Soft Furniture for Breakout, Reception & Collaborative Working

Twist n’ Sit

Luna

What are the main uses for our Soft Furniture range?

• Reception Seating
• Breakout Seating
• Informal Meeting Space
• Formal Meeting Space
• Collaborative Work Space
• Drop-in Seating – a more relaxed & comfortable alternative to Hot Desking
• Quiet Zone – where higher levels of concentration are needed
• Acoustic Space where private conversations and phone calls can take place

A New Look Office for a New Generation

Our working habits have changed. No longer do we all work from the office every day. Many still do, but whether we do or not, we don’t necessarily need to, nor want to work at a desk all the time. Now that we all have laptops, iPads, mobile phones and mobile data, work can be conducted from pretty much anywhere, including a comfortable lounge chair or acoustic meeting pod. Because of this, we’re seeing the face of the office change dramatically. They’re becoming friendlier, more homely places and much more drop-in drop-out café style with less space allocated to desks and more set aside for comfortable & less formal soft furniture and touch down tables. Those desks that do remain are often assigned as ‘Hot-Desks’ with no individual ownership, and increasingly these are being changed out for ergonomic Sit-Stand desks as they become more affordable.

What are we doing about it?

The manufacturer we partner with is Europe’s  ‘go-to’ designer-producer and is leading the way by understanding the ever changing office working practices and designing innovative and practical products to facilitate these moves. As an end-user supplier we ensure that we have the tools and products to help you create the perfect office environment – at a very affordable price.

What do we mean by ‘Flexible Space’ and how do we create it?

Office occupancy, particularly in Central London, requires a very significant financial outlay and one that most businesses typically commit to for 5 years at a time, so getting the most out of the space and building in flexibility for change during that period is rather important.

The two major factors are;  how staffing levels might change during the lifetime of the lease and how working practices might alter during the same period.  By far the biggest inflexible ‘space grabber’ is the floor to ceiling partitioned office and meeting room. Of course, most businesses have a genuine need for  one or more meeting rooms for client meetings, board meetings and other situations that require sound and/or visual privacy from the general office and the same can apply to offices for the company executives. But, not only are these rooms expensive to build (and to take down again at the end of the lease by the way!), once they’re up they’re up and whatever floor space they occupy is fixed for the duration.  Now consider the typical office with a boardroom big enough for large meetings, but very rarely, if ever, is it used to its full capacity. More likely it’s used for small 2 or 3 person meetings or even just one person trying to conduct a telephone conversation in private away from the bustle of the office. In the meantime, other colleagues are crying out for somewhere to have their own meetings or quiet time but to no avail. So you see, the cellular meeting room (and executive office) are fixed, inflexible spaces, much of the time wasting vast amounts of valuable floor space that could otherwise be used for additional meeting spaces.

So, how do we create flexible space?  One way is to create one very large room with a series of room dividing Bi-Folding Moving walls that can be opened or closed off to create multiple private rooms of different sizes dependent on the immediate requirement. Used in conjunction with folding conference tables this is an excellent way  to create flexible meeting space but it can get very expensive, and it still doesn’t usually fully optimise the available space.  This is a topic in itself and is covered elsewhere on this site.

The answer, therefore, is to have fixed cellular rooms only where absolutely necessary and populate the rest of the open plan office wherever space permits with Flexible, Relocatable Soft Furniture and Acoustic Furniture to suit the purpose. Of course, the type of furniture depends on what you are wishing to achieve:

• For a high level of sound privacy: Enclosed Acoustic Booths with Integral Roof and Door .
• Slightly hushed conversation with moderate visual privacy: High sided open-topped Acoustic Pods
• General comfort with no real sound or visual privacy: Regular or Modular Soft Seating and Tables

Soft Furniture & Acoustic Furniture Benefits & Justification

1. Create multiple meeting spaces within the same foot print of a single fixed cellular room
2. Can be moved to different locations within the office when office space re-configuration is necessary
3. Can easily be re-configured into different sizes and shapes
4. Can be taken with you to your new office at the end of lease
5. None of the considerable costs and complications associated with building partition walls  including the cost of partition materials and labour, moving/altering/installing air conditioning plant, lighting & fire sounders/smoke detectors, building control approvals, landlords licence to alter and finally the dilapidation costs of removal and making good at the end of lease term
6. Dampen the ambient noise within the office in general with the introduction of multiple soft surfaces and acoustic materials
7. Brighten up the office with lots of colour through fabric variety
8. Create a generally more friendly, homely and relaxed office environment that will contribute towards staff satisfaction and wellbeing
9.  Encourage staff who might otherwise prefer to work from home back into the office and spend more time in engaging in productive collaboration with colleagues that is less effective from a distance or over Zoom.
10. Greater general productivity from staff created by making available these multiple informal meeting and work areas.