A long work day can leave you feeling tired and sore. From hunching over the keyboard to straining when you reach for your office supplies, a poorly designed work station is often at the root of the problem. Fortunately, some simple changes in your office furniture can have a positive impact on your body and overall wellbeing.
Creating An Ergonomic Office
Let’s start with the office basics: desk and chair. Ergonomic office furniture allows you to maintain safe body positioning throughout the workday and helps to prevent strain. Buy office furniture that allows you to adjust your space to suit your personal needs. These two office furniture staples should be arranged so that your body is aligned: feet on the floor, back straight, and shoulders relaxed. Ideally you should adjust the height of your chair so that your feet rest flat on the floor and your knees maintain a ninety degree angle to the floor. If your chair is not adjustable, you can use a footrest for the same effect. Desk height is just as important. There should be plenty of space for your knees to fit comfortably underneath, and you should be able to reach your desk surface without significant raising or lowering of your elbows. Comfort is key when designing a work space, and ergonomic office furniture is the first step to a healthy work day.
Once your chair and desk are in place, you should position your computer. Especially in Salt Lake City, it is important to have your computer positioned well. Ergonomics plays a key role in the prevention of neck and shoulder strain while working at the computer. Your monitor should be adjusted to eye level and placed about an arms length away from you. The keyboard and mouse should be placed directly in front of the monitor where it can be reached comfortably, with straight wrists and minimal upper body movement. These simple adjustments can make a big difference by reducing strain on your muscles and joints.
Ergonomic Office Furniture
Designing an ergonomic work station also requires thoughtful placement of commonly used items. The goal should be easy access to often-used items such as the telephone, writing utensils, and staplers. By keeping these items within arms reach, you can avoid unnecessary strain to your back and neck. Additionally, you can change some of your office habits to help boost the ergonomic quality of your work station. Adjust the sensitivity of your mouse and keyboard so they require less effort for a response and try to use speaker phone, especially if you plan to multitask while taking your phone calls.
Ergonomic office furniture and proper work station setup can save your body and keep you feeling good from the time you boot up your computer through the end of the work day. By adjusting your desk and chair height, properly arranging your computer and accessories, and strategically organizing your office supplies, your office space came become both comfortable and efficient. Now that you understand the basics of work station ergonomics, it is time to buy office furniture and set up your ideal, ergonomic work station.
Your employee break room might deserve a makeover in order to actually serve its purpose. Employees need a place to go on their down time. The break room should be a fun, friendly place to spend time away from being behind a computer. If you want a way to improve the productivity of your workplace, take a look at what other professionals are saying about what has worked for their employee break rooms.
We’ve put together this list where you will find new ideas to inspire you to upgrade your employee break room. Before you purchase new office furniture, take a look at these tips.
Tip 1: Think About Food and Beverages
Many companies have vending machines in their break rooms, but this approach usually tempts employees to spend their own money on junk food. Instead, you should offer fresh fruits, vegetables, and healthy snacks to your employees. In addition to having snacks in the break room, you should consider supplying coffee and tea.
Tip 2: Make the Break Room a Fun Place to Be
In addition to upgrading the break room furniture, you should consider adding some fun games and activities. Some of your employees might enjoy playing board games during their lunch breaks. Other employees might actually enjoy putting together a puzzle. You could even invest a little more money in the break room by purchasing a tabletop game, such as a ping-pong table.
Tip 3: Make the Break Room a Place to Gather
The best way to make your break room a place that people will want to visit is by adding outlets that are conveniently located along the walls. People will stop in the break room to charge their phones and tablets.
You should try adding a bulletin board or whiteboard to the break room in order to foster creativity. This will help your employees feel comfortable to share their ideas with each other, improving morale in the process. The best part is that you will find all these items wherever used office furniture is sold.
Tip 4: Consider the Color of Your Break Room
When you are upgrading your break room furniture, it’s important to take color into consideration. You could try to brighten up the space by purchasing a brightly colored couch, or you could make the room feel like a friendlier space to be by adding a fresh coat of paint.
Tip 5: Make the Break Room a Relaxing Place to Visit
Make sure to find office furniture that will inspire calmness in your employees. For instance, coffee tables offer a place for employees to sit and read a newspaper. In order to find the perfect piece of furniture that inspires your employees to relax on their breaks, you could consider purchasing used office furniture in Salt Lake City. When you search for used furniture, you will end up finding rare, exquisite pieces, and you’ll spend less money on the purchase.
Maintaining an secure, orderly and clutter-free workplace environment is an important concern. The addition of employee lockers can provide a number of benefits, especially for organizations seeking to optimize their physical space or business that have had problems with theft or other security issues within the workplace. The relatively low cost and wide selection of locker options that can be found through a used office furniture supplier may prove to be an ideal solution. Failing to provide staff, associates and even visitors with a secure storage option could lead to problems that businesses would do well to avoid.
Workplace Security
Security concerns like theft within the workplace can be toxic for morale. Investing in lockers and other office furniture in Salt Lake City that can be used to provide secure storage space may allow businesses to avoid any number of personal conflicts that might otherwise have a negative impact on morale. While failing to provide staff and associates with a secure place to store their personal belongings may seem like a minor oversight, but doing so can often lead to conflicts and morale issues.
Reducing Clutter
A cluttered environment or a poorly organized workspace can also impede worker productivity and decrease operational efficiency. For manufacturing or warehouse environments, clutter may even constitute a potential safety hazard. Finding used office furniture that can provide a safe place for associates to keep their equipment, personal belongings or any other items that may be cluttering up the workplace could be an important concern. Streamlining the physical space and removing any items that could be interfering with workflow and other operational processes can allow businesses to create and maintain a more professional environment.
Shared Office Workspaces
Conventional office layouts that provide each employee with a dedicated workspace are quickly beginning to fall out of favor. Removing the barriers created by walls and office cubicles can improve communication by allowing workers to share ideas and information more easily. While the majority of office furniture is shared by everyone, providing employees with their own storage space still remains an important concern. Lockers can be used to store shared equipment when not in use or to provide staff and associates who will be sharing the space with a place to put their personal effects. Shared floor plans and more open organizational layouts can also help employers to reduce both the setup and maintenance costs that may be required in order to maintain the surrounding environment.
Equipment and Supplies
Improper storage of electronics and other office equipment may result in increased wear and tear as well as a more frequent need to replace equipment that has become lost or broken. From uniforms to mobile devices, employee lockers are often an ideal storage solution for ensuring that all uniforms, equipment and other assets can be kept safe and secure. Investing in lockers and other quality office furniture that may be used to store equipment and supplies can help to curb overhead costs that might otherwise place strain on a business’s operational budget.
Any business owner looking to optimize his or her workspace will quickly find that cubicles are an essential piece of office furniture.
Not all workspaces come equipped with traditional offices, where an employee has the luxury of working behind a set of walls and a closed door. Still, even workspaces that feature offices generally have large areas of unused common space that can also be put to good use.
Office cubicles are used all across America because they come in a wide range of styles and can accomplish a variety of objectives, from privacy to decoration. Plus, compared to renovation work, adding cubicles to a workspace is very cost-efficient.
We’re going to look at some of the ways that you can best implement and arrange cubicles, and similar solutions, to achieve the work environment you are striving for.
Customize The Dimensions of Your Cubicle Spaces
Versatility is one of the key selling points of office cubicles. Due to their modular design, it’s easy to use the panels to create spaces both big and small.
A single workstation does not require much space. You can easily create one with a series of panels, office desks and some storage solutions. With cubicles, you can create a series of adjacent workspaces, or a single workspace set aside for a manager or employee with unique duties that require privacy.
Office cubicles in Salt Lake City are effective in distinguishing larger spaces, too. For instance, privacy is important for large meetings and conferences. If your workspace does not feature a conference room, cubicle panels can be used to partition off a large space to hold meetings or group work sessions.
Whether you’re planning out a line of small, adjacent cubicles, or one big one, it’s important to properly measure and plan out space. Even a small miscalculation can hurt the proper placement of your cubicles. This is one of the big reasons that it’s important to work with professional office space planners.
These individuals have an eye for laying out entire office floors, ensuring precise calculations that yield perfectly symmetrical cubicles.
A Panel System Might Suffice
Panels are the primary component for cubicles, providing the needed privacy for office desks. Panels protect work from prying eyes and some systems can even dampen sound. While cubicles also include connectors, work surfaces, storage solutions and more, a panel system might be enough to meet the needs of your employees.
In situations where you need to create a little bit of privacy, a few panels on their own might do the trick. By utilizing panel systems to define work areas, you are creating a cost-friendly solution to providing privacy for employees.
Promote Collaboration and Space Efficiency with Team Desks
Open concept workspaces have exploded in popularity over the years for good reason. While this concept does not offer much in the way of privacy, it’s easy for workers to quickly and effectively communicate with each other.
This concept does not utilize traditional office cubicles, rather, benched desks with a variety of available partitions to add that crucial element of privacy. Call centers are one industry known for putting this concept to use to most effectively and efficiently fit a large workforce into smaller spaces.
Professional office planners can walk you through each crucial phase of furnishing an office space. From diagnosing your needs, showing you available office furniture and properly implementing those solutions, these professionals can help you create the ideal space for productive, efficient work.
It isn’t a big surprise to anyone to hear that employees like having a lot of natural light. We all enjoy natural light and the ability to feel connected to outside even when we are at our offices working. We will be the first to admit that so much of your ability to bring natural light into your office has to do with your building and its layout. On the other hand there are a few small things that the right office space planner could point out that would help you rearrange your office furniture to maximize the sunshine.
How To Have More Natural Light In Your Office
We are only going to talk about things you can actually do improve the amount of natural light you get in the office you are already in. Our first tip seems a little obvious but it comes with a caveat that is crucial to the whole thing. Tip number one is organize your office furniture in a way that keeps people close to windows. Where ever people are going to be working the most, try getting that spot close to the window.
The caveat here is that you need to make sure that any of the new office furniture arrangements don’t obscure sunlight from those who are night right by the window. Just keep this important tip in mind while you try to maximize the amount of light that comes into the office. Whether it is a standing desk that barely comes close to the window or big office cubicles that take up a lot of space you want to make sure you let that natural light come in.
Comfortable Office Furniture And Natural Light
An interesting study reported on by the Harvard Business Review talked about just how much employees desire natural light. Along with this, they talk about how employees want to feel comfortable at work. They discuss how comfort comes from two main things, natural light and comfortable office furniture. When a system is built to put workers in a comfortable and focused state of mind, office productivity will soar. Office furniture in Salt Lake City can have the same effect on your business. Careful space planning and good equipment can bring unique results and growth to your business if you will just let them.
