Office Furniture, an essential business investment
Unless your company takes space in a business centre, buying office furniture is an essential investment for your organisation. There are many factors to take into consideration when choosing the style and size of your desk and you will want to make sure that you get it right first time. The industry standard desk is 1600mm x 800mm but this may well be too big, or small, for your requirements.
What factors you will need to consider before purchasing furniture for your new office space.
Finding the right desk for your office space
Before you even start to look into the myriad of desk options you need to ask yourself what kind of desk you even need and how you will be using it.
Will you be working at your desk from 9am – 6pm every day and therefore require a more sizeable option? Are
you after a desk for a receptionist, who would need a spacious desk for sorting post and displaying newspapers or company collateral? Is your desk, and indeed your office space, just used as a touchdown facility and therefore just a small space for a lap top would suffice? All of these aspects will need to be taken into consideration.
Choosing the Shape of your desk
The traditional, rectangular desk, works for most people and industries but there are plenty of alternative options available. An L shaped desk is a excellent option for someone who needs two separate ‘areas’ of working; U shaped desks offer more space for files and documents and wave shaped desks offer a useful circular end which could be used for small team meetings, minimising the need for an extra meeting room.
How will you use your desk?
It sounds obvious but how you use your desk will ultimately determine the size it needs to be. Many people in the information management industry will require multiple monitors, which are generally displayed side by side and will therefore require a larger desk. Graphic designers will also require more space for larger monitors and graphics tablets and personal assistants may need additional space for paperwork and filling.
Do you use a desk phone, or just your mobile for telephone calls? A Cisco handset has dimensions of 20.32 x 26.67 x 15.24cm and clear access to the receiver is obviously important. However, many people rely on smart phones for business and these can help reduce the amount of desk top ‘real estate’ needed.
Paperwork can mount up and take up valuable space. To get around this, the many options of vertical filing systems work well. These can also be fixed to the back panel of the desk ensuring that valuable space on the actual desk top is not taken up.
As you can see, there are a number of different factors to take into account when choosing a desk. If you do not rent office space from a furnished office provider, office furniture can be a significant expense to a small company so it’s worth doing some homework before taking the plunge. After all the entire UK workforce spends, on average, 43.2 hours[1] per week at work, so it’s important to make the right decision first time.
[1] Office for National Statistics
Anna Norman Butler, Marketing Manager at Avanta serviced offices London and writer on Business Centre tips and tools. Avanta Managed Offices provided furnished office space solutions for small businesses.