Nothing looks more like one building than another, especially when it’s empty. What brings your offices to life, what gives your company its identity, is the way you occupy your spaces. A necessary task of identifying needs and projecting your vision allows you to arrange your spaces. The aim: for your professional premises to match your business activity as closely as possible, naturally focusing on your core activity, but also ensuring they serve all support functions. Your building holds a true internal ecosystem, the “little world” that is your company on a daily basis.
How should the company’s offices be designed based on its needs and the reality of its staff’s occupancy? We explain how to reflect on this in order to make the right decisions.
In this article, we address all the questions you should consider when designing, such as:
These strategic considerations regarding the design of your company’s office spaces arise at various stages of your business activity. Arranging, relocating, and reorganising your premises and furniture are common practices during:
In each of these situations, part or all of your building’s design needs to be reconsidered. This could involve:
These various changes, whether temporary or permanent, can be managed with varying levels of ease depending on the information and tools at your disposal.
To prepare for the design of your premises, brainstorming is essential. The Executive Committee, Human Resources, and Workplace Environment teams are just some of those who can provide valuable information and communicate employees' needs.
Whatever design project you are leading, whether managed internally or outsourced, managing your building(s) relies primarily on two key elements:
The first information you need is, of course, the measurement of your spaces.
Knowing that a building is 300 or 2000 square metres doesn’t mean much if you don’t know:
In an ideal world, the Workplace Environment Management would have all this information and more, particularly through a digital reference of plans and data that centralises all the necessary information into a sort of digital twin of the building. In addition to consolidating information on a single platform, this digital copy offers several advantages:
Once you have your plans and data and have defined your expectations, you can move to the operational phase. Your allocation choices directly impact the design of your premises.
You can read: "Allocation of Employees by the Workplace Environment Management (WEM): Why, How?"
Depending on the phase of the design, different providers can be involved in creating new workspaces:
These real estate design professionals serve your project, vision, and goals. They will also need to rely on accurate plans and data. If not, they will have to create and collect them themselves, which will inevitably incur additional costs for your company. Mastering your real estate assets is also a way to save money. By carefully maintaining and updating your building data, you avoid having to redo the process for each new design project.
Having your own reference of plans and data, a digital twin of the building, also allows you to manage your design changes independently (excluding structural modifications to the building, which necessarily require the involvement of an architect).
Designing new layouts for your offices doesn’t necessarily require one of your employees to have a PhD, especially when it involves moving people or changing furniture arrangements. However, to avoid handling the project manually, having the ability to virtually test different configurations will save time and effort.
Using building design software can be labour-intensive and skill-demanding, while the traditional paper, pencil, and tape measure method will be very time-consuming.
It is therefore advisable to use the appropriate digital tool to visualise your space layout, taking into account the actual measurements of the spaces and the detailed description of the furniture.
For a one-off move during renovations or moving into new premises, you can streamline the mover’s work and make your offices operational more quickly by mastering the essential information for the transfer. Regarding staff allocation, you will need to specify each person's current workstation and their new workstation. Similarly, by using simple pre-move labeling, you will designate the equipment associated with each workstation and the location of shared equipment.
Surfy serves as our Workplace Environment reference for:
● Mastering the use of our premises. Over the past 4 years, we have managed 6 major relocation projects related to structural reorganisation due to the health crisis and the optimisation of square metres with remote work. It is the visibility provided by Surfy that has allowed us to make these space optimisation adjustments.
● Managing all our relocation projects
For example, we managed the relocation of our headquarters to the 15th arrondissement from start to finish, including the layout scenarios with the architect, the logistics of the move, and the selection of suitable furniture. The same applied to the Colombes site.
The logistics of moving furniture and personal effects by the mover is greatly facilitated. Imagine the time saved for them with a precise listing and plans where each box and piece of furniture is identified from its starting point to its destination. The relocation of several departments was completed door-to-door in one day, with operational teams ready on Monday morning, finding all their belongings in their new offices.
In summary, designing your offices relies on a clear vision of your expectations and needs, as well as mastering building data. Virtual plans help you familiarise yourself with the spaces and choose the layout best suited to your activity. You can also adapt it over time. Depending on the scale of the project and with the right tools, autonomous management of your designs is entirely feasible. For larger projects, using a reliable and shareable digital base simplifies project management with service providers.
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