Tag: glass office partitions

Office Interior Design Tips to Make a Great First Impression

Space Plus Blog

Imagine walking into a deserted business lobby, and wandering aimlessly in search of help. This would immediately leave anyone frustrated as well as skeptical of the company’s professionalism.

You certainly want to avoid this situation in your own commercial space. Ensuring someone is prepared to greet clients is the first element in a long list of steps you can take to create a great first impression.

Keep reading for more suggestions to make your office unforgettable!

Create a visually stimulating atmosphere

An aesthetically pleasing entrance will set the tone and improve a guest’s mood instantly. Plants and creative art draw attention and help put clients and visitors at ease. For a modern office, try abstract art or a geometric display along with manicured plants or even a living wall. If the space is more traditional or transitional, consider big, lush plants and more traditional or photographic art.

Greet guests with a lobby sign

Everyone loves a unique introduction (and a hint of flattery). Use a wall-mounted or rolling chalkboard to create a simple message for your guests—something like, “Welcome, Jane Smith from The Company. We’re thrilled to have you here.” It’s a simple, inexpensive gesture that lets clients know you’re excited about their visit. These little impressions can go a long way—and maybe even steer a prospective client away from your competitor.

Show off your mission statement

Posting your mission statement and core values shows your clients that you care. Positioning it where it’s highly visible will also serve as a reminder to your employees of why they come to work every day. Just make sure employees live up your mission statement and that you inspire them by modeling the behavior you want to see!

Offer refreshments in waiting areas

Show you care about making visitors comfortable. With the large variety of single-serve coffee and tea makers available today, it’s easy to whip together a beverage cart for visitors to help themselves while they wait. Individually packaged snacks are a nice touch, too.

Elevate your office space with sleek sliding glass doors and partitions

The drywall is coming down in offices everywhere, and that’s a good thing. Sleek and modern glass office dividers, partitions and sliding doors are taking their place. These versatile glass panels can be used in any number of configurations for conference rooms, reception areas, office cubicles, “huddle rooms” and more. They’re especially useful for adding privacy and creating distinct spaces in offices with open floor plans. Plus, they instantly elevate the look of office space.

Brighten your space

Poor lighting systems can dampen the mood and drain productivity. Along with a good temperature control system, quality lighting and fixtures are a must. Pay attention to areas where natural lighting could potentially grace the space, but something is blocking its path. Clear glass walls may be the right solution to open and brighten the space. If your office isn’t blessed with plenty of natural light, it’s relatively inexpensive to retrofit the space with quality lighting. And, it doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all. Today, customized lighting systems allow you to personalize lighting and color temperature in individual work areas.

Create an impressive office with Space Plus

The modern workplace needs state-of-the-art solutions. Enter Space Plus, a division of The Sliding Door Company. Our glass office wall dividers and sliding doors can help you create dynamic spaces for every need—from workstations and conference rooms to lobbies, phone booths, common areas and more. These sleek and modern products are constructed of the highest quality tempered or laminated glass, customized to your taste with a variety of designs, glass types and frame finishes to choose form. The best part? Installation rarely requires a permit or major construction, so the process can stay efficient and within budget.

View our gallery for inspiration and reach out to our expert staff today to get started on the office interior of your dreams.

Why Working from Home Has Become So Strenuous

Space Plus Blog

Working from home has become an integral tool and an invaluable ally in the race to flatten the curve of the current global pandemic. We were sent home, told to make do with our living circumstances, and only allowed visual communication through video chats and zoom meetings. Regardless of the obvious necessity of working from home has become in fighting the good fight against COVID 19, it hasn’t been easy. Well, perhaps for some it’s been a welcomed break from reality. But for most of us who don’t have an adequate home office, WFH mandates have been nothing short of taxing- on our mental health, our physical well being, our productivity and, well, our social life.

So, why has it been so difficult? When these hurdles present themselves, we’re often so struck by the process of change and steeling ourselves amongst the rough waters that we may not always consciously consider the litany of factors contributing to our mental dismantlement. Yes, we gave up the tiresome commute. Yes, we reduced our carbon footprints significantly. Yes, we had less work/life drama wearing us down. At first, these were all much welcomed changes, that many of us were overjoyed to work from the comfort of our breakfast nooks with our roommates/family close by. But it wasn’t long until the novelty of the home-quarantine-endless-summer motif wore off, and we began to miss our daily routines, those co-workers that clearly provided us with much more substance than we were perhaps willing to admit in the past, and the very idea of having a life separate from home.

So now, six months into the virus-induced groundhog day, it appears collective opinion is beginning to change. Despite the many real safety concerns, many of us are looking ahead to brighter days when we can once again transition from pajamas into work attire, to see our favorite barista at our local coffee shop before jumping into our car to commute into the city. We’re ready to enjoy the physical separation from our loved ones and regain the pieces of yourselves we had lost during this global pandemic. But before we can begin to envision future days, we need to understand the why behind our collective suffering. Why was working from home so troubling, so exhausting, so physically taxing as compared with a typical workday?

Homes Are Not Designed to Be Productive

Unless you’re one of the lucky ones who have a real built-in home office, replete with doors, desktop computers, and glass wall partitions, working from home turned out to be a complete disaster. We never had the training or the transition period necessary to acclimate to an unstructured workday, while still aiming to clock full hours and produce great work. The truth is, working on a laptop from your kitchen table or your bed is no replacement for the productivity of a real office surrounded by coworkers, a boss lingering nearby, tangible deadlines, and so on. Despite the concentration hurdles we were faced with, we also had to relearn how to exist in our new ergonomically inadequate set-ups without destroying our bodies in the process. Without help from our standing desks, comfortable working height stations, desktop computers, office chairs, and multiple breaks, many of us were ill-equipped to face an 8-hour workday in a healthy manner.

“Many of us are finding ourselves hunched over laptops on sofas or beds, perched on hard dining room chairs or subjecting our arms and wrists to ill-placed keyboards. For most of us, gone are the days when well-designed offices took care of all these problems for us.”

-Bryan Lufkin, Worklife

All of the laptop use, poor lighting, uncomfortable chairs, and laying in bed with our bodies scrunched up has compounded after the many months of home quarantine and has caused us to endure taxing physical pain and aches we never experienced prior to the pandemic. When our physical bodies are disrupted and unhealthy, it begins to take a toll on our mental integrity. Pretty quickly, we were faced with a slew of troubling mental uncertainties as a direct result of the times, which ended up affecting our physical bodies.

And so the cycle continued.

Overcoming this pandemic will take a lot of hard work. More than were collectively providing at the moment. But returning to a sense of normalcy is amongst the top of (almost) everyone’s priorities now.

How Will We Get There?

Your real place of work will have to adopt some serious and potentially uncomfortable safety measures and mandates so you and everyone else can be comfortable (and safe) during an in-office workday. They may have to install hundreds of new sliding glass office dividers and glass office partitions in order to keep everyone safe and provide enhanced spatial distancing. You might have to take a temperature check every day you go into the office. Maybe you’ll be asked to bring in your own set of utensils and a personal coffee cup. But these awkward precautions pale in comparison to the real repercussions of emotional instability, physical discomforts, and worse of all- contracting the virus.

Transition your workplace into a safe, welcoming work environment by integrating new techniques, safety measures, and spatial barriers for everyone to benefit from. Install glass office walls, sliding room dividers, and glass sliding doors to allow for increased separation while still maintaining a community feel. A “separate but together” floor plan will become a crucial element throughout this reintegration process to safeguard everyone in the office moving forward. Visit Space Plus, A Division of the Sliding Door Company online for more spatial inspiration, to view our online catalog, and to Get a quote from one of our professionals today.

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Let There Be Light! How to Make Happy, Healthy Employees!

Space Plus Blog

Who knew something as simple as glass office partitions could transform your company? Here’s how Space Plus, a division of The Sliding Door Company, can help you bring in the light, and why that’s important.

Healthy employees are happy employees. Happy employees are productive employees. Productive employees make for successful companies.

Sounds like a simple enough equation, until you mull over the details. How do you empower your workers to stay in shape? How can business leaders give their team members the tools they need to stay on top of the ball?

Turns out, the easiest way is to let in the light.

The Dangers of a Windowless Life

Study after study has explored the relationship between lighting and health, as well as lighting and productivity. If they agree on anything, it’s that natural light works wonders for both the mind and the body, and that improves both focus and morale.

Take the well-known study conducted by Northwestern University’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience program, called “Impact of Workplace Daylight Exposure on Sleep, Physical Activity, and Quality of Life.”*

When researchers compared employees who with windows to those without windows, they found a significant disparity in wellbeing. Those who had the luxury of a window seat received almost 200 percent more white light exposure than those who didn’t. As a result, they received, on average, 46 more minutes of sleep per night.

That may not sound like a great deal until you consider the impact that a little sleep can have on a person’s emotional and physical wellbeing. Those who struggle to get adequate sleep tend to have weaker immune systems, higher rates of cancer, poorer focus, worse memory, and reduced attention span.

Those who work in offices without windows also suffer from depression at higher rates, experience hormonal imbalances and have trouble coping with stress and difficulty concentrating. In other words, working without natural light can negatively impact all those things your team needs to function at optimal levels.

The Many Health Benefits of Natural Light

On the flipside, those who work or study in well-lit environments tend to feel and perform better. That’s because sunlight:

Increases vitamin D production.
Regulates the body’s circadian rhythm.
Helps maintain a healthy sleep cycle.
Relieves eye strain associated with artificial light.
Mitigates the symptoms of depression.
Strengthens the immune system.

The takeaway? If you want a healthy, highly motivated team, you need to bring in the light—but how?

3 Three Ways to Increase Natural Light

There are many creative solutions to the light problem. Your best bet is to start with these three:

Find an office with plenty of windows. The first solution is the most obvious, yet the most difficult. With office space increasingly sparse, it’s harder than ever to find real estate that features plenty of windows. If you can land a well-lit office space, the more power to you. If you can’t, there are still some things you can do to maximize the natural light you do have.
Replace the cubicle with a glass wall. Office cubicles have a bad reputation, and for good reason. They’re ugly, they’re cumbersome, and they block light. If they’re not a relic of the past already, they should be. Glass office partitions, on the other hand, give you all the benefits of cubicles—privacy, noise reduction, foot traffic control—without the downsides (like being stuck inside a windowless box for at least eight hours every day).
Install sliding glass doors instead of traditional doors. The more glass you have in your office, the more light will flow from room to room and space to space. That goes for walls, cubicles, partitions, and Basically, anywhere you can replace light-killing materials with glass, you should.

Most companies want healthy, happy employees. Helping them get there may seem like a giant task, but it’s easier than you think. With a simple office redesign, you can work wonders for overall well-being, morale, and productivity. Take a look at Space Plus’ innovative workspace solutions to find out how you can transform your office into an employee-friendly environment by letting in the light.

Sources

https://www.spaceplus.com/design-blog/want-healthy-employees-let-light/
*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4031400/. the authors also published the results in a paper presented at the 27th Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies: https://experts.illinois.edu/en/publications/impact-of-workplace-daylight-exposure-on-sleep-physical-activity-
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-health/daylight-windows-productivity-stress-health-depression