In the era of home – workers and freelancers, tiny office spaces can prove to be foiling the work atmosphere. A growing business needs the perfect space to allocate all its needs and demands and usually buying a large commercial property is extremely expensive unless one has the necessary funds. Even if you take a good property or mortgage it ceases to be of use since the tax input and cash flow demand a lot of economic strain. That is why the need for the hour is to make your small office space look bigger and to utilize every inch of it wisely. Below are a few tips on how to transform the look of your workspace:
1. Make viable use of common areas :
The cubicles and divisions within a workspace lead to fragile distribution of the floor spacing thereby making it look small and congested. Open offices are the latest trend in commercial places but gathering a large number of people in one area does not help either. It is better to make use of common areas for meetings and conferences to provide a change of space and atmosphere.
2. Make your Work Space Tech-Savvy:
Use less of paper and rely much more on your computer. This will help in reducing the number of filing cabinets and drawers. Less furniture will make your office appear more spacious and clean.
3. Prefer having Stand-Up Meetings:
Having stand -up meetings are a faster and better way to communicate and also a great way to achieve good results as quoted by experts. This will allow less clogging of people for over a long period of time and the need for consensus can be reached faster.
4. Clean the Mess:
Unwanted files, used and old pieces of documents, excessive stationary, old pens and broken pencils all need to be trashed out from your work desk since these make the work place appear messy and unclean. Do away with things you do not want and make sure your desk has things which you require on a daily basis.
5. Invest in a Wall to Wall Flooring:
Rather than having different wallpapers for every wall in your work zone use a uniform theme and make sure it applies to flooring as well. This will provide for a chic and clean look to the entire space. Avoid using large rugs or carpet since they break the synchrony of the space and make it appear smaller.
6. Bring in the Light:
Instead of having large lamps and big tubes for filtering in light, make use of large paneled glass windows which allow the process of letting in sunlight. This will help save on your electricity bills and will also make your workspace appear larger and more defined.
7. Choose the Vertical:
When dealing with small floor space think vertically, not horizontally. Place your shelves on the walls in a fashion that will make them appear taller and wider which in turn will make your work space look more compact and purposeful.
8. Smart Designing:
Be it small offices in Mumbai, or the huge glass structures in U.S.A, they all have one right to passage: great designing patterns. Make sure you research all the options and pick up a theme which will make your office space look spacious and grand. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a splurge with your pocket.
Make sure your workspace deserves the planning and execution it deserves. Your employees and work culture can be stimulated with a well executed work place which allows opportunities for growth.
Bio: Jack Dawson is a commercial estate analyst in India. His targets range from studying the reinvention of the small offices in Mumbai and creating an array of newly created modern work spaces in the capital of Delhi. Incorporating the above mentioned points according to his, transform an ordinary work space into one where communication and productivity go hand in hand. Also he writes for http://onebkc.com/
Jack you are right about #2 – make your work space tech savvy. It’s amazing how much space filing cabinets and shelving takes up with stuff that can be digitised. Very little ‘data’ needs to be stored in physical form these days.
Just about anything you print can instead be stored in digital form. A tool such as CutePDF will send print jobs to a PDF file.
Invoices from suppliers can be scanned in with a scanner (specialised document scanners are brilliant!). Old magazines, catalogues, and outdated reference books should be dumped. New books can be purchased as e-books.
And of course a regular spring clean is necessary to keep everything neat and trim. I have managed to pretty much eliminate my personal filing cabinet by scanning or photographing things in.