If your company is making the leap and leasing new office space, you have a very important decision to make. How much space do you need? Choosing the right size is absolutely crucial, for a number of reasons:
- Comfort and morale of your employees
- Legal regulations – are you allowing the right amount of space per person?
- Practical and productive functioning of the office
- Cost – are you paying too much for space you just don’t need, or could access to more space be one of the hidden charges of leasing a serviced office?
- Growth – does the space you have allow for the future growth of the business, or would you prefer to jump to a larger serviced office as and when you need to?
What is the legal requirement for office size?
The crucial thing to consider when working out how much office space you need is the Health and Safety Executive’s guidance on the issue. HSE regulations insist that workrooms have enough space available for people to move within the room and between workstations with ease. When the room is empty, the total volume of the space when divided by the number of people working in it should be at least approximately 53.2 square feet.
At dedicated meeting and office spaces like Carrwood Park, the operating rule of thumb is to leave 60 to 70 square feet of space per person. However, this is dependent on the room size, shape and the furniture and equipment in the space. As a rough guide, a 2 person office requires around 85 square feet per person, whilst a 40 person office will need between 45 and 50 square feet.
Don’t forget about the furniture
When working out how much space per person you need to allow in your new serviced office, you need to take furniture and equipment out of the equation. These are obstacles that take up a person’s space and restrict movement, so you shouldn’t include these when trying to work out the square feet of a room, for example.
What does your business need?
It’s important to know about the minimum requirement of space per person in offices, but you should only use this as rough guidance and tailor the actual office size to the needs of your business. If you want your team to be comfortable, productive and happy – you should always leave more space than the minimum required.
As we note in our Serviced Office Size Guide, in business common sense prevails and the amount of space and equipment an employee will require is intrinsically dependent on what their job is and the type of business you operate. For example, an office for a telephone-based business like a call centre is likely to need less space than another type of company, such as a printing firm.
As our ‘Choosing the right size for your serviced office’ document states, a marketing business or print agency of approximately four employees, should ideally have an office of about 280 square feet in size.
By comparison, a procurement agency of around 90 employees would require an office of approximately 7,500 square feet.
A medium-sized agency like a procurement firm typically spends a lot of time in the office. Working on the sum that the firm has 90 employees, a business like this would trequire 95 desks, five meeting rooms and one management office.
Making the best use of office space
Of course, it’s not just the actual space you have that matters in an office, but what you do with it. As we mentioned in an earlier blog, there are ways of setting up an office to maximise productivity, but also to ensure that all workers are comfortable and have pleasant surroundings to work in. The right layout can ensure a good ‘flow’ through the workspace, with all essential equipment within easy reach and the layout as a whole making logical and practical sense. Here are a few tips on efficient office layout to get you started:
- Let in plenty of daylight
- Keep the space well-ventilated
- Create zones – for example, one zone for computer work and another for informal meetings collaborative work and breaks
- Keep groups to between 6 and 8 people – research has shown that this number of people on a bank of desks is more productive and needs less supervision (as it supervises itself)
- Stick to open plan to give yourself more flexibility
- Be smart about storage – keep everything accessible but ensure storage doesn’t eat into valuable office space.
Carrwood Park recommends a company should ideally have an office with 60 – 80 square feet per employee. This is however just a general rule of thumb and the actual office space your firm requires largely depends on the type of business you operate, your budget and what your employees are required to do.
For more tips on choosing an office that is right for you, download our serviced office size guide to work out exactly what you need in a new office space.
