Office Design Trends To Watch Out For In 2017

Here at ACI, we carry out a lot of fit out projects each year and, thanks to this, we’re lucky enough to get a birds-eye view of what’s on trend when it comes to office design. Below you’ll find some of the main trends that we think will emerge in 2017.

When it comes to choosing furniture, we’re seeing employers focusing on not only wanting their staff to be comfortable, but also healthy in their day-to-day working environment.

We’ve seen an absolute explosion in the demand for sit/stand and height adjustable desking systems and from the feedback we’ve received, employees are becoming much more productive and feeling better in terms of their posture where these desks are installed.

We’re also seeing quirky items entering the office environment courtesy of yoga-inspired members of staff, with inflatable medicine balls becoming a common sight as an alternative to the traditional office chair. Whether health and safety would be too happy about this is another matter!

I think a lot of the large corporations will be the first to admit that they got a bit carried away when it came to the ‘open plan office’. Although a great idea in principle (studies found it improved productivity and collaboration between different departments), in practice it wasn’t the best thing for the more introverted employees of a workforce.

We’ve been helping a lot of our clients to create hybrid office spaces that have elements of open plan design along with ‘quiet zones’ partitioned off so that employees can get away when they feel the need.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 5 years and have managed to miss the likes of Google and Facebook making waves with their unconventional offices, you’ll notice that we’re all starting to follow suit and prioritise our employees and the enjoyment they get out of coming to work (have a look at our post about what features employees would like to see from their office).

We’re increasingly being asked to source things like pool tables, foosball tables and games machines to allow staff members to take a break every now and then.

It makes sense, a happy worker is a productive worker.

We love the challenge of thinking outside the box when it comes to adding the fun element to your office interior.

We had an interesting project recently for a social media agency that had told us how important their corporate branding was to them and how proud their employees were to promote the brand. They asked us, how can we bring the brand into the design of our office?

Their brand was quite edgy and, being an agency, they wanted their office to look impressive to potential recruits and clients.

We ended up getting a street artist in to spray paint the walls in their brand colours and even stencil their logo onto the wall. The exposed brickwork that the artwork was sprayed onto set the image off and the result was fantastic.

We’re seeing a lot of clients wanting to incorporate their brand colours and corporate artwork into their office design.

It’s great to see so many companies putting their employees first and wanting to create a nice environment for their staff. The employees that we’ve spoken to are enjoying it too, with most of the staff members we speak to after the projects saying what a difference it has made to their working lives.