How do you choose office furniture?

Today the workplace is our second home.

Office or workplace is a second home in this millennium. We spent more hours at our workplace compared to home. Is it not true?

Career is life and life is a career. This mantra has been adopted literally by our professionals. It does not matter that they are at the threshold of youth or middle-age. Team-meetings, client-meetings, deadlines, night-outs are common buzzwords in today’s work environment, be it a multinational organization or a small startup.

Workplace injuries and effect on the health of professionals

Hours of sedentary work is taking a toll on the spine. It is compressing the discs and decreasing the blood circulation in the body. The cases of carpal tunnel are rising along with pain in the neck and back muscles. 

Spondylosis is becoming common among today’s working professionals because of hours of repetitive motion with a traditional mouse and keyboard.

Poor posture while sitting is giving rise to back pain and neck pain. It is one of the major causes of absenteeism in the workplace. 

Is the furniture responsible for health-related injuries at the workplace?

The sad truth is YES. Employers are bound by law to provide a safe work environment to all their employees. Employees are entitled to compensation if they suffered illness or injury due to working on the premises of the employer. 

Apart from health-related injuries e.g. carpal tunnel, back pain, neck pain, and spondylosis, common workplace injuries are slips, falls, and trips. Eye strains are a common problem among people who work long hours on computer and laptop screens.

The reason behind all this is that the furniture design and office layout is not tuned for workplace safety. Sometimes these ergonomic aspects are given less importance than the color and style of workplace furniture.

You may be puzzled about why so many health-related issues are discussed in the context of corporate working life? Because Decorwoods has done extensive work to reduce this pain. 

So what are the parameters while choosing office furniture?

There is a set of parameters to pay attention to while purchasing furniture for the office. But the ergonomics stands on the top of the list.

Parameters	Priority
Ergonomics	High Priority
Mobility or ease of furniture shifting	Medium Priority
Maximum utilization of space	High Priority
Made by Interior design professionals with own manufacturing	High Priority
Durability	Medium Priority
Lifetime support	Medium Priority
Resale value	Low Priority

Ergonomics

Office furniture should follow principles of good ergonomics to be useful for employees. So the furniture makers who give the highest priority to this in their designs are most sought after. They should have an inhouse design team to work on this aspect of office furniture like chairs, office desks, and footrest.

Mobility and ease of shifting

Rarely entrepreneurs keep their workplace tied to one location. Most of the startups and small and medium enterprises do not prefer to invest in commercial property. Rather than they choose to have long term lease or rental to avoid blocking a substantial amount of capital.

It becomes necessary to shift offices along with furniture on a timely basis. The rigid design of furniture without the facility to dismantle and mantle again is a disadvantage. Furniture which is modular and which can be easily mantled and dismantled as building blocks are the best for the workplace.

Maximum utilization of space

The commercial real-estate is very costly even on a rental or lease basis. This cost gets added to the working capital requirement on a monthly basis and it is one of the highest costs for running an office in metro cities.

This has given development to a new phenomenon of shared workspaces or co-working spaces like WeWork, Regus,91 springboards,etc. Still, the companies that provide these facilities need to have good office layout with furniture and desking system utilizing maximum spaces.

Furniture makers who have a professional team of Interior Designers to work on the office desking system provide maximum utilization of desking space in the workplace.

Inhouse manufacturing with a team of Interior Designers 

Office furniture which is of standard designs and sizes made to fit any office or workplace is a bad product to choose from.  Office furniture and the desking system should be custom made as per layout, area, and location of the workplace or office. It ensures maximum utilization of floor area.

Also, custom made desking system and office furniture ensures that it gels with the color, theme, and philosophy of the design conceptualized by architects and interior designers.

Durability

It depends on the materials used for making office furniture. The input materials to make office desking systems range from high-quality woods like Red Oak, Ash, Bich, Maple, Cherry, Teak to pre-laminated boards like MDF, HDF & particleboard. Generally, the base materials used to make office furniture are plyboard, commercial plyboard, marine plyboard & blockboard. It gives light weight to furniture made while preserving strength and durability.

Red Oak, Ash, Bich, Maple, Cherry, and Teak are the wood that is used to make home furniture as these are very costly compared to ply and particle boards. These woods offer the highest durability, but the trade-off is the total cost of ownership of it

.

The quality of the hardware is of utmost importance.  Stainless steel with chrome plating and brass materials are best for hinges, locks, chains, knobs, and other hardware material.

Lifetime Support

It is always advisable to choose a furniture manufacturer who offers lifetime support for the furniture supplied. It ensures that repairing and maintenance can be performed at the lowest cost possible.

Resale Value

Let us accept the fact that new ideas give birth to new enterprises. Also, enterprises fade away with natural death as the products and services are no longer needed by society. Closing up a business is a frequent phenomenon in startup circles. The question arises:  Can we recover our investment in office furniture? 

The resale value of furniture is an important criterion for making a substantial investment in starting an office or workspace.