Office optimization

Questions that you need to ask as business owner / manager of the company

Being a business owner/manager is not an easy task today; costs optimization is a daily task and the avoidance of unnecessary costs is a constant.

One of the costs we need to care about are the costs associated to the property we use for business. Quality and optimally utilised office / business premises can significantly affect to higher productivity of employees, unsettled and insufficient business premises bring employee dissatisfaction and consequently inefficiency at work.

Determine the delicate boundary between large enough and well -maintained business premises and the costs associated with it is an eternal challenge.

Challenges

As business owner/manager, you need to ask yourself a number of questions before setting project bases.

For how many employees do I need office/business premises, I need to estimate the growth in the number of employees and the growth of the company in the near future, what kind of office/business premises I need today, what kindtomorrow…

How many square meters do we need?

Based on data obtained from several small, medium and large companies, we can estimate that the averagesquare meters of office space are approx. 10.5 m2 per employee… The size of the offices space also determines the number of employees in the office, work that the employees perform …

Managers who use offices for meetings also, need, in principle, larger offices. Of course, we must not forget the meeting rooms, the spaces for entertainment, socialising …

Offices or “open space offices” – what is more appropriate for our company

Costs reducing trend in all business areas (studies shows that the cost of setting up open space offices are lower by up to 50%.) and optimal utilisation of office/business premises leads us to conclude that open space office type to see as the most sense.

But is it really?

Studies based on implemented open space offices brings both, advantages and disadvantages of this design.

Better utilisation of space, better communication among employees, higher flow of information is only some of the advantage…Noise, lower possibility of concentration, greater possibility of transmission of disease, lack of privacy are potential disadvantages…

Open office space concept has advantages and some disadvantages, but whether such a design is appropriate for employees or not, depends also on the company itself – what the company is doing, what company vision is, what are the values of the company…

Now it is official…

Recent study prepared by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, at Harvard Business School and Harvard University stated the open office space architecture does not improve interactions among employees, does not improve team spirit…

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It is not everything so black…

Not having enough privacy is weakness of open office designs as stated in study and could be deadly for business. On the other hand, too much interaction also could lead to limited business process capability and capacity what can heavily influence quality of service.