the workspace peopleYour office furnishings and décor will cast that crucial first impression, which is more often than not the last, on your clients and employees. Order and professionalism that reflects from the appearance of your office should be in accordance with your profession and position. For instance, a banking or accountancy firm should ooze a more sombre look with neutral colours, whereas a photographer’s office could be vibrant and more artistic.
Detailed thinking is a prerequisite for purchasing your office furniture, with comfort, ergonomics and economy as the most important factors to be considered. Another important aspect is incorporating your brand name or business logo into your office décor by its appropriate placement so as to create a powerful impact on prospective clients and employees.
Use space, colour and flexibility to create an ideal space
Let’s go over a few important points to be borne in mind while designing your workplace:
1. The Power of Green
Greenery is not only visually soothing, but it has been proven to enhance productivity levels and purify the circulating air of toxins. Hence, adding greenery to your office décor is a brilliant idea.
2. Room for Change
For a flourishing business, office décor must be flexible, with room for future growth. Using movable shelves and cabinets instead of fixed partitions, and fixtures that can be easily dismantled and used elsewhere are some of the ideas you can use to be able to alter arrangements with relative ease in future.
3. Inspiring Flooring
Design experts call flooring the ‘fifth wall’, and it no longer needs be mundane and bland. In fact, there are numerous attractive carpets and flooring designs available on the market, which can make your workplace look truly inspiring without costing a bomb. What’s more, sustainable flooring options manufactured with sustainable processes are available too, to create an environment friendly office.
Go Creative
There’s hardly anything less inspiring than a drab workplace with poor maintenance. If you are a futuristic entrepreneur, you would want your staff to be self-motivated and highly productive, and clients to be impressed with and interested in your business. In order to accomplish this, infusing creativity into your office design is utterly important.
Turn imaginative by using any or all of the following ideas to create an inspiring workplace:
1. Colour it Right
The key to colour choice for your office interiors is choosing a few contrasting colours instead of a single hue, or too many competing ones. Such a paint scheme will work wonders and create a great impression. For instance, choosing monochrome shades for your office décor, in tandem with contrasting light wood coloured furnishings, can look amazing.
2. Maximise on Flexibility
Times have changed and static furniture configurations are considered passé. A modern day, well-arranged and innovatively designed, office space is characterised with modularity and flexibility as key facets.
You may currently find little or no need to reconfigure your workplace, but the fast changing needs of a dynamic business environment dictate the integration of flexibility into your office interior design. Choose movable furniture, configurable in more ways than one, which can be used in the event that your business needs change in the future.
3. Create Distinct Rooms
All the rooms in your office can be distinctly designed in terms of styling and textures. This is the best way to maximise on creativity and create a distinguishing and stimulating workplace.
4. Avoid Clutter
Ensure going over your office files, documents and stationery to discard unnecessary stuff every once in a while, as a first and crucial step to do away with clutter. This will take only few minutes per employee every day, and result in an organised and an energetic workplace.
5. Turn Environmentally Responsible
With the advent of the concepts of sustainability and ecological protection and their influence on office design, there are several ways in which these are being employed to create sustainable workplaces.
You could incorporate these elements into your office design and furnishings, and hence reduce your company’s ecological footprint. This is an ideal way to build your image as an environmentally conscious, socially responsible business.
Office interior design is hence a vital, effective and an inevitable tool for a business to successfully connect with its current and prospective staff and clientèle.
Written by Jonny, guest author at OfficeMan, a company that helps businesses find suppliers to carry out office refurbishment or relocation.
