Relocating your business to a whole new office can feel very exciting, like you are embarking on a significant new chapter in your company’s journey. However, your heart could sink as it dawns on you that you miscalculated – or perhaps just failed to see – how much space your firm really needed.
Fortunately, even if it’s taken an office move for you to see how space-restricted the new office actually is, you can still free up space in the following ways.
Swap out heavy furniture for lighter alternatives
For decades, offices tended to house an awful lot of paperwork – meaning that they also needed desks large enough to store it. You might still have a few of these bulky, heavy-duty desks with storage compartments galore, but you should think again before bringing these desks with you.
These days, such oversized furniture just isn’t necessary. Think about it: a lot of your crucial corporate documents are probably stored in the cloud instead.
Design your new space with hot-desking in mind
Hot-desking is the process of using large, communal desks and other spaces in place of traditional desks that, come what may, are each assigned to a specific worker. Therefore, hot-desking is a system that can save a lot of space, especially with options like folding tables and laptop tables.
If many of your employees tend to be out of the office – whether for business trips or working from home – at any given time, factor this into the layout for your new office.
Rethink how you purpose your corridor
Ah, the humble corridor. Once simply a physical link between different rooms, it’s now ripe with potential as a workspace in itself. When space is at a premium in your office, you can’t afford to simply leave its corridor bare. Thankfully, onoffice outlines a few exciting possibilities.
Those include integrating hot-desking facilities in the corridor, where you can also set up phone booths allowing staff to handle calls away from distractions of the main office area.
Perhaps the only way is up – literally
When floor space is looking crowded, perhaps you should start thinking about the wall space as well. One article on the American Express website has some suggestions for how you could maximise that space, such as though attaching both shelving and study pockets for storage.
If you’re struggling to think of practically viable solutions in this department, though, don’t be afraid to seek out workplace design experts for help with planning your new office space.
Clear the clutter
It’s easy to underestimate just how much space is needlessly taken up by those “little things” often left carelessly discarded on desks or elsewhere in the office. Therefore, remember to de-clutter!
Perhaps you could act on advice shared by Business 2 Community to stack multiple, labelled storage trays together. That way, you can be sure where those small-but-important things are, but those you need most often can be kept in the top tray for fetching especially quickly when called for.
