Your Guide to Choosing Your New Office
- Written by News Company
Your office will play a massive role in your business, as it impacts the productivity of everybody inside, as well as your company culture and employee flow, engagement and satisfaction. Your employees will consider the office that you choose a symbol of how much you value them. As the nation gets back to work, here’s how to choose a good office.
Accessibility
Accessibility is an important part of location. It is important for any business as things like traffic and lack of parking spaces can impact both clients and employees. As an employer, you want to maximize your employee’s productivity, which is why you should choose a location that has a minimal amount of traffic or one that is accessible easily by public transportation. If your office itself has good accessibility to restaurants, bars and café’s, your employees will enjoy working there too.
Safety
It’s important to conduct a risk assessment before being sure that you want to choose an office, as many landlords don’t conform strictly to health and safety requirements. If the office was built before 2000, you should have a report on the presence of asbestos-containing materials. You should have information about security for the building and you should make sure that there is a clear and obvious fire escape route, with functioning emergency lighting, as the Fire Safety Order makes it mandatory for your emergency lighting to be functional and regularly tested and inspected.
Size
The general rule for office sizing is that you should have 21 square meters for every employee. If you have 20 employees, your office should be about 420 square meters. This might be difficult to achieve in the city, but if you’re in any doubt it might be worth bringing some employees in to get their opinions on the sizing. You don’t want them feeling claustrophobic as they work.
Technology
You should inspect all the plugs and check that they are functioning and safe. You should also ask to connect to the internet or, if the office does not have internet already available, ask to connect to the closest available Wi-Fi. This is something you need to do before you buy, as an office can turn from perfect to nightmarish if the only Wi-Fi available is painfully slow. When testing, use fast.com, as internet providers often prioritise Wi-Fi speed testing sites but fast.com is owned by Netflix and set up so that they can’t prioritize it without giving higher speeds to Netflix streaming.
The Design
Key factors that you need to consider in terms of the actual design of the office include office layout, the air quality and ventilation infrastructure, the presence of natural and artificial lighting (try to get as much natural light as possible), the acoustics inside the office (and the noises that leach in from the outside), as well as closeness to the natural world. Creativity improves when close to nature, so if you can get a building with a view over a park, garden or trees, you will find the productivity of your employees improves.