Common Office Design Mistakes to Avoid

Office Design

Most business owners don’t invest enough time and budget for their office designs. However, office design plays an important role in your employees’ productivity in addition to your brand image.

A badly designed office may create a negative atmosphere killing creativity, collaboration, and employee morale. It also affects your brand image in the eyes of your clients. Therefore, you need to watch out for the below mistakes and avoid them or redesign your office accordingly.

Poor Lighting

The best lighting is, of course, natural lighting which is lighting by the sun. However, if it is not possible for your office to use natural lighting, then, try to use soft lighting. Don’t go for bright LED lighting because too much brightness causes headaches and anxiety. Try to use yellow or orange lighting in your office. Don’t forget that lighting affects productivity. Therefore, never go for cheap lighting and never rely on just one type of lighting. Do your best to make your office look elegant, soft and warm.

Poor Storage

Having poor storage area in the office is very risky because you may lose important documents or have to throw away some documents that you may need in the future in case of an audit. Also, you don’t want your important documents to get mixed up with unimportant ones. Thus, the best solution is to store your vital documents in an off-site records management facility that is provided by companies like Corodata.

Poor Acoustics

Especially for open offices, paying attention to acoustics is very important because no one can be productive in a noisy office. Therefore, it is very important to use acoustic materials in walls to reduce noise levels. However, making it too quiet is also not recommended for an office because it would be like a library and this won’t be very comfortable for the employees. The noise level should be in between for employees to be productive.

Poor Reception Area

This is where your visitors will get the first impression of your office. If you care about your business, then, care about the reception area and make it welcoming and professional. Also, make sure it is spacious and in your visitor’s immediate vision so they don’t need to look for the entrance of your office. Never use this area as storage where employees put their unwanted reports and files. This will look very unprofessional.

Picture of Ceren Cubukcu

Ceren Cubukcu

Ceren Cubukcu is a top 5 bestselling author of Make Your American Dream A Reality: How to Find a Job as an International Student in the United States. She recently founded her consulting business to help more international students find jobs in the US in addition to her self-service digital event ticketing platform, Etkinlik Fabrikam (My Event Factory), to offer her webinars. 

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