The working environment I want for my team is inclusive, fun, positive, and professional. Working collaboratively and pursuing excellence together does drive our productivity, I’m sure of it.
But were our own offices at Posturite truly enabling that? No.
And would a lick of paint and a new coffee machine do the trick? Again, no!
It was time for a complete office redesign, and you'll see the results in these photos. We needed to re-analyse the flow of people around our buildings and create new zones for a variety of different activities and tasks, always of course embracing the principles of ergonomics. In this blog, I want to inspire you and share ideas for how to transform a workspace, using examples from the Posturite head office in Sussex. With expert guidance from my colleagues in our inhouse Furniture Projects team and from partner workspace designers, the office design changes for our hybrid team have been exciting and all-encompassing for our company culture.
If the idea of a ‘community’ at work makes you feel queasy – look away now.
How to help employees to mix
When we work from home, we can make do with seeing each other on screen and chatting via apps. But I really like to have a shared in-person office space for my head office team too, and place high priority both on collaborating in-person and also on informal socialising.
The problems that hindered collaboration and communication with our old office layout were:
- Two separate buildings next to each other, with some people never setting foot in the building that wasn’t ‘theirs’.
- Little inter-departmental mixing – some teams were very separate.
- Literally not seeing each other on arrival and departure from the office.
- An unattractive and dark corner used for lunch breaks and social events.
For a Posturite company culture that I see as being warm, friendly and people-centric, this was no good. Our historic mill building in Berwick, East Sussex, has great character with its oak beams and period features, but needed a complete interior rework.
Armed with only a modest budget, our trusted office redesign project managers Wagstaff Group were set to work!
Our design solutions for encouraging interaction between colleagues
The solutions we chose for our office redesign to encourage socialising were:
- Creating a much larger new staff social space and transforming its feel by replacing dark warehouse exterior walls with a beautiful glass frontage, to bring natural light in.
- Placing a stunning new extra-long dining table to encourage a communal dining experience - we chose the Centro table by Connection. I had been inspired to introduce this by the ‘family-style’ lunch breaks I’d seen both factory and office staff enjoying in Europe on visits to Posturite’s partners on the continent. All sitting around a large table was exactly what I wanted, and it just doesn't happen much in UK workplaces. Now there is often somebody from every single department around the table, and I love this. It’s just a very natural and friendly thing and you can see how collaboration happens as a result.
- Asking staff to avoid lunching and snacking at their desks – more on this later!
- Additionally providing sofas and soft seating so that there is choice, and breakout spaces are created. Fresh coffee from ultra-local coffee brand Need Drinks is on hand.
- Adding a stylish acoustic retreat to the social space called the ‘One’ by Connection. It’s a snug yet spacious pod that’s comfy for two colleagues to sit together, or for a team member to make a phone call away from their desk.
- Redesigning the main entrance so that we now walk through each other’s departments. I tend to work early in the morning from home for a few hours, and then on arrival at head office, I can walk through offices where marketing, IT and purchasing are working away, and simply say hello in person. The same goes for others working on the upper floors. Everyone can now simply recognise other people within the organisation more easily.
- Creating a larger new meeting and training space which is formal yet attractive, and screens for including remote colleagues in meetings.
- Adding small casual meeting spaces on every floor, with a choice of table heights. I love the look of Connection’s Plenti table at high ‘poseur’ height.
What we have ended up with is spaces for collaboration and opportunities for accidental collaboration, which is key to our company culture. Casual conversations amongst colleagues in a business are important.
My Furniture Projects colleagues have an expert eye over the whole workplace furniture market, and are great at picking out real gems of furniture design from international designers, which you can see in these photos.
We are consultants on workplace design and ergonomics for all kinds of organisations – from huge government departments in the Midlands, to energy specialists in Aberdeen, to successful law firms in the City of London, to police forces with busy call centres in the west country.
How do staff rate the office redesign?
The reason I can confidently describe this office redesign as a success, is because I have the stats to prove it! My inhouse project manager Adele Carvil worked really hard planning the refurb with our suppliers, and she and I have been delighted with the anonymous survey results:
- 81% think that the new office space will enhance our company culture.
- 79% have chatted to someone they hadn't before, in the new social space or offices.
- The aesthetics and atmosphere of the new office were rated 4.59 out of 5.
Staff comments on social aspects included:
- “I love the new mix of the ground floor team; I have made friends with people I never really used to be able to speak to.”
- “The breakout space is really lovely, it all feels really spacious and considered. There’s more of a team feeling.”
- “It's a very welcoming, positive environment.”
We have quite a young team at head office, though staff of all ages took part in the survey. There was once a time when I was the youngest Posturite employee, but those days are no more! We remain a hybrid-working team but the feedback “It's great, I am coming into the office more because of the refurb” is what I’d hoped to hear.
How to help employees to move at the office
As a leader, there are two main ways as a leader you can help your staff to move more at work for their long and short-term health and wellbeing, and that’s:
- In your expectations for their behaviour, and the way work is organised.
- The ergonomic equipment you supply them with.
The expectation of all managers at Posturite is that you take breaks. We want you to take a mixture of short microbreaks to move away from your desk, and a longer break at lunch to refresh your body and brain fully. These breaks to move and change postures will give you both musculoskeletal and mental health benefits. And you won’t come up with the most brilliant idea for our business if you’re constantly sedentary and uncomfortable!
We have equipped our offices with electric sit-stand desks for every team member. That’s essential in my view. The wellbeing benefits of switching between sitting and standing to work during the day boosts our productivity, and this is a key back-pain prevention measure. We chose Deskrite 350 sit-stand desks for the office redesign which have excellent quiet and fast engineering features to move up and down at the touch of a button. An exciting innovation here is that our desktops are made from Circuboard, a super-sustainable material which also comes in beautiful woodgrain finishes. This look enhances the natural and warm aesthetic. I love their new coloured desk edges too – and we have green and blue on different floors for variety.
The mix of different kinds of meeting spaces in different areas of the building will also increase movement habits at the office.
Why no snacking at desks?
I’ll be honest that us saying ‘no lunch or snacking at your desk’ has been slightly controversial amongst the team, but there is very good reasoning behind it. Popping over to the social space instead to eat encourages us all to move, and it boosts collaboration and engagement. Looking at both wellbeing and productivity, it’s the right thing to do, to improve us as a business and as people.
Project Manager Adele says “Actually a lot of people have come up to me and said they thought this was going to be a bad idea - but now they really like it! It’s ‘forcing’ them to take breaks in a helpful way, including two managers who said they had been guilty of not taking proper lunch breaks before.”
How to create zones within an office design
Our Furniture Projects colleagues and our partners - notably Flokk - are expert in planning workspace zones which inspire top productivity at the office.
Thanks to their advice, and also by exploring our pre-design staff feedback survey, we have created spaces for collaborative working to task-based working, to sensitive working and hypersensitive working which requires confidentiality. It’s a spectrum of activity and meeting types. We completely adjusted the flow of people to enable this in our office design.
Contemporary workplace design emphasises spatial adaptability, encompassing both communal breakout areas and secluded work zones. The multizone configuration in our own office redesign establishes flexible ‘neighbourhoods’ which we can adapt and evolve in the future.
Take a look at what we’ve used to divide office spaces for our zones – instead of solid dividers or walls, we’ve chosen the stylish Harp office room dividers by Connection, whose linear design is semi-transparent. Its innovative bungee-cord structure provides a subtle separation between the main desking area and the breakout zone, creating balance between focus and interaction.
The ’Harp’ structure also helps us with lighting. Lighting has always been a challenge on the ground floor of The Mill, but this sleek, contemporary design allows us to define multiple zones within the open-plan space while letting plenty of natural light flow through.
It’s a good idea to incorporate biophilic design into an office design too. All the indoor greenery from Sussex-based specialist Office Plants you’ll see in the photos give us a connection to nature which is another wellbeing at work boost.
What is used for extra privacy in private virtual meetings?
With our HR team moving into an open-plan office, it was important to still enable total privacy when it’s required, and the Tone Acoustic Phone Booth by Screen Solutions does exactly this. The soundproof pod is perfect for confidential conversations, virtual meetings or moments of focused work for short periods. It’s in addition to another private meeting room for small in-person groups.
How to make your office more sustainable
The office redesign was also the perfect chance to increase the sustainability of our offices and facilities, as part of our highly targeted CSR activities.
A key upgrade was successfully installing a huge area of solar panels on our warehouse roofs as part of our commitment to reducing carbon emissions from direct operations.
It’s exciting to now be generating clean energy on-site at Posturite. In just the first three months, the system has averaged 7.2 MWh of monthly production, delivering approximately £1,978 in energy savings per month.
Sustainable materials are used throughout our office design and in our furniture choices. For example:
- Our Hemp Fine dining chairs by Vepa in the office social space are made from fully biological, plant-based and recyclable hemp and resin materials.
- Waste plastic bottles have been transformed into the felt material in our ECHOKIT Nature-Inspired Sound Art Acoustic Panels on the walls.
- The One pod uses 22% recycled content, 100% recyclable content and has a carbon footprint of 153 Kg CO2e.
- The beautiful flooring throughout the offices is by Tarkett, who operates within circular economy principles and holds Cradle to Cradle® certifications.
Getting good value from an office refurbishment
Adele did an incredible job in managing the budget and getting a great deal for our money. We knew the bar we wanted to get to and tried hard not to compromise on that. In our staff survey:
- 84% think redesigning and refurbishing our offices was a good investment. 50% said ‘definitely’ good.
There’s a real staff benefit to our investment and you can ask me for the stats in a year’s time for even higher productivity!
We took care to minimise wastage of assets, for example to audit our ergonomic chairs and retain and repair those that we could continue using.
How to show care and respect to employees
There are many ways to show care to your employees, and providing an inspiring and very comfortable working space is one of them.
To enhance physical wellbeing, implement an effective DSE assessment process for all Display Screen Equipment users – and of course give access to reasonable adjustments. We’ll continue to ask neurodivergent colleagues for feedback on how we can meet diverse sensory needs at the office – including continuing to improve acoustics and provide quieter spaces.
When equipping your offices, you’ll obviously need to follow the DSE regulations for working safely with display screen equipment, and you’ll see for example the adjustable ergonomic office chairs we have in these photos. We hot-desk so our staff quickly adjust the chairs and desks for optimal positioning when they arrive in the morning, and we provide good equality equipment for their homeworking too.
As seating specialists, we’ve loved choosing different chairs for different tasks, and chose the Guava Chair by MDK Office Seating for our main meeting room.
An office design to be proud of
I do think our new office design reflects our company culture of collaboration and openness at Posturite. I also feel employees have higher expectations now for wellbeing at work than they might have had pre-Covid - which is massively positive in most areas.
Visitors always seem wowed by the office transformation and I want to thank all the colleagues and partner businesses who have made this happen – including in our IT, facilities and installation teams – because this was a major project.
Let’s see if I can tick off some of my aims for the newly designed workspaces:
- Stylish yet homely design - tick
- A workspace we can use as a living showroom - tick
- A place that is inspiring aesthetically - tick
- Top comfort for productivity – tick
- Better communication and interaction – tick
- A wonderful indoor and outdoor venue for our corporate and charity events - like our summer Stroke Association fundraiser below
“I really enjoy coming into the space in the morning and using the areas throughout the day” reported back one colleague. “The social space is such an excellent conduit to building relationships with people. I like the atmosphere and really enjoy the daily interactions with staff.”
To discuss a fully comprehensive and considered office refurbishment or upgrade for your teams, get in touch with the Posturite Furniture Projects Team and we’ll be happy to help.
