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When you are designing your office, you need to think about how it looks from the point of view of your staff and customers. Your staff need to have a productive place to work that they feel proud to represent. Meanwhile, customers should feel at home from the moment that they step through the door. Here are some of our top tips to help create a welcoming office for your business.
Carry a Colour Scheme Through
You should try to ensure that your office is as cohesive as possible. One of the easiest ways to do so is to ensure that the colours are carried through all areas of the office. Whether you are in the office itself, the kitchen, or the toilets, there should be little things that pull the points between them. Using colour is one of the best ways to begin to build cohesion. If you have obvious colours as part of your branding, you are even starting in the right place.
Ideally, you want to have two brights and a neutral. This combination will give you plenty of options to play with. Not every room has to be the same. You should be able to create a series of interesting rooms with just three colours, and each one can speak perfectly to your office and the vibe that you want to carry through.
Try to make sure that this is not too much of a headache overall. You need to make sure that you are still creating a productive place for your employees. Mixing and matching bright colours in a hallway or bathroom might be fine, but it could not be the best choice for your office or reception where people will need to be able to get their head down and work.
Ensure Furniture is Cohesive
Your choice in furniture will be incredibly important within your office. You need to ensure that the furniture you pick is both stylish and functional. Desks need to be the right size for your employees to work without taking up too much room in the office itself. While you never want to crowd the space, you might have several employees in a department who all need to work together. By picking the right desks, you will ensure that they have a space that best suits them and their needs.
This can also be demonstrated in other places such as your conference room. This will be the primary place where you entertain your customers, and so you need to make sure that it looks the best it can possibly be. This means that you need to think about designing a conference room carefully. Many assume that you just need to throw a table and chairs in there to have the right space, when in fact this is the perfect opportunity to showcase your branding and achievements as a company. Try to ensure that at least one wall can serve as a backdrop for video conferencing too so the message is clear and welcoming even if clients are not present in the building for your meeting.
You don’t have to have furniture matching across the entire footprint of your office, but you do need to make sure that it matches within its individual rooms. There are two real design styles that you can follow. Make sure that everything is the same and cohesive, or go in the complete opposite direction and have a method in a mismatched madness. Whatever you choose, you need to make sure that you are certain that it is the style that you want to follow and you need to commit to it.
Have Amenities Standing By
If you want to have an office that always seems to be welcoming to visitors, one of the best ways to do so can be to ensure that there are amenities standing by to offer them. Your visitors might have travelled for quite some time to get to you. Having the right refreshments standing by is a great move to make that will help you to ensure that you make a good impression on them.
There are several options to choose from here. You should always make sure that you have water available for them to drink. One of the more common options here can be to choose a water fountain. It means that your guests will be able to refresh themselves, but the option will be there for your employees too if they wish to use it.
You might also want to have snacks standing by. There are many options out there for nutritious and delicious snacks that have a long shelf-life, so you can be certain that they won’t go stale. When a visitor comes around, you can pull them out and offer them up! Of course, these might also be a wider part of a benefit you offer your staff too. Many companies nowadays like to offer extra incentives like snacks. It can be one of the small differences that helps to make your company a friendlier place to work – motivating staff and helping new ones to settle in faster.
Signpost Well
It can be very disorientating to head somewhere new for the first time. You need to make sure that staff and visitors will be able to find their own way around if needs be. While visitors might be accompanied by staff at all times once introductions have been made, they might have to make their way to your reception on their own.
This can be a little tricky if your office is in a building with many other businesses. It could even be difficult simply because your office’s door is located somewhere a little bit unusual. You need to make sure that you give support to your visitors from the moment that they step on your property. If they can see a sign and clear instructions about where they are supposed to go, they will feel much more relaxed and at ease.
Signposting is also important to ensure that guests do not end up somewhere they should not be. A visitor on the hunt for a toilet could end up in a room where they are not supposed to be, and this could cause a lot of embarrassment on both sides of the party. Make sure that you have enough signs in place to direct your guests to wherever they are supposed to be.
Make Improvements to Your Office Today
The perfect office will be able to show off your brand and your company culture even if you are not there to explain it. Start with simple decorations like the colour scheme and the furniture and then move on to the smaller details. You need to make sure that all the little details are accounted for so you can create as good and as welcoming an office as possible. Don’t look at it through the eyes of a company owner. By considering it as a guest or newcomer to the company, you might be able to see where some improvements need to be made. Before you know it, you could have the perfect office for your company to settle into!