish dump than somewhere a group of professionals go to work every day.
If you’ve been in your office for a number of years, we have no doubt that you know how difficult it is to maintain a neat and tidy environment.
Files end up getting piled in stacked beside cabinets that have run out of space. An extra desk gets put in and there’s no socket on a nearby wall, so you create a network of extension leads to make it work. Then, on top of it all, a chair broke and somebody brought in one from home. Before you know it you’re working in a flea market!
Workspace clutter can get so bad that the only option is to aim for a new office interiors fitout. When you wipe the slate clean and start again, you can introduce new storage options that actually take into account your workplace requirements. You can plan the arrangement of your furniture so that everybody has access to an outlet. And, best of all, you can buy desks that keep those nasty looking computer wires out of site.
Of course, knowing what you need to achieve and making it happen can sometimes be two different things altogether. There are a huge amount of options when it comes to creating a truly optimising office interiors plan.
Our team have access to a huge array of office furniture, as well as the experience and skills you require to make sure that it’s implemented effectively. The quickest way to figure out what your office needs is to get talking, so make sure to get in touch with a member of our staff today.