More Thoughts on Planning Office Spaces for Development
A proposed rule of thumb for planning office spaces for development:
- Buy cheap desks.
- Buy expensive chairs.
Our office has it all wrong. We have desks that are solid as a rock but probably $600+ and seats that are $99 Office Max specials (just a guess). I suspect that this is the case with most offices where the planners spend a fortune on desks, dividers, cabinets, and so on (just go look up the prices of cubicle partitions from Hon or Steelcase) and go cheap on the seating.
The problem is that the majority of an office worker’s time is spent sitting. Splurge on the chair instead. Don’t go too cheap on the desks; Ikea Galants are perfectly stable, durable, lightweight, easy to hack, easy to refactor, cheap, and assembling them is a great team building exercise 🙂
There is no exception to this rule. If you want sit-to-stand type desks, just get something like this:
Kangaroo Elite Sit-to-Stand (yeah, it’s $600, but a sit-to-stand desk easily costs $1000+)
As an added bonus: if you have top candidates coming into the office for interviews, they are far more likely to be impressed by fancy chairs than fancy desks.
