How to plan a workspace for optimum effect

John Hamilton, design director, Steelcase Asia Pacific helps you with suggestions to plan a workspace for optimum effect.

1. Don’t plan any workplace without engaging with employees. Use surveys, interviews, an outside resource to help uncover internal issues and work process needs. Involved, engaged workforce helps create a better work environment and embrace change faster.

2. People sometimes spend 14 hours or more a day sitting down while working. For optimal well-being, employees need to be able to move, even when seated. Ergonomic task chairs, height-adjustable worksurfaces, stand-up café tables and even treadmills can come handy.

3. When planning workplaces with shared spaces and mobile employees, plan a concierge service to help people find what they need.

4. Businesses compete in a global marketplace. Company offices, clients, suppliers, and other resources can be located anywhere yet they are connected. Understand the culture, work conventions, and business customs before planning a workspace outside your turf.

5. A smaller workspace must be multipurpose, user adjustable and be used by two or more people at least some of the time. If a space can’t do all three, it shouldn’t be in the plan.

6. Space also needs to adapt to different needs in different ways: an individual workstation can also host small collaborations; a private office can morph into an effective group space; a storage piece can triple as a worksurface, visitor seat, and transaction top, etc.

7. A space dedicated to one purpose will sit empty — a lot. A videoconferencing space should be open to any collaborative meeting and include furniture that works just as hard off camera as on.

8. Use space to nurture and comfort stressed out workers. Provide mobile whiteboards and screens so people can adjust their privacy; huddle rooms near collaborative areas for quiet refuges; comfortable lounge spaces; and kitchen and break room areas.

9. A coffee bar, kitchenette, or small café is a multi-faceted space. A break area, meeting room, a semi-private workspace, a place to bring a client or customer or to catch up with a colleague, supplant the need to visit an outside coffee shop.

10. Everyone likes daylight. Share natural light throughout a workplace with shallow floor plates, glass walls in any enclosed spaces on the periphery, few internal walls, and low panels so light imbues the workspace.