Classic or contemporary? 5 reasons a modern office means business
Where you – and, if you employ anyone, your staff – work can be crucial to corporate success. Without a workspace that is sumptuously decorated and well-organised, you could find your efforts at spurring creativity and productivity coming to disappointingly little.
You could be drawn to a traditional office – perhaps for its vintage features, like wooden desks and cabinets, and elegant decor such as leather seating. However, if you move into an office of more contemporary design instead, your business could thrive for the following reasons…
You can more easily recruit millennials
As acknowledged on the World Economic Forum website, many companies have reported struggling to recruit and keep millennials. Barn-like offices bereft of daylight or open space could be somewhat to blame, with the millennial generation of workers often prizing meaning, flexibility and challenge.
For many such workers, easy-to-tailor spaces – including the likes of soft-seating areas and standing desks – might not be merely a good idea, but instead essential.
It can improve your workers’ performance
If you doubt the connection between work environment and work performance even now, consider revelations of research that modern offices include various features conducive to better working.
When you transfer your workers to an office where natural daylight pours through windows also allowing views of trees and plants, you can anticipate your workers more effectively thinking, recalling, concentrating and performing.
You could be rewarded with boosted productivity as well as reduced staff sickness levels, thanks to improvements in lighting and reductions in carbon dioxide.
You can lead by example when it comes to creativity
You could rejoice when your workers show their creative streak, but are you leading by example with your choice of office space for them? Well, more to the point, maybe the term “office features” should be used here, as tech titans like Google and Microsoft have shown.
While Google has added beach huts, dodgem cars and slides to one of its London offices, Microsoft’s Washington HQ has been given two treehouses for use as meeting rooms.
A modern office can be a “blank canvas”, stylistically
It might initially feel novel to slip into an office that used to be, say, a living room during the Regency era or a kitchen in the Victorian period. However, one problem with an office resplendent in period features is that you could have little leeway to make it look truly like your own.
By contrast, contemporary desks and cabinets are often designed in neutral colours such as white, grey and putty, as the Inspirations & Celebrations website points out. For this reason, you might only need to add a few colourful, shiny features to visually transform this decor in many people’s eyes.
You can foster fruitful social connections
Work Design Magazine cites this as an advantage of co-working spaces, which have taken on strong relevance in our age of flexible working. These spaces are already abundant; BE Offices, for example, offers a pleasing array of co-working spaces for ready use by UK businesses.
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