Whether you’re moving to a new office or simply update your office space, you want to keep up with the latest office design trends. You might not know a lot about interior design, but many of the trends aren’t that difficult to execute. You might have an open space that you want to make look like a modern office. Trends come and go but quality changes to your meeting rooms and cubicles can improve the look of your office for years to come.
Here are some of the best office design trends in 2021.
1. Easy Access to Sanitation Features
With COVID-19, the most talked-about news item of 2021, it isn’t surprising that an open office might add sanitation features that are easy to access for everyone. This can include adding additional sinks to your break room and bathrooms. You might consider adding hand sanitizer dispensers to your conference rooms and other frequent meeting areas.
Community spaces need a sanitation feature where employees and visitors can quickly clean their hands. You want to create a working environment that helps keep your staff happy and healthy while providing peace of mind.
2. Nature-Focused Design Elements
Ventilation and air quality have become essential in office interior design this year with a pandemic to fight. As part of an open-plan office, you’ll start to see a lot of greenery, such as potted plants and indoor garden beds. You might even see vines growing up columns in the lobby of buildings and atriums.
Biophilic design is one option for a workplace design that will probably remain popular for many years. It’s one way to help ensure employee well-being and create a sustainable design with natural materials.
3. No Designated Seating
Millennials love new technologies and striving for a better work-life balance. They’re influencing design trends that lack assigned seating. The office seating will have boundaries and partitions that help keep everyone safe, but also offer a sense of community.
Meeting spaces might be booths with a table in between the seating in a corner of the room. Work styles will change to include laptops and tablets in the place of desktop computers that once kept employees anchored to a single desk. The one-size-fits-all office design trend is a thing of the past.
4. Hands-Free Technology in the Office Environment
If the past year has taught us nothing else, it’s taught us how germs can easily spread from one person to the next. This means there are office design trends that focus on putting hands-free technology in modern office design.
You can expect to see tablets affixed to walls and doors where you scan your mobile phone or a specially programmed keycard to enter the building and various offices. These tablets can also register visitors or notify your employees that an appointment has arrived.
5. Adjustable Desks
A couple of years ago the hottest design trends included office furniture. Yep, the biggest ticket item was a standing desk after research showed sitting all day was bad for employees. Now, we’re learning that standing for hours is bad on the knees and feet. Ergonomic chairs are also getting a bad rap since we need chairs that are aligned to the floor.
Adjustable desks will solve these issues. Your employees can quickly adjust the height of their desks or even move them around their offices to suit their current needs. This is much easier than moving a laptop and other work items from a sitting to a standing desk when the employee needs a change.
6. Flex Spaces
Your new floor plan should include many flexible spaces. These are areas that can be used as meeting rooms or breakrooms. Many modern offices don’t resemble anything like a traditional office or corporate culture. There are wide open spaces with smaller privacy cubicles for quiet time.
Some modern office design trends include rooms for relaxation. You add a large table to your open space that can serve as a place for multiple people to work or the office to share a meal together. With flex space, your employees can use a single space to accomplish a variety of tasks.
7. Office Furniture From Rental Companies
In the past, corporate culture has frowned on rental furniture. This type of office desks, chairs, tables, and more were seen as cheap or a sign of a struggling company. In the modern office, rental furniture has a whole new look. You can find office furniture for rent that’s high quality and cutting edge.
Many companies are working hard to minimize assets, such as furnishings, and renting office furniture is the best option. You can rent office furniture for a couple of months or a couple of years. You can use rented furniture to try out new design elements or verify that it creates the work environment you need.
8. Bright and Bold
Millennials and the modern worker love to be inspired and express their creativity. It’s hard to do that with office furniture from the old corporate culture. They don’t want dividers. They want to work inside brightly painted phone booths. Whether you hire an interior designer or do it yourself, you need to think bright and bold colors and shapes.
You don’t want a square desk and typical chair when you can find a desk with odd angles in bright hues. The color palette is going to lean towards the primary colors.
9. Privacy Pods
The modern design trends and open floor plans don’t offer much in the way of private space. There needs to be somewhere an employee can go to focus and work by themselves. Privacy pods are going to be popping up around open space floor plans.
These privacy pods are usually a small space with room to work. Another benefit is that these are usually soundproof allowing the worker to focus on their project without the noise of an open space with lots of people.
Seeking a New Office in Washington, DC?
The Genau Group is the real estate firm in the Washington, D.C. area to help you select new office space with all the natural light and open space you want. We’re always keeping up with the latest office design trends, so we can better serve our clients. Contact us today to schedule an appointment.
