As office furniture installation service providers, we get to experience first-hand the office layout and design trends. One that we’ve been seeing pop up more frequently over the past few years is the co-working space—a single versatile space meant to accommodate a number of employees, often with varying requirements.
Co-working spaces can be an excellent way to bring a team together. In fact, they’ve been around for years, particularly with businesses that deal with creative teams or with a highly variable or transient workforce. Lately, however, they’ve been more regular homes to teams of varying skills and backgrounds, and have proven to be considerably effective collaborative tools.
When designing a co-working space, it’s important that you keep these 3 key elements in mind:
A co-working space should be a point of pride for the team that works within it. Having such a space customized for you is definitely a positive selling point for any employee, but it’s important that the aesthetics of the space are customized to their style as well.
It’s important to keep in mind that the co-working space is unique in its difference from the traditional office. Embracing this difference can give your employees something that truly feels unique and special, and therefore much more effective as a morale-boosting point of pride.
Your co-working space should have a variety of work areas suited to all of the workplace activities that its occupants will need. Will it be occupied by a team that will need to collaborate frequently? A large table or an open seating area, and possibly some collaborative tools such as large screens or whiteboards could be in order. Will the occupants need to host clients for closed-door meetings, or does it include a manager that will need a place to speak to employees in privacy? Then having a few soundproof ‘quiet rooms’ with latching doors will be necessary.
To make sure which activities you will need to compensate for, see our previous article on the 10 types of workplace activities.
You’re going to make sure that you have enough space for the people, gear, and tasks required of it. This applies not only to the size of the space, but also considerations such as seating, desk space, power and network outlets, and so forth.
When it comes to space, it’s usually best to err on the side of caution; packing employees too close together can cause a number of problems, including competing for access to shared resources, animosity between coworkers, and overall lower morale. If you end up with an excess of space, however, it will simply mean that you have room to grow, which can be used in the interim by temporary workers, interns, or any regular workers from other units who are temporarily displaced from their offices.
Once you’ve got your perfect space planned out, make sure to call professional office furniture installation services in Toronto to see that it’s all assembled and installed to your specifications. Contact us to book an appointment today.