The Most Common Commercial Office Designs

Saying the phrase commercial office design used to drum-up visions of cubicles, poor lighting, and the ever elusive corner office. Fortunately for the majority of employees, commercial offices have now come to represent places where employee workspaces are designed to maintain comfort while increasing work efficiencies. From collaborative work areas to open floor plans the most common commercial office designs are places where employees enjoy coming to work every day.

Open Workspaces: Open office designs incorporate a few of the following elements: shared workspaces, team areas, alternative work areas, large meeting and training spaces, and groups of desks as an alternative to rows of cubicles. Benching applications, which comprise a work surface space with a central technology infrastructure, are also a popular element of an open workspace design.

Collaborative Workspace: This type of popular commercial office design brings employees together. Glass office doors instead of solid panels help to promote a collaborative environment where employee hierarchy is kept to a minimum. In a collaborative office design, desk horizons are often lowered. In addition, desks are often grouped together so that it is easy to speak with your fellow employees, as well as move seamlessly throughout the entire office.

Integrated Technology: In 2013 we saw an increase in office spaces which embraced inter-connected technological systems. iPod and iPad docking systems, large screen monitors for Facetime and Skype conferencing, cloud-based services, internal email communications, and other technologies were embraced by commercial offices throughout the globe.

From Google to Start-Ups, “cool” offices are the new “it” trend: Silicon Valley has been the birth place for some of the greatest technological advances. It is also the home of an emerging commercial office design trend: the “cool” office. Google headquarters infamously has a slide for transporting employees between floors. Collaborative work stations, chic office furniture, and nap-pods for the hardworking employees are all additional attributes of their “cool” office design. Industry experts predict that this “cool” office trend will continue to grow amongst start-up companies. The reason behind the trend? More young people see Google headquarters as the inspiration for what an office should be; as such, they are increasingly seeking out jobs at institutions where the office seems like a dream home.

Individual work stations: While the first and second trends suggest open work environments as the way of the future, some analysts are thinking as deadline driven introverts. In order to accommodate a multitude of work personalities, offices are starting to incorporate both individual and collaborative work stations. Think of the individual station as the desk right in-front of a librarian – whispering is not permitted, cell phones are put away, and work is achieved in a head-down, sprinting to the finish line kind of mentality. With tighter budget restrictions predicted for 2014, companies are smart to design commercial office spaces with work efficiency in mind.

No matter what new advances 2014 might bring us, these top five most popular commercial office design trends are here to stay in some size, shape, or form. In order to create the most productive and happy employees, companies have discovered that they must design commercial office spaces which are comfortable, effective, and most importantly, inspire both individual and team work.