Your office design might be the last thing on your mind when you first set-up an office for your business. After all, when purchasing commercial space, the first thing that comes to mind would naturally be size and price. Having purchased the space, you would want to set it up right away to accommodate your employees, start getting into work, and start generating money.
As time passes by and your business grows, however, you may notice that your office design actually affects much of your business processes and efficiencies. Although not immediately, you will start seeing the need for more enclosed meeting rooms, or more open collaborative spaces, or even some quiet nooks to relax and collect your thoughts in. These realisations may prod you towards choosing to redesign your office.
Here are some things to consider to help guide you when revamping your office design:
The office size
Probably one of the most important things to know before revamping your office, is understanding the amount of usable office space you have can help your decisions. Factoring in what you currently have, you can better manage what can go where and properly allocate the necessary space for each particular area or function.
Some good questions to consider here are how many employees you have and if all employees have enough space to do their functions properly. Factor in that each person needs some office essentials—be it a desk, a storage locker, or a filing cabinet for office files.
The amenities
When setting up meeting rooms, eating areas, or communal workspaces, a good factor to consider is if they are easily accessible by all the people that may need to use it. For certain specific rooms such as Video Call (VC) rooms, Data Server rooms, and the like, certain staff members and teams may need more access to them, so bringing them closer may add greater efficiency.
Another consideration to make here would be the amenities each room has. Whether it’s a projector for meeting rooms, a whiteboard for training rooms, or plain open spaces, noting these can determine which roles may need constant special access. For example, marketing meetings often need regular meeting rooms more frequently, but once in a while will need a VC room for meetings with staff members who are offsite. Work areas that grant easy access to both will be a great help for the marketing team.
The enclosures for privacy
Determining which rooms need actual walls and stricter privacy settings is also another important factor in your office design. Certain teams will need more private booths for each employee, particularly when each task makes a lot of noise—customer service agents, for example—while others would need more open spaces that cater to collaboration—like editorial teams.
The amount of privacy a particular room has will make it more suitable for storing confidential material, like accounting information, or for highly essential and delicate material, like server rooms. Meeting rooms may need more privacy as well to protect the business’s interests, while communal town halls or eating areas would need more open space to be conducive to communication and relaxation.
The Importance of Office Design
Your office design is highly important to your business and revamping it can provide some avenues to boost efficiency. Looking into some simple factors, such as the size, accessibility, and privacy of particular areas of your work set-up can help you make decisions to improve your office design. By doing a careful consideration of what you need, you will improve your business in the long run and help keep employees satisfied with their work environment.
If you are looking for a suitable commercial office space to purchase for your business in Sydney but don’t have the time, then hiring a buyer’s agent may be the best option for you. Contact us now, and see what services we can offer for you.
