How To Build an Office To Impress Visitors
While a primary goal when designing office environments is often to enhance its functionality and productive capabilities, it’s worth emphasizing the importance of your visitors’ perspective as well. From clients to potential hires, there’s no telling how many individuals will walk in and out of your office doors after the pandemic. As such, you want to ensure that you’re making a great first impression by conveying your business’s unique charm. This is how to build an office to impress visitors and some important factors that make a design more effective.
Features of an Impressive Office Space
The first step to any successful redesign is to study up on what typically works within the office environment. The same is true for optimizing this environment to improve the visitor experience. Though members of your team might become accustomed to the particular details of their immediate setting, visitors will be keenly aware of everything around them. These are some of the key things they’ll automatically notice.
Appeals to the Senses
When a visitor steps foot through your office’s front doors, their senses are going to supply them with information to help develop a first impression. Touch, specifically, has a large influence on whether a person will feel comfortable in a given space. For this reason, you’ll want to create a welcoming atmosphere by including something that appeals to this sense in your reception area. Ergonomic chairs, like the Allermuir Soul Guest chair and Conic Lounge chair, are especially effective in this regard as they ensure each person who sits in them feels supported.
A Unique Style
Impressive offices also tend to have a style that visitors won’t be able to find anywhere else. Whether it be in the arrangement of furniture, the color scheme, or the decorative accents, these features give the space additional character—which guests will associate with your brand. Therefore, you’ll want to work with a team of qualified design professionals to create an environment that represents all you endeavor to showcase about your business. This way, you won’t just be easy to remember, but you’ll also be hard for them to forget once they leave.
Offers Visitor Accommodations
Make sure, as well, that your new office design has plenty of accommodations for visitors who might need them. These changes could involve installing wheelchair-accessible doors or creating more space for traffic to move in and out of certain areas. Either way, incorporating these characteristics is crucial to ensuring that you’ll be able to meet anyone’s needs during a visit.
How to Build an Impressive Office by Area
Now, when it comes to actually building an office to impress visitors, it’s best to use these desirable features as guidelines to drive your redesign. While they aren’t the only things that you should consider, going into the process with them in mind will help you to create an appealing environment for all. Still, make sure to remember that the ways you apply them will vary by room, and not all sections of the office will benefit from certain traits, either. Here is how you can approach this development by room.
The Reception Area
As mentioned, the reception area is where most people will form first impressions of your office. Consequently, considerable efforts should go toward making this as comfortable as possible while maintaining a professional atmosphere. You can accomplish this by filling the space with comfortable, ergonomic Rework furniture, placing a grand office reception desk to create the proper presence, and using décor to set the tone.
This area is also where you can best showcase your business’s style. You can even get help from professional interior office designers like Rework to ensure it’s everything you want. Don’t be afraid to put your brand name up on display, use your company colors, and make it obvious who exactly your guests came to see.
The Main Floor
When your guests enter the main floor of your office, they’ll be looking for consistency in style and an arrangement that promotes productivity. Open floor plans work well for this purpose, as they make it much easier for teammates to collaborate and, therefore, demonstrate your overall company culture. With a more compact design, these arrangements also make the room appear larger and less cluttered. As such, your visitors will be able to see more of your office design.
Additionally, using a color scheme similar to the one in the reception area will create a seamless transition from one space to another. This consistency will help maintain the atmosphere you’ve painstakingly crafted for your business and provide your guests with more opportunities to enjoy it.
Conference and Meeting Rooms
However, once you usher them into the conference or meeting rooms, you want to ensure that the setting is all business. Here is where you want to show them the professional, problem-solving side of your business and sell them on the prospect of working with you. To do this properly, furnish these rooms with everything to ensure comfort—especially ergonomic seating. Arrange furniture in a way that allows for the clear presentation and reception of ideas.
But despite the more serious tone of the conference rooms, make sure that you’re still incorporating some of the style your visitors have come to expect.
Kitchen and Break Spaces
If you commonly hold meetings during lunchtime, it’s likely that your guests will visit the kitchen and break areas of your office as well. You may even want to build a separate lunch section reserved for guests to ensure that you can communicate with them even when the lunch rush has struck the rest of your team.
Comfortable seating will also be an important component here, though you’ll have a bit more freedom to implement your style. By hiring a team of reputable designers to help you out, the possibilities for your build are only as limited as your imagination.
For assistance with any step of the office redesign process, reach out to Rework LLC. We specialize in interior office planning and design, as well as in the acquisition and refurbishing of high-quality office furniture. From benching workstations to used office reception desks for sale, we have all you need to turn your Chicago office into an environment that everyone will love. Shop Rework for the ultimate solution for redesigning, decommissioning, moving, or upgrading your office furniture.