Beyond the Basics in Your Office

Sometimes, a business can place too much emphasis on its office aesthetic, spending far too much of its cash on excessive displays of comfort and prosperity. Other times, however, an office can spend far too little, with their employees working on the equivalent of cardboard boxes. As in all things, however, the best way to approach office design and aesthetics is by taking the middle path of moderation, furnishing a comfortable and inviting space that is simultaneously cost effective and not distracting in its opulence.

Making Space 

Many cutting edge businesses are making an effort to create large amounts of open space in the design of their office. Once upon a time, a bullpen packed with cubicles, desks, and various equipment – copy machines, printers, fax machines, telephones, etc. etc. etc. – was de rigeur for the corporate world, but more and more successful businesses are turning to the open floor plans and wide spaces that are commonly seen in Silicon Valley businesses.

Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto, California, are well known for their open, warehouse-like look, with walls left blank for employees to customize and each department free to provide their own unique design specifications so that those spaces would meet their needs more effectively. Twitter’s office space is similar, with desks existing on the edges of wide open space, and meeting rooms centered within that space. In some ways, this reflects the structure of the web that has made both of these companies so wealthy.

What is clear, however, is that employees like to have open space to move about in, rather than being hemmed in by desks and equipment on all sides. Those open spaces create concomitant mental space in which to move, metaphorically speaking, which leads to the kind of creativity and outside-the-box thinking that these companies value so highly.

The Day to Day 

Beyond a floor plan, what else can you do to encourage employee productivity and happiness using an affordable budget? Consider the furniture that your employees commonly interact with. Their desks and their chairs – little else, when you think about it, unless you often hold meetings and conferences, in which case the conference table and the chairs in there are also commonly used. The question is, do you think your employees want to be sitting in those chairs, at those desks?

If the answer is “no,” then you have a serious problem – if your employees don’t want to be there, then the quality of their work is really going to suffer. To help your employees be the best that they can be, you need to provide a work environment in which they are pleased to be there. To that end, desks that are suited to their posture and work purposes are ideal. Some consideration for what is pleasing to they eye is also wise; a plastic fold-out table, while at a comfortable height, is hardly encouraging.


Chairs are a larger issue, as your employees probably spend a fair amount of time sitting on them. Uncomfortable chairs that are inappropriately sat upon have actually been recorded as doing damage to your employees’ health, which, as you can imagine, puts a serious damper on their happiness and productivity. To that end, comfortable, ergonomic chairs are best. If your chairs possess neither of these qualities, you may soon have employees who are ill, in pain, and generally don’t want to be there.

Accessorize Your Office 

Sometimes creating a great office space is all in the details. Are your walls bland white space? Is the lighting the kind of lighting you would find in a Burger King break room? Is there nothing alive in your office beyond the employees themselves? (And even that is in doubt some mornings?) If your answer to each of these questions is “Yes,” then you have a problem that can easily be solve by bringing some fresh attention to detail to your office. Paint the walls, hang paintings, maybe get some graffiti in there – anything to separate your office walls from the walls of an interrogation room!

A few plants here and there, perhaps an office pet, and some lighting that is pleasing to the either rather than the sort that burns its way to the back of your brain, can all do a lot to improve employee happiness and productivity. When you can walk into an office and say to yourself, “I want to be here and I want to work here!” then you know you have a winning office space, and soon, a winning business.