If you are looking to grow your business, then one of the
best steps you could possibly take is to spend time designing and developing a
new office building to help that growth along.
However, there are plenty of complex points that one must
consider when it comes to the development of a new office, which means the
process of designing a new one can be quite involved.
Fortunately, this guide aims to walk you through the best
steps to take in this process, so that you are able to design and create a new
office that will be a high-quality complement to your business.
Creating an Initial Plan
When you are first setting out to create a new office to
help the growth and development of your business, you are probably not going to
know much about what you are doing. In fact, that is likely why you are reading
this article in first place. That is fortunate, since there is a very easy way
to give yourself some direction: ask yourself questions.
This might not sound like the most helpful piece of advice
in the world, but you would be startled by how much this can actually do for
your efforts in designing and developing the perfect office building.
The trick is to ask yourself specific questions about the
office building and how it would work, and then to spot the next logical
question that your answer brings up. Everything that happens in an office is
connected in some way, so if your answer to a question can bring up another,
unanswered question, then you should ask yourself that question as well.
To help you get started, here are a few questions that you
might find helpful to answer:
- Why do you need a new office?
- What makes an office work?
- How can a space incentivize productivity?
Keep in mind as you are answering these questions that you
should be as detail-oriented as possible in your answers. Don't let yourself
just write a word, or even a sentence, and move on. You should dive deep into
the nitty gritty and explain exactly what you mean and why you mean it”that way
you can be sure you have every detail down that you need.
Hire Professional Help
Now that you have an exhaustive list of questions and
answers, you are about ready to get in touch with some professional services to
get your project started. You might not feel like you're ready for that, but
now that you have the key pieces of information about what you want in hand,
you can work alongside these professionals to create a vision of what your
office could be.
After all, unless you are a trained architect, you have no
real need to consider the shape or layout of your new office. In fact, going in
to meet the professionals with those ideas already in hand might create more
problems, rather than help the process go smoothly. What will help, however, is
any information you can provide about what you want from the building, which
you have already gone through the effort of collecting for them.
If you'd like to learn more
about what a skilled professional with architectural experience can do for you
with the right information, then you need look no further than the veritable
repository of information that is the internet. However, to put it simply:
trust the skills of the professionals.
Keep Your Office Atmosphere in Mind
When it comes to creating the design for your office, the
atmosphere is among the most important elements to keep in mind. The atmosphere
of your office can, after all, have a major impact on your business and touches
on several important aspects of your company's operation.
Here are a few examples:
Creating a Positive Environment
There are a plethora of interesting and effective ways in
which you can create and manage the atmosphere within your business's offices.
These can range from the company policies that you implement within these
offices, to the very layout of the offices themselves.
Of course, that means that certain elements that contribute
to the atmosphere of your business cannot be changed as easily as others, so it
is important that you have a solid idea of the kind of atmosphere you wish to
generate before you commit completely to the design of your new offices.
One point to keep in mind, however, is that you should
always aim to create a positive atmosphere within your business. There are
plenty of ways to do this (and plenty of ways to fall short of that atmosphere)
so be sure to poke around online so that you can learn what not to do.
Employee Workflow
One of the biggest impacts that the atmosphere can have on
employees in your office is that it can interrupt (or enhance) their workflow.
This means that you need to consider factors that contribute to employee
effectiveness when thinking about your office atmosphere.
This is a more complicated topic than you might initially
assume and can often require a large amount of adjustment to completely master
the perfect atmosphere. After all, people are complicated creatures; you cannot
simply create a space that would œtheoretically ensure that they are
productive and assume that it will work as intended.
So, once you have established your office atmosphere, be
sure to pay attention to your workforce and see if the atmosphere is having a
positive or negative effect on productivity overall. But remember, employees
aren't machines and that means periods of low productivity are both normal and necessary for a healthy, effective workforce.
Customer Engagement
Another important aspect of office atmosphere, if your
business works with customers within those offices, could be the issue of
customer engagement.
One of the most important elements of this is the fact that
your office's atmosphere is often responsible for setting your customer's œsnap
judgements during their first impression of your business. That is to say,
that your customers will often decide whether or not they œlike your company
based on the atmosphere that they are first exposed to in your offices.
This makes the kind of atmosphere you foster within your
business even more important, since it can have an impact on your ability to
convert and retain potential customers, which can in turn contribute to the
profitability of your business.
Of course, the kind of atmosphere that customers would view
positively depends entirely on the kind of business that you are running. If
you are running a bank, you would doubtless want a far more professional
business atmosphere than you would if you were running a paintball course, or
even an IT consultancy business.
In short, your business atmosphere can be nothing short of
vital in determining the success of your business in many, many ways. So make
sure you are taking your time to properly develop the atmosphere of your
office. You want to create a space that works for both customers and employees,
and that is not the easiest of feats to accomplish.
Keep Your Workers in the Loop
Speaking of which, you might be tempted to keep quiet about
the process of designing and developing your new office space until you have a
solid result to show your workforce.
While that's totally understandable, it would also be a mistake. Your
workforce, more than anyone else, will be able to speak to the experience of
working as a part of your business and, because of that, they will be able to
tell you whether or not your design will function as you envision it.
These are the people who are already working in your
business, they know what it is like and they know what will make that work
easier, or harder. By keeping them in the loop with your designs and taking
their feedback onboard, you can work to avoid obvious mistakes and ensure that
you create an office space that will truly work for your workers.
Create a Budget and Stick to It
Finally, while it can be nice to lose yourself in thoughts
of a perfect office atmosphere and purpose-built design, you must also be sure
to keep in mind the cost that all of these measures will incur for your
business. Almost every step in the process of developing these offices will
have a cost, after all, which makes it vital that you have an effective budget plan to keep that spending under control.
Fortunately, it shouldn't be too difficult for you to
outline (and budget for) every step in this process, given the wealth of
information that exists about it online.
Of course, creating a budget plan and effectively sticking
to it are two completely different matters. You need to be careful to ensure
that you are sticking to the plan wherever possible; otherwise your efforts in
developing your budget plan may well be wasted as your project goes over budget
anyway. A bad turnout for everyone involved.
