With many companies experiencing meteoric growth in the post-COVID economic boom, many companies are looking to not only reintroduce employees to the physical office space, they are looking to expand what office space they have. Whether you are a startup moving out of your garage to your first office or transitioning from a 10-employee office to one that can hold more than twenty, you will need to design your office to provide the best environment possible for productivity and synergy for your employees.

There is a wide range of office plans and designs available from a variety of different schools of thought for productive workspaces. This guide provides you with a general idea of what each school of office space design offers in terms of productivity.

The Open Office Plan

Open office plans have been all the rage in recent years, but do the results match the hype? Open office plans involve large, open rooms where employees use workstations that are not separated by any kind of barrier.

Open office spaces are purportedly conducive for more collaborative and interactive environments where employees are encouraged to be open and communicative at all times. The theory goes that this kind of environment is conducive to highly creative outputs that are reliant on team effort.

If your firm is dedicated to marketing, public relations, or certain kinds of sales, an open floor plan can be a highly effective option for your team. Optimal desk and workstation placement is paramount for these environments, with each team needing a dedicated space for their individual tasks that is suited for their size and technical requirements.

The Closed Office Plan

The closed office plan is more in line with classical reasoning – each individual needs a private space where they can both think and work. Closed office plans make use of either permanent or portable dividers to separate each workstation.

Closed office plans offer more quiet and private areas where workers can spend their time free of the distractions provided by more frivolous teammates. They are more conducive to offices that concentrate on individual effort, such as engineering, coding, accounting, and other technical disciplines.

Offices that rely on more introverted workers work best when they have an area where they can feel secure and have a reasonable amount of privacy and separation from other employees. Office layouts need to be carefully constructed to best utilize the space available to house the number of workers needed for the company to operate efficiently.

The Hybrid Plan

With many companies incorporating in-house advertising and marketing departments in conjunction with their engineering and R&D, a hybrid work environment that can best utilize both closed and open plans may work best. While your engineers diligently code the next product updates in their individual cubicles, your marketing department can jabber on about how to best market the product in the next room over, with neither department negatively affecting the other.

Hybrid plans are possibly the most difficult to plan out, with spaces needing to be optimized for each department’s needs and focus. Luckily, Creative Office Design’s planners can specifically tailor each project to meet every company’s needs.

Whether you’re looking to move to a bigger space or redesign your current office to better accommodate a growing workforce, you’ll need new or used office furniture and a design that can incorporate it into your new workspace. Creative Office Design will assist you in getting the absolute best out of your workers without the delays and extra hassle that other firms are experiencing from the once-in-a-lifetime supply crunch for brand new office furniture and supplies.