Depending on where you’re located, office space can be very expensive indeed. If you’re in an out-of-town office park, then you might not have it too bad, but in major business centres, your rent could well be one of your biggest overheads – often being double that in other locations. Anything you can do to bring this cost down is a good thing, and the best way to do this is to not rent as much space in the first place. Of course, in order to do this you need to make sure that you’re getting the very best out of the space – you don’t want to be overly cramped. Let’s have a look at some of the things that you can do.
Pick Smaller Furniture
Furniture is going to dictate much of how your space is used, so you need to give it a bit of thought. Excessively large desks and chairs will take up a lot of space, when in actual fact people generally don’t need a huge amount of room. A two metre long desk is complete overkill, and you could potentially get two people on it.
Dividers can be good for allowing employees to work privately, but they too take up space, and don’t always allow for the best layout. Of course, it is very important that you do give employees their own space – it shouldn’t be cramped (some guidelines here).
Move Out Excessive Stock and Equipment
Storage can be really important for those businesses that also have quite a bit of stock or equipment. The fact is, you should be using expensive office space to store it. It’s far better to keep it in a dedicated facility with a company like Safestore, where it’s going to cost you less, not get in the way, and is probably better managed.
Keep Things More Open
Finally, individual offices are often an unnecessary part of the workplace, and generally serve only to split more senior members of staff from everyone else. You can give bigger desks to the people who need it, but having shared rooms that people can use when they need meeting space is much better for office morale, and uses a lot less space to boot. Note however that fully open plan offices have their critics.
So there you have it – if you want to bring down the cost of renting your business premises, then reduce the space you use by knowing how to maximise.