Your office is the place where most of your employees spend the bulk of their weekly hours. It is also the place where your high end clients come to meet with you face-to-face. If your office is drab, lifeless and generally boring to look at, this can give the wrong impression and feel to employees and clients alike. Making your clients and employees feel more at home in the office, by sprucing up the general esthetics of the place, you will make your office a far more pleasant place to do business. The following are five tips to help make this transformation work.
External Signage
When it comes to helping visitors find your establishment, eye catching and aesthetically pleasing signage is a must. Not only does it help your building to stand out from the street view, but large, colorful signage helps to make your building look classy too.
An Inviting Painting
Heading into the lobby of your building, there is an empty wall that is as boring as it is bare and lifeless. Imagine a large, beautiful painting by a known, but not too well-known, artist now filling this empty space. Such an extravagant work of art gives the impression that your office is about more than the droll minutia of business transactions. There is a sense of culture here that permeates the building and adds to the atmosphere of the office in good taste.
Change the Lighting
When entering your office, your visitors and employees are hit with piercing light from overly bright, fluorescent bulbs along the ceiling. These simply have to go. To get a more esthetically pleasing look to the interior lighting, you will want to start with the natural lighting inherent in the office and from here utilize softer string lighting and personal desk lamps to add class; thus, making the atmosphere more inviting to the eyes. The idea is to relax employees and visitors, not make a place where the lighting adds unnecessary tension.
Critical Improvements Outside the Office
The first thing people see when they visit your office is the sun worn, paint faded parking lot and the cracked sidewalks that make the area look like a dilapidated section of the downtown business district. By resurfacing your parking lot, repainting the parking lines, fixing disfigured parking bumpers and putting in new sidewalks, your building will start to look newer—especially if you have that old brick exterior of the building sand blasted for good measure. Work with a contractor like Oberfields or someone similar for help in this area.
A Personal Touch
What can definitely spice up the esthetic character of an office is to give your employees some latitude in decorating their desks and offices. By allowing your employees to personalize their own space, within reason, you will not only improve the esthetics of the office, your employees will start to feel at home when working at the office. This can be motivating to employees and improve productivity too.
After making a few needed changes, your office is looking many times better: both inside and out. Not only are your employees happier, but your big clients are commenting about how they like what you have done with the place. Just add in some gourmet coffee for your staff and visiting clients, and you might just make boss of the year.