Office design is hugely important. What your office looks like says a great deal about how much you value your employees. By creating an office space in which their creativity can thrive, and in which they can communicate properly, you will increase employee engagement and ensure productivity. Unfortunately, actually understanding how to design an office properly is a real skill and you may find that you need to get professional help with your office design.
These are a few tips on how you can get professional help with your office design.
The first thing you need to do is look for design companies that are able to offer these types of services. A simple Google search will reveal a number of options. In fact, it will reveal so many that you may struggle to choose from them. However, this is where you will need to start doing some research.
If you want to get professional help with your office design, you should choose a company that has experience in delivering on the core values of your own company. A number of online sites exist that allow you to check on the performance of a company. The Better Business Bureau is a good example, but so is social media. Spend some time looking into what other people have said about the different companies that are out there.
Next, you need to start looking into portfolios. Try finding some examples of work that has been done in the past, and whether those designs fit in with your own company’s core values and ideas. Do also look into an explanation behind the choices of design, materials, colours and more. In most cases, each of those decisions has been meaningful in terms of what a company has tried to achieve, which can be inspirational for yourself as well.
Hopefully, you will only have between three and five professional design companies left to choose from by now. You should take the time to contact each of these to discuss what they can do for you. With a truly good company, you should be able to explain what your company is about, what it tries to deliver and what its core values are, and they should then be able to come up with a design that fits in with that, as well as with what you are trying to achieve.
Innovative office designs tends to put the employee at the centre. It gives a clear message of how valued each individual member of the team is. Interestingly, this is something that management has traditionally been quite resistant to. For instance, in most innovative modern offices, there are relaxation and play areas. It has been shown that by trusting employees to only use these relaxation methods when they actually need them, overall productivity is actually increased. However, at the same time, it can be very hard for management to relinquish that control and place that trust in their employees. It takes a shit of consciousness and a good design company should be able to help you make that transition.