Is it worth investing in your office?

With more people now working from home or a hybrid of working at home and the office, is it worth investing in your workplace? Harry Reece, managing director of Base Architecture, examines the arguments:

Since Covid turned our working environment on its head, whether it’s worth investing in improving your office space is something we get asked about a lot.?

Working from home or splitting your time between there and the office is now part of everyday life and often an expectation for potential employees. Business owners and leaders are understandably nervous about investing into their physical workplace, as they’re worried that staff might have little interest or desire to actually use it.?

Your workplace, though, shouldn’t be a place where you’re chained to your desk. It’s where you socialise with colleagues, learn from your peers and develop in your field of expertise. The workplace is simply an environment that you can’t recreate at home or in a virtual world.?

It’s also a space to showcase your businesses, your values and your brand. In a very visual world packed full of likes and shares, dull dreary places do not light people’s fires and they may choose to avoid these places or even resent being based there.?

Given the choice, clients want to visit and engage with businesses that are exciting and inspiring. You can showcase your business through your social media and marketing campaigns but also through your physical offices.?

You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m a believer when it comes to businesses investing in their office or workspace. Here at Base, for example, we have extensively upgraded one office and are now considering repeating the process at a second. We experienced a 100 per cent return to work as a result, with the benefit of flexible working if the team so wish. In 19 years, we haven’t had such a united and proactive team.?

You don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money to make a difference either, but you do need to carefully consider how your business functions (or how you want it to function).

When looking at schemes like this for clients, we do a full, detailed business appraisal first to find out how teams communicate and link together, what the business specialises in and how their systems work.?

As sustainability becomes ever more important for businesses, we can also look at how improved heating and cooling can make for a better work environment as well as improving your carbon footprint. Some of the cost of the investment might also be offset by cheaper bills long-term!?

Once we’ve established the constraints and opportunities in each project, we can tailor some innovative and exciting design solutions.?

A project we did for our friends and clients at Iconsys is the perfect example of this. We designed a fully bespoke and automated smart HQ to support their continued growth, incorporating a fully automated building for both office and factory staff.?

If you’re not sure whether investing in your office is the right thing to do, it’s always worth an initial conversation - it could be an investment that reaps rewards in the long run.