How can you design your office for success?

Attracting quality clients is hard enough these days. You nurture them through your organisation’s sales funnel, put in the legwork to build a good relationship and finally get that all important face-to-face meeting. Any marketer knows the context or package is often more important than the product you’re trying to sell. So what does your office design say about you?

According to Kissmetrics, 90% of people are visually influenced when making a purchase. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. Visuals effect our emotions, and our purchasing choices are based on our emotions.

Let’s look at an example:

Would you be willing to spend £100 on a bottle of your favourite perfume or champagne if it was offered in a cheap disposable plastic bottle? Even if you were assured that the product inside was exactly the same?

If you actually went ahead and bought the perfume or champagne, you’d surely be expecting a discount, right?

From this we can discern that you’re actually interested in the packaging rather than the product inside. If the packaging of a product becomes damaged, supermarkets are forced to discount the product or sell it as B-Stock, even though the product inside is perfect.

So if you consider your workspace the package of your business, what are potential clients thinking? Do they think they deserve a discount because of the visuals? Or will they walk away entirely, unimpressed by the feeling and lack of thought surrounding your office design?

How to make a great first impression

Meeting prospective clients in your office gives you a great advantage – you’re on home turf. You can set the scene, show your professionalism and how busy your company is. If clients see that other firms are trusting you to help them, they’re more likely to do the same. This is called social proofing. This is all great, but how can your office décor effect it?

Well, what do you want them to think of you?

• You want them to be amazed and impressed.
• Tastefully emphasising your company accreditations, awards and accolades can work wonders.
• Highlight your company’s experience and reputation to inspire confidence.
• Create intimacy, their project matters to you.
• You’ll want to create positive expectations.
• Easily recognisable signage means clients won’t get lost.

Hosting your meeting in a tastefully designed office with comfortable furniture adds value to your work. More importantly, it will create positive emotions towards the meeting, which as we now know, affects purchasing decisions!

A clear and concise signage scheme means visitors will always know where meeting rooms and facilities are, making them feel assured – this can only help purchasing decisions! Also, your external signage is the first point of reference visitors will have with your business or brand. So it makes sense to go big and bold here. We’ve developed tasteful bronze, brushed steel, fluorescent neon, and even 3D backlit cut letters for our customers! How can you make your office exterior work for you?

So where do we start?

Comfortable and well maintained furniture – squeaky or leaning chairs makes it seem like your company can’t afford to repair or replace them, or even worse, doesn’t care about the detail!

A clean office is a successful office! Over spilling bins or dusty tables again will look like you’re unable to maintain your work space, so how can you be trusted to maintain that important contract?

Another top tip is to maintain a sensible temperature in meeting space. Your visitors are sure to remember a boiling hot or freezing cold meeting room – and not in a positive light!

Has your business won any trophies or awards? If so – get them up high where everyone can see them. If not, why not use certificates and accreditations instead. Also, customer reviews are one of the most powerful tools out there for social proofing. Why not pick some of your best and put them on the walls of your offices, meeting rooms and stairwells? Even putting them in the staff rooms and breakout spaces can keep your staff engaged as they see the fruits of their labour!

A well thought out colour scheme! It’s well known that the colour red keeps us alert and motivates us to take action, but its not suitable for economic negotiations. Yellow attracts the eye – which is way a lot of signage is yellow! Green and blue are both relaxing and stress reducing whilst brown wood-like shades make us feel secure.

Did you know oranges, browns and purples make us feel warmer than the actual room temperature? Some businesses use this clever trick to reduce their heating bills! How can you use this knowledge in your office design?

You could even go a step further and use office graphics – such as digitally printed wallpaper. This is attractive and can really bolster your business in the eyes of your customers. If you’re based in London, why not have the London skyline to show your businesses is an intricate part of the city? You could have a calming scene in your meeting rooms, or even a busy bustling scene in your canteen to reflect the lively hustle and bustle of a thriving office space!

The other side of the coin

So we’ve talked about how you can use your inspired office interior to help sales and make your clients feel positive about your business, but what about your workers?

Surely, your workforce is the backbone of your business – and here are some scary stats to prove it!

Strong office design can make your employees 33% happier, and happy employees are known to be 31% more productive! When you consider that the average person in the UK will spend 3,515 days at work in their lifetime, that extra 31% equates to a whopping 1090 extra days of productivity – just by redesigning your office! Can your business really afford not to do this?

58% of all high achieving employees said they need quieter office spaces to aid problem solving. In addition, 54% of employees said that their office felt distracting and made it hard to concentrate on tasks.

Now you’re armed with this knowledge – and you’re still reeling from that productivity statistic…

How do we start this process?

Adding some paint, flare, and colour to your meeting rooms and offices is a great start. However, why not let the experts plan it for you? The Octink interior design team know what works for businesses, and specialise in offices and work environments.

We can create colour schemes, customer journey plans, signage, office graphics, even fit-out and refurbishment plans. The best part is, we produce all these in-house at our production facility in Brentford, then our installation teams will come to your office and install it all for you! We’re the one-stop experts for office interiors.

Do you have questions? Let’s continue the conversation over at enquiries@octink.com

About the author: Octink are a specialist supplier of display graphics, signage, and hoardings.

All images used in this article show examples of Octink’s work.