Home Office Design

Office Decoration

5 Home Office Design Tips

Match Your Brand: An important element of business marketing is the branding and image of your company. Whether you entertain clients or not, your office design should match your brand. Successful branding requires you to look and "feel" the brand. Having glossy business cards and a high-tech image but out-of-date office furniture and equipment, will make you feel like an imposter and you will have difficulty projecting your brand to customers.

Turn Down the Volume: Noise in your office environment can have a greater impact on productivity than you may think. According to Dr.Melissa Stöppler, About.com Guide to Stress Management, "...increased stress levels and increased stress hormone levels may occur even when you are not consciously aware of the stress." Low levels of office noise can impend your performance.

Take the necessary steps to pinpoint office noises. The gentle hum of the furnace next to your office can be dampened by a door or barrier. Move any noisy office equipment away from the walls and add carpeting, office dividers, or curtains to reduce noise.

Bring in Nature: Spending long hours in an unnatural environment can be hazardous to your health. We are biological creatures and need to experience nature for the best in psychological and physiological functioning. Use as much of nature as you can such as:

Locating your office in a space with windows if possible. Consider nature photos to make your home office a more pleasurable place. Add real plants to have fresh oxygen in your workspace.

Create a Barrier: Home office business owners will understand the difficulty of separating the company from the family. It is vital to build a home office design supportive of your own personal productivity. The temptation of a quick television break or snack can result in lost productivity and extra inches around your waist. It is best to designate a separate room with a door or closed space in the house for your business.

Check Ergonomics: The study of ergonomics or human factors looks at the interface between humans and machines, or in our case, small business owners and the office. Improper office ergonomic design can have a huge impact on productivity, injury prevention, and health. Consider these quick ergonomic checks:

# eyes 24-36 inches from computer screen and the top of your monitor should be below or at eye-level

# feet should be on a foot rest or planted firmly on the floor

# slightly reclined chair posture is best to reduce vertebrae pressure and minimize lower back pain

Office Design Picture

Basic Home Office Equipment

Zoning regulations may determine whether or not you can even have a home office. Before you start a home-based business, it’s important to find out whether or not home-based businesses are allowed in your location; some cities/towns don’t allow businesses to be operated in residential areas.

A separate home office space. It’s important to have a designated space, preferably a room where can work in isolation, away from distractions. Having a designated home office space also makes it easier to calculate percentages of home business use expenses that you can deduct on your income tax. (See Calculating The Home-Based Business Tax Deduction.)

When you’re choosing the home office space in your home, remember to choose a location that has all the relevant wiring for the equipment you’re going to need, (such as telephone and cable jacks), and space for all of your chosen home office equipment, including things such as filing cabinets. Otherwise you’ll waste too much time wandering through your home looking for this or that. The Basics of Small or Home Office Design will show you how to plan your office design around the power, lighting and ventilation needs of your office space.

You may also need an attractive home office space if you’re going to consult with clients on the premises. This space needs to be kept “business-like” (uncluttered by things such as children’s toys), and private. When you’re choosing a room for your home office, consider the space the client will have to walk through to get to the meeting room. He or she won’t form a very good impression of your operation if he has to stroll through your laundry room or follow you through a labyrinth into a dark corner of your basement before she gets to talk business.

Filing cabinet(s) – and a good filing system. To deal with those once-yearly chores, such as income taxes, and whatever daily crises crop up, you have to have a filing system that allows you to lay your hands on exactly whatever piece of paper you need. See my Data Management Library for articles on how to set up and use a good filing system.

Basic home office furniture. Definitely you’ll need a desk for your home office (large enough to hold a computer and still leave enough room for a desktop work space), and an office chair. Whatever other home office furniture you need will depend on how much equipment you have and what kind of business you’re running. If you have a printer and or fax machine, for instance, you’ll need stands for them. See Office Design On The Cheap for tips on saving money on office furniture and equipment. If your business involves meeting with clients in your home office, you’ll need some attractive chairs and perhaps a coffee table.

Office Design

Commercial office facilities were originally designed to be office spaces; they have adequate power, lighting and ventilation for office work spaces built into their design. This will probably not be the case with your house or other building that you've decided to use as a small or home office.

I would advise anyone who was about to set up a small or home office to locate their office in the site that has the best power, lighting and ventilation for office use. Let's look at each of these home office design elements and examine the infrastructure needs for home office use.

1) Power - Commercial buildings designed for office use generally have a better quality electrical supply than residences and other non-commercial buildings. And setting up a small or home office means that you will be greatly increasing your power use in that location. For instance, even a small laser printer will consume 300 to 400 watts of electricity when it's running, and larger laser printers will consume much more.

Now think of the other office equipment you're about to install in your home office. Suppose you have a PC, a monitor, a laser printer, a fax machine, a scanner and a phone. Will the circuitry in your chosen home office location be up to the job?

Step one of home office design is assessing your power needs. Add up the wattage of your office equipment (and related office design features such as lighting). You may be able to cut down on your power needs by "combining" some of your office equipment needs. For example, instead of having a separate printer, fax, copier and scanner, you could have one multifunction machine that performed all these functions.

Before you even spare a passing thought to the aesthetics of your home office design, plug in all your equipment and try to use it, as you would on a normal working day. If you experience electrical danger signs, such as breakers popping or lights dimming when various pieces of equipment are operating, have an electrician check your circuitry and see if any simple rewiring can be done. In my experience, houses, especially older houses, are often wired very eccentrically and need an electrical "cleanup" or updating.

2) Lighting - Chances are extremely high that the existing lighting in the proposed location of your small or home office is inadequate for work space needs. Few residences have rows of fluorescent lights installed, for example, as commercial office spaces do. While you don't need to go that far, you do need to incorporate strong overhead lighting in your home office design - and in many cases, that means purchasing and installing new or additional light fixtures. Various types of track lighting are easy to find and relatively easy to install.

When choosing the lighting for your home office, assess your needs first by sitting in your proposed work space and determining how much illumination you need to work efficiently and where the light should be placed. An office with inadequate lighting is not only useless but can lead to all kinds of health problems from headaches through neck and shoulder pain.Remember, though, that adding lighting will increase your office's power loads. Once again, you'll need to be sure your existing circuitry can handle the increased electrical load.

3) Ventilation - Many people overlook the importance of ventilation in office design, but you and your office equipment both need it. First, the more office equipment you have operating, the more heat will be generated - and excessive heat can damage office equipment such as PCs. Secondly, if your small or home office space isn't adequately ventilated, working there can be extremely uncomfortable for you. This is a particularly common problem when people choose small spaces for their home offices, such as ex-bedrooms. The room becomes a "hot box" and almost impossible to work in.

Consider the ventilation aspect of your office design carefully when you're choosing the spot for your small or home office. Is the room large enough for you and your equipment to work in comfortably? Consider cooling options such as purchasing a small air-conditioning unit or fans of an adequate size to cool the room. Commercial office spaces usually have air-conditioning systems installed to protect both the equipment and people's health.