Office Design & Layout – Tips from the Pros

Office Design & Layout – Tips from the Pros

If your office is too small and you are looking to relocate, your new premises should be designed around your business and its needs. How the workspace is arranged has a lot to do with productivity, and if you want your employees to be able to freely interact and engage in dialogue, an open-plan design is preferred. There’s a lot to interior design, especially office space, which must have a balance of visual appeal and functionality, and with that in mind, here are a few tips from office layout specialists, who really know their stuff.

  • Study Office Activity – In order to effectively plan the layout, you need to fully understand what goes on during a typical day, looking for where the secretaries are located, which would require filing cabinets to be nearby. Look to place essential office equipment like laser printers and photocopiers to be in a central location, ideally an island that everyone can easily access. An interior office designer would spend a few hours watching what happens, and that helps them to come up with the right layout, which is very much customised for optimum efficiency.
  • Sourcing a Fitout Contractor – If you approach an established company such as Express Fitouts, they have an in-house design team and can handle the project from initial concept design to the handover, and with such a name, they don’t hang around, making sure that your new office space is ready when you need it. You would be assigned a project manager, who would coordinate every stage of the operation, and they are used to working around office staff, if you would rather keep things going during the refit.
  • Think Mobility – If you focus on using partition walls that are inter-connectable, with a range of full and half panels, you can easily change the layout at any time, so your new office design in not set in stone, indeed, you will probably make some changes to bring a slight improvement to the layout.
  • Carpet Tiles – Heavy-duty carpet tiles are both attractive and very durable, and if there’s a spillage, you only need to replace a single tile. The office fitout company can show you an extensive catalogue of contract carpeting for office space, and stick with a darker shade, for obvious reasons.
  • The Cloud – If all of your documents and paperwork were digitalised, you could do away with those bulky filing cabinets, and that space can be utilised for something else. This would mean that all authorised staff would be able to bring up any document onto their workstation screen, and that saves so much time, as the employee no longer has to go and retrieve the document in question. Keeping all of your critical data on the cloud frees up valuable office space, as filing cabinets are rarely needed.

Once you locate an experienced office fitout contractor, your worries are over; it is simply a question of the design and layout.