The Importance of Office Design
Done right, office design has the power to unleash the potential of your people, transform wellbeing and productivity, and create a progressive, profitable culture and company. However, how do you decide which is the right office design style for you? There are many options to choose from, with choices for every brand and budget, so it can be confusing to decide what is best for you. However, with careful planning and expert advice, you can make the right choice that will drive your company forward in the years to come.
Research has shown that a well-designed office can increase staff productivity levels by 20%. Over time, that can translate into staggering results for your business, whether financial, social, or people related. According to many studies, the single most important element that determines an employee’s ability to focus is their environment. No matter an employee’s role or seniority, their working environment is of prime importance.
Great office design never happens by accident, it is achieved through careful planning, a clear vision, unwavering creativity, combined with expert knowledge, support, and guidance. We’ve explained 5 of the most common design styles for your office and broken down what they say about you. Understanding how your design choice communicates your brand is crucial for every company. This should be a major consideration before you embark on designing and transforming your future workspaces, so you can make sure you’re sending the right message to clients and employees alike.
Modern Office Design
Modern office design has a clean and uncluttered aesthetic. With a focus on minimalist shapes, personality can be communicated through the addition of biophilia and brand graphics. The go-to starting style for most workspaces today, it risks becoming very bland if not enough personality is added, dampening creativity and innovation.
The modern office design focuses on keeping things simple, avoiding ornate elements and excessive accessories. This clutters the space and leaves the design (and your people) muddled. With a muted colour scheme predominantly featuring cool, neutral shades along with a pop of brand-based signage and furniture, this is an undistracted design that enables focus and clear thinking.
Rustic Office Design
While modern workspace design is cool and uncluttered, rustic is contrastingly warm and worn. This style utilises a natural colour palette of creams, greys, and browns along with natural leather and aged wood to warm up space and set that comfortable but professional tone. For areas where you want energy and creativity, you can add accents of colour with feature walls, try on-trend mustard or fresh green for an Insta-worthy brainstorming room.
With a welcoming rural feel, this design trend can recreate a domestic atmosphere, making your people feel comfortable and secure. Rustic design is not for every brand, and it would likely not be appropriate for firms in the software and technology sectors. However, for brands trying to create a relaxed, domestic atmosphere, this design is worth considering.
Industrial Office Design
The industrial workspace design trend has become popular over the last few years, as companies look to differentiate themselves from generic and repetitive corporate office designs. Featuring a unique blend of metallic and wooden materials, industrial office design embraces the utilitarian style of many office buildings built in the last century, such as exposed brickwork, concrete and bare metal structures.
This wood and metal aesthetic can create a raw room tone that can be rather harsh if not complemented by biophilic elements or other complementary colours. However, if these complementary colours are not used very carefully, it can leave a space looking synthetic or fake. An industrial design that creates the feeling of an old-fashioned factory will create a trendy and quirky impression in the minds of your visitors and staff, promoting collaboration.
Traditional Office Design
Traditional office design is a style that looks like it came out of Westminster Palace or a barrister’s chambers. This high-class and formal style is impressive and comfortable, whilst being surprisingly easy to achieve in most spaces. The warm brown woods, ornate panelling and nail-studded leather give the space an elegant and even opulent feeling of luxury.
This style could appear overly elaborate in a large open plan space and is generally used for smaller boutique spaces and executive suites. However, the classic combination of dark leather, warm wood, and ornate detailing sends a very clear message about your brand, clearly stating an emphasis on quality.
Transitional Office Design
Nearly every workspace is a combination of 2 or more of the above design styles, rather than a single theme. The most popular combination is between traditional and modern, known as transitional design. The cool, understated colour scheme of the typical modern office could not be more different from the rich, luxurious tone of the traditional office. Transitional design brings the two together with some eye-catching results, such as bold block colours with warmer wood and leather tones side-by-side.
Many companies find the modern office design too featureless and cold for their brand, while the traditional seems complicated and outdated. Combining the two provides scope to accurately reflect your brand and culture, reflecting and enhancing the personality of your business and people.
Your Office Design
No two companies are the same, and no two workspaces should be either. In order to get the best out of your people, they need to be surrounded by a spatial embodiment of what your company is and what it is trying to achieve, only then will your people produce their best work.
At a time of such upheaval, you have an unparalleled opportunity to change the way your people work. By creating a great workspace, you can ensure that you are maximising the performance and profitability of your people, and ensuring a thriving future for your company.
Flexible remote working, the rise of virtual and hybrid communication, plus an increased emphasis on employee wellbeing has now become central to the way we think about the design of our office or workplace. Whether you are looking to implement agile workspace design as you move toward hybrid working, or you are moving to a hub-and-spoke model, we can design and deliver high-performance workspaces for your future.
Our creative design team develop unique office design concepts to create the perfect workspace for your business. From initial sketches and test-fits to photo-realistic renders and video walkthroughs, we develop the design to help you visualise exactly what your new office will look like. Our office design team will liaise closely with our estimating team throughout the design process to ensure we stay within budget and achieve a workspace that fulfils all your requirements. Want to know more about how we can work together to create your dream office? Contact an expert today.
