Office Furniture Personalities

Photo by: Dedalo progetti

It may be hard to believe that your office chairs could have any effect on how successful your business is, but if you picture one of your employee’s sitting on the same wonky chair 40 hours a week, with the same saggy seat cushion that causes them to slouch and suffer back pain, then you can begin to imagine how the discomfort and lack of inspirational surroundings can make your workforce feel a bit demoralised and disenfranchised.

Office furniture not only affects your employees, it can also make an impression on every potential customer that walks into your premises. For example, if a client comes in and sees a drab and disorganized office space that hasn’t been updated since the 90s, they would be forgiven for believing that your business is also stuck in the past.

Luckily there are many different office furniture styles that will allow you to show off your business in its best light. Here is a brief run-down of a few office furniture ‘personalities’ and notes on how these different  styles can improve both your employees’ productivity and make a good impression on potential customers.

Cool and Modern Office Furniture

This furniture ‘personality’ type, mostly found in large corporation headquarters and financial institutions, is indicative of serious business and serious money. Think Lord Sugar’s boardroom in The Apprentice – clean lines, simple design features and lots of glass and chrome. This décor scheme isn’t about fuss and colour, it’s about coming across as credible, successful and worthy of trust. This kind of impression is built on a sobering colour palette of greys, blacks and whites.

Fun and Funky Office Furniture

Offices for the creative industries have a free reign on the colours and styles they incorporate into their design schemes. They can mix completely contradictory styles or have seemingly random items of furniture and artefacts dotted around the place, because that sort of thing fosters creativity – a priority in these types of office environments.

Having glass manifestations of forest scenes on the walls or a swing in the middle of the room, for example, helps to inspire the creatives to come up with innovative ideas and break cycles of functional fixedness, where stuck-in-a-rut thinking is exacerbated by using the same objects in the same way, day after day.

Sparse but Functional Office Furniture

Thanks to mobile technology the need for lots of room to work is becoming less of a priority because many more people are able to work from home or on the move. It is possible that business owners could actually do with cutting down on the number of desks in their premises and operate a hot desking system where employees take it in turns to work from home.

Standing desks, or standing workstations as they are sometimes called, can also demonstrate this sense of flexibility and are growing in popularity.  Employees can drop in, charge their laptop and send some emails before heading off to their next appointment.

Having a realistic approach as to how much office space you need could also mean you have the option to downsize your premises, meaning that you can spend more on the latest ergonomically designed chair or buy new equipment.

Traditional Office Furniture

Including beautiful antique office furniture and fixtures in your premises demonstrates credibility to incoming clients, much in the same way super modern interiors do. Antiques are expensive, so therefore the presence of them implies that your company is moneyed and successful. Antique furniture also implies tradition and heritage – so if that message is important to your brand then it may be worth investing in a few antique pieces to reinforce the impression that your business is reliable and ‘has always been there.’

Whichever office furniture personality you opt for, let the team of office partition specialists at Applied Workplace work out the best scheme for you.

Which office furniture personality type does your business conform to? Share in comments below.