• Introduction 
• How Does Office Design Affect Morale, Productivity, And Company Culture?
• 3 Reasons Why Your Office Design Needs to Fit in With Your Brand Identity
• Why The Appearance of Your Office Matters When Making an Impression 
• 4 Office Design Layouts to Consider
• 5 Benefits of Biophilic Office Design
• The Do’s And Don’ts of Office Furniture Design Layout 
• What if You Have a Small Office Space?
• 5 Points to Consider When Designing Your Office 
• What About Office Furniture?
• 5 Things to Remember With Home Office Design
• Conclusion 

Are you thinking of renovating, refurbishing or redecorating your office space? Are you about to start up your own business and you’re thinking about working from home at the start? In that case, you need a home office and you’re not sure where to start?

Designing the ideal office space for your needs isn’t something you can do quickly, and it requires time and planning if you want to get it right. This is a time-consuming process which is certainly worth it, because in the end, you’ll notice major benefits coming your way. 

Not only will you be able to attract new business, but you’ll also ensure that morale within your workforce is high, productivity quickly follows and as a result, you retain your experienced staff, whilst attracting new talent in the process. 

Of course, changing the design of your office costs money, and that’s something you need to be mindful of at the start. Setting a budget and shopping around will allow you to find the furniture you need within the price range you’re happy with, whilst also giving you the right look to your space. 

Thankfully, we’re going to cover all the information you need to know about creating the ideal look to your office, whilst incorporating the latest office furniture design and additional elements to ensure comfort, supportiveness, and of course, an attractive appearance.

Perhaps you don’t want to make sweeping changes to your space and you simply want to tweak a few things here and there, giving you a better look and experience in your office. That’s fine, and you can use the information we’re going to cover, picking out the specific pieces of advice that are applicable to the things you want to change. 

First things first, look at your office as it is and identify problem areas. From there, have a vision as to how you want your office to look. 

How Does Office Design Affect Morale, Productivity, And Company Culture?

There are many benefits of designing an office that is modern, attractive, comfortable and very functional, but they all come back to three specific areas - morale, productivity and the general company culture. 

How?

Think about it from the point of an employee at their office desk. If you were that person, you would want to go into the office every day and feel comfortable, wouldn’t you? You would want your office to be a pleasant place to work, somewhere uplifting and supportive in terms of the types of office furniture in place, and you would also want to be free of small annoyances, such as feeling too cold or having the printer too close to your desk. 

The layout and design of an office have a huge impact on morale, and that’s where it all starts. Morale is the starting point of many important aspects of business success and growth. When morale is low, productivity is low, and that means profits are also low.

However, when morale is high, productivity rises, and profits quickly follow. 

The culture of the office is also affected by long-standing morale. When morale is low, people will question the mission statements you’re putting out there, they’re not going to work as hard, they’re going to be less forthcoming with ideas and suggestions, and everything is going to feel rather negative indeed.

However, the opposite is true when morale is high.

It’s far more pleasant to go to work on a cold, rainy Monday morning when you’re heading to an office which is bright, uplifting, comfortable, clean, and modern. It’s not so pleasant to go into an office which is dark, depressing, doesn’t have much natural light, has a tendency to be too hot or too cold, and half of the desks are falling apart.

It’s common sense in so many ways, but it has a huge effect on how the business succeeds, or otherwise. Check out this video which talks a little more about how morale affects productivity levels in the workplace. 

3 Reasons Why Your Office Design Needs to Fit in With Your Brand Identity

Obviously, your office design is how your office looks and how it functions. So, why does this need to fit in with your brand identity? Surely it doesn’t matter that much, right?

Wrong!

It’s vitally important that anything to do with your office and your business, in general, fits in with your overall brand identity. If you go against this, you risk confusing your employees, completely confusing your customers, and potentially affecting growth over time.

For instance, if you have a children’s toy company who are dealing with the design of new toys and researching how they can be improved, your office design could be brightly coloured, innovative, and uplifting. It wouldn’t really be fitting in with the brand identity if it was sterile, cold, dark, and focused on everything serious with a capital S.

On the flip-side, if you are a funeral company, you can’t have flippant quotes on the walls, brightly coloured designs and a jolly feel to your space. This would cause your customers to feel like you weren’t taking them seriously, especially during a difficult time in your life. As a result, you could lose business to a competitor who your customers feel takes them more seriously. 

Check out this infographic which highlights why brand identity is so vitally important. 

Source - https://www.business2community.com/infographics/important-brand-identity-infographic-01197538

Let’s check out three reasons why your office design simply has to reflect your brand identity in general. 

1. Your Customers Are Clear on What You Are About - If you don’t know what your business is about, how can you expect others to know? Your office interior design is one of the easiest ways to show your potential customers and clients who you are, what you are about, and what you provide. This will back up every other part of the service you provide and help you to appear professional. 
2. To Set The Tone For Your Employees - Employees might not be in the right frame of mind if the office is designed in a different way to the brand you’re trying to promote. Ensuring that everything is in line means that nobody is confused and everyone is clear about the services and the type of tone you’re trying to strike for customers and clients. 
3. So Customers and Clients Take You Seriously - If your design completely conflicts your goods and services and the mission statement of your business, nobody is going to take you seriously. As a result, you might find that you end up losing business to your competitors. This links back to our first point - it doesn’t look very professional. 

Why The Appearance of Your Office Matters When Making an Impression 

Before we get into the practical elements of changing your office design, let’s take a moment to appreciate the importance of making a good impression to your visitors. 

Why does it matter exactly?

According to Forbes, it takes just 7 seconds for someone to form a first impression and we all know that once that impression is formed, it tends to stick pretty solidly. 

If you think about your personal life, when you’ve met someone for the first time, did you find it hard to shake that first impression off if it was particularly negative? Probably. 

So, if you’re making the wrong impression to your visitors simply by the way your office is designed, you’re throwing away good business.

It’s really easy to make a good impression on visitors. Most people look for three things - cleanliness, neatness, a professional design. 

The first two are standard things which every office should be, but the third can be difficult for some. New businesses, in particular, tend to struggle with designing a modern office in a professional way, especially if they're low on funds at the beginning. In this case, they might opt for second-hand furniture, anything they can get their hands on, and pull something together which looks like an office, until some point in the future when they can afford to do a refurbishment or a total renovation.

It makes sense, but it could actually be damaging the chances of early business success.

So, investing in the design of your office is actually more vital than you think. 

4 Office Design Layouts to Consider

Of course, you can design your office however you see fit, but there are some specific office design ideas you can think about when it comes to how to lay out your office to begin with. The four we’re going to focus on are:

1. Cellular Office Layout - The cellular office is a large open plan office which is separated, either by partitions or office screens, into smaller spaces. This means that people can collaborate when they need to, but they can also find privacy and quiet when they need it too. In this layout, cubicles and booths are heavily featured, and teams can often be sat together, to ensure higher productivity. 
2. Open Plan Office Layout - This is without a doubt one of the most common types of office layouts. In this design, one large room houses several employees at their office desks, and there will be lower partitions in place to ensure a certain amount of privacy, without segregation or cubicles. This type of layout is ideal for effective communication, teamwork, collaboration and fostering healthy working relationships, but it can be quite disruptive at times too. 
3. Co-working Office Layout - With the rise of remote workers, co-working spaces have become the go-to destination for those who want to get work done. That means regular office spaces have taken on the same design and adopted it as there own. This type of space uses a hot-desking arrangement, i.e. nobody has a set desk, and it’s really first come, first served in terms of who sits where. 
4. Agile Working Office Design - You might hear this type of office layout called the ‘combination office layout’ but it’s really one and the same. In this case, the open-plan office features various different types of furniture, such as booths for those who want to do quieter work, large bench desks for those who want to collaborate etc. In this case, the focus is on the task, and whilst nobody has a specific office chair to sit at, they can choose where they’re going to sit according to the task they need to complete on that particular day. 

These four office layouts are ideal for large open-plan offices, but many businesses also give employees their own office or perhaps have three or four employees who share one office space. This really depends on how many rooms you have within your entire premises and the effectiveness of having people separated in this way.

For the purposes of this guide however, we’ll concentrate on the open-plan route, as this is the most common type of office you’ll see in the modern-day. 

5 Benefits of Biophilic Office Design

Biophilic office design is on the rise, and it’s no surprise when you check out the benefits.

If you’re not sure what biophilic design is, it basically means that you bring elements of the outdoors into your office space, therefore increasing your employees’ connection to Mother Nature. It isn’t as ‘out there’ as it sounds, as there some very firm benefits to back up why adding a few office plants and general natural elements to your space is a good idea. 

1. Improved Health - A few office plants here and there could be enough to boost the health and wellbeing of your employees. Many different plants can purify the air and take out the toxins which can be harmful to health, such as bacteria, microbes and mould spores. However, these plants also put moisture back into the air, which may reduce allergies. 
2. Improved Mental Health - Natural elements such as plants and water are beneficial for mental health as they’re naturally calming. We know that going outside into nature is a useful tip for anyone suffering from stress, anxiety and even depression, so bringing those natural elements indoors may be able to do the same thing. 
3. Increased Productivity - Increased physical and mental health has a beneficial effect on productivity, but if you add in extra natural light in addition (more on that shortly), you’ll also notice that productivity is boosted a little more besides. 
4. Retain Your Existing Staff - Biophilic office design brings the health and productivity benefits above, but it is also an attractive and pleasant place to work. As a result, this is likely to lead towards higher morale and therefore helps you to retain your current, highly skilled staff. It could also help you to attract new staff too.  
5. Helps to Make Positive First Impressions - A biophilic office looks the part and this can be very useful when making positive first impressions to visitors entering the office space. This could be the difference between visitors choosing to do business with you, versus going elsewhere. 

You could opt for several plants dotted around, a plant on each desk, a water feature, a living wall, or opting for a generally natural decor, but there are many plus points of opting for Mother Nature doing her thing in your office. 

If you want to find the best plants for health and wellbeing in the office, check out this infographic. 

Source - https://mrsnew.com/6-best-plants-you-can-grow-indoors-for-air-purification/

The Do’s And Don’ts of Office Furniture Design Layout 

When you’re designing your office layout, you need to think carefully before going ahead with any plans. The smallest things can become a huge issue when employees are working at their designer office furniture every single day, e.g. a large printer can be noisy when sited too close to the regular working environment, etc.

So, what are the main do’s and don’ts when looking at office furniture design layout in particular?

Do’s

• Ensure there is enough space between desks so that employees have personal space 
• Ensure there are clear walkways between desks and other storage cabinets, so people aren’t banging their legs or tripping up 
• Ensure the windows aren’t blocked off - Natural light is something everyone needs!
• Take into account general health and safety guidelines. Check out this video for more information on the do’s and don’ts of health and safety in the office. 

Don’ts

• Forget storage! It’s a good idea to think about a specific space for storage units, which isn’t next to office desks
• Place large and noisy pieces of equipment close to desks. These will not only cause extra noise and stress but they will also cause extra heat for those particular employees too 
• Place desks so employees are sitting with their back to the door. Its best to be sideways on to doors; this is the ideal option for productivity within a modern professional office design

These might sound like common sense elements, but they’re things which are often overlooked when it comes to placing furniture in specific areas within an office. 

What if You Have a Small Office Space?

There is one question which crops up a lot when redesigning an office space - what do you do if you have a small office?

Of course, this does limit your options a little, but there are no major reasons why you can’t implement modern small office design, provided you are a little clever with the types of furniture you’re going to purchase and where you’re going to put it. 

In this case, make use of vertical storage space, i.e. shelving, rather than extra cabinets which take up floor space. You could also think about utilising bench desks underneath windows, provided there is no additional glare for employees, and perhaps corner desks to make use of that often under-utilised area.

Of course, you could also utilise flexible working options, such as offering employees the chance to work from home or remotely, if you’re really struggling for desk space. 

A small office doesn’t have to be a barrier to having a quality modern office, but you need to think carefully about the decor, in order to avoid the space feeling dark and too small for employees to be comfortable.

Avoid dark colours on the walls and opt for brighter colours for your desks, to stop the space feeling oppressive. 

5 Points to Consider When Designing Your Office 

Of course, office design isn’t all about furniture!

There are several other points you need to bear in mind to ensure that you design the perfect office space for your employees. Let’s look at those in turn here.

Colour And General Decor

The colour of your office can affect the mood of those within it, how productive your space is, as well as how big or small it feels to those sitting at their executive office desks. 

Check out this infographic which talks about colour psychology and how it affects mood. 

Source - https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/psychology-of-color-infographic/

The best colours for creative and stress-free offices are yellow, blue and green. Of course, many offices opt for the monochrome or grey and cream look and that’s fine, provided the space is large enough to allow plenty of natural light inside, to help lift the general feel of the space. 

The Use of Art

Have you ever thought about using art in your office? This could help to create a sophisticated feel in your space and could also help to add a little brightness if you opt for plain decor. You could also think about using different textures in your furniture and perhaps on your walls, to create an interesting look. 

Lighting And Access to Natural Light

Of course, you need adequate lighting in your office and you need to ensure that you don’t place any desks or chairs in areas where glare may become a problem. Any flickering lights need to be fixed as a matter of urgency and you should also ensure that there is as much natural light making its way into the office as possible.

A dull office can seem small and depressing, however, a too bright office can cause headaches. Finding the ideal middle ground is therefore key. 

Flooring 

What type of flooring are you going for? Wood floors are ideal for adding to the biophilic look, but you could go for carpets if your space is a little cold, laminate floor for a cost-effective choice, or even tiling if you prefer.

It really depends on your type of office and the rest of your decor in terms of which option you’re going to go for, but do remember that your flooring can also affect how cold or warm the office is too. Of course, you also have to think about health and safety in terms of your flooring too.

Temperature Control 

When designing an office, it’s not all about how it looks, it’s about how it feels too. Is your office a naturally hot room, or is it quite naturally cold? Are you able to open the windows to let some natural air inside? This is a good idea! 

You’re likely to need some kind of air conditioning or heating during the summer or winter months, so you need to look towards where this is going to go and how you’re going to regulate it. It goes without saying that your air conditioning units and heating systems need to be serviced regularly. 

What About Office Furniture?

You’ve got the general space sorted out, but what are you going to put inside it?

Choosing the right type of office furniture depends on two things: what you need, and how you want the space to look. If you’re going to follow office design trends, you might already have a few ideas about the types of chairs and tables, desks and even booths you want inside your office, but you should also think about shunning hard trends and thinking outside of the box if the situation requires it.

For instance, we mentioned having a small office space and in that case, large curved desks are going to take up a huge amount of floor space. You could look towards executive desks which are regularly shaped, e.g. the traditional rectangle and have them situated in a way which reduces the amount of floor space they’re covering. We also mentioned corner desks earlier and these are a good option to look into. 

Of course, you can also think about acoustic panels to cut down on noise and office screens, and if you’re thinking about going down the agile working route, you’ll need different zones in your space - zones for quiet work, zones for collaboration, zones for breaks, etc. 

Office furniture has changed massively over the last few years and it really comes down to doing your research these days and looking into innovative designs. You don’t have to stick to the regular chair and desk model nowadays, you can go down the route of standing desks, such as height-adjustable desks, to add in a little active working too. 

The options are quite literally endless and this is the fun part of redesigning your office and looking towards a truly creative office space. 

5 Things to Remember With Home Office Design 

Up until this point, we’ve focused mainly on the commercial office and how to redesign or even start from scratch, but what about a home office? How can you find modern design home office furniture and ensure your decor doesn’t take the shine away from your living space?

Designing a home office is actually a little trickier than you might think, but it doesn’t have to be super difficult either. If you have a spare room, you’re already halfway there and if you don’t, you need to find a suitable space which isn’t going clash with your sofa or where you watch TV.

Let’s look at 5 points you need to bear in mind when designing a home office. 

1. Keep it Separate - We’ve already touched upon this point, but it’s a very important one to reinforce. You should never underestimate the psychological elements of a home office. If you have your office or working space in direct view of where you’re sitting when you’re chilling out and watching TV, work will be on your mind, and the same goes when you think vice versa too. This is no good for your home and work-life balance. Try and keep your office and your living quarters completely separate, as much as possible.
2. Don’t Design it to be Too ‘Office-y’ - It’s easy to hear the word ‘office’ and assume that you need to go down the same route as a commercial design but that’s not necessary all the time. You can design your home office to be a little quirky and trendy!
3. Choose The Right Office Furniture - There are certain types of furniture which are ideally suited for home offices, such as tub chairs and corner desks, helping your space to look less like a regular office and something a little more creative. 
4. Don’t Forget it Has to be Comfortable - If you need an ergonomic chair, don’t be afraid to get one! These can also look the part in a home office and there are many designs which aren’t quite so commercial. If you’re going to be sitting for long periods of time, you need to be comfortable. 
5. Don’t Forget Storage Space - One thing which most people tend to overlook when first designing a home office is storage. You are still going to need a little space to store things away and it’s best if this is lockable, especially if you have work materials in your home and people are coming in and out. Remember, confidentiality comes first!

Conclusion 

How do you feel about potentially redesigning your office, or completely starting from scratch? For sure, it’s a big job that requires planning, but it’s also a very worthwhile one; it can be a fun endeavour too!

The design of your office goes far beyond simply how it looks. It’s about the experience your employees have when they’re at work, how comfortable they are or otherwise, the impression made on employees, and it could also be the make or break in terms of whether you retain your high quality, experienced staff or whether you lose them to a business who has a more comfortable and more innovative view.