Updated January 2023
You spend one-third of your life at work. This is enough of a reason to have your work environment be as comfortable, intuitive, and well-designed as possible. But there are more reasons for smart designs than the number of hours you give to your job each day.
In fact, so-called luxury modern office designs are more than just a luxury. Implementing modern designs into your office spaces enables collaboration, boosts productivity, and even complements branding.
Here are 6 reasons your modern office design matters to your employees, your company, and you.
1. It Changes Employee Workflow
Research from Cornell suggests that most knowledge workers prefer closed offices for concentration but prefer open offices for communication and trust-building. Why not have the best of both worlds? Modern office layouts like those offered by StrongProject, take into account the varied ways your team members work.
You can create the feeling and overall look of an open office while still designating areas where employees can focus and detach from the bustling work environment. Having both spaces allows your workers to choose whichever work environment is best for them or is best for the task they currently need to complete.
Create a warm, inviting reception area with a lot of open space, break up your workspaces with different contemporary seating options and occasional tables, and use acoustic furniture to block out the noise in your more closed-off office sections.
2. Employees Need Collaboration
Your office environment needs to facilitate collaboration among employees. More collaboration leads to more creativity, which leads to higher overall productivity.
You can’t just want your employees to come together and bounce ideas off one another. You need to use your office design to lead them in the right direction. Use a high-backed lounge with a media console to facilitate small and informal, but productive, meetings, or install break-out chairs and tables in deliberate parts of the office to give employees a place to gather away from their desks.
Collaboration furniture can take your traditional workspace, boardroom, or face-to-face meeting to a new, innovative level.
3. Your Office Showcases Your Company Values
Does your company strive to be environmentally conscious? You can build a LEED-certified office to show how committed you are to being green. As you can see, the benefits of a modern office go beyond the personal and even the corporate. Modern offices can help with your company’s CSR and sustainability efforts, too!
Does your business support the local community? Buy and showcase local art on your office walls. Do you strongly support working mothers and fathers? Implement kid-friendly areas throughout your workspace.
How you design your office reflects what your business stands for—and stands up for.
4. Looking the Part Sets You Apart
There are too many companies that don’t put any effort into their office design and put little to no thought into modern office ideas. They use the same corporate office furniture in the same corporate office colors to portray the same stale corporate office environment.
Breaking away from this mold can not only set your office apart from the rest but your company, as well. You can have elements of the traditional office layout. But you can also integrate areas for collaboration that feel more like upscale living rooms people would want to spend all day in!
The bottom line is that you want your office to be loved by your employees. You want them to come back day after day and never get tired of their surroundings.
Make a name for yourself as the most unique place to work in town with the right office decor. Get people talking about the thing your office has that no other office in town has to offer. Show off the sleek, modern design of your office so employees are not only excited to work there, but are just as excited to tell their friends that they work there.
5. It Creates Workplace Well-being
You can actually design your office in a way that promotes well-being and nudges your employees toward making healthier choices for themselves.
By giving employees adjustable furniture—including standing desks—and allowing them to choose where they want to set up their workspace on any given day, you’re promoting movement. Install amenities outside of your office, such as benches and tables. Employees might take more frequent walks or breaths of fresh air throughout the day.
Make an investment in your employees’ well-being as well as their health if you want your company to succeed. These simple additions to your office design can do just that.
6. You Want Your Employees to Want to Come to Work
A stuffy, dimly lit, uncolorful workspace does not equal happy workers. You want to keep employee turnover to a minimum, and office design is a huge factor in fulfilling that task in the age of remote and hybrid work.
The bottom line, however, is that you want your office to be loved by your in-office and hybrid employees. You want them to come back day after day and never get tired of their surroundings. You want even your fully-remote employees to be motivated to come to the office to use your common spaces! Without a doubt, the only way to do that is to put focus on the design of your workspace. Keep your employees top of mind when doing so, and always showcase what your company does best.
