9 Office Types You Probably Don’t Know About
We have talked in detail about how did the concept of office start and touched upon the different categories of workspaces. This blog will discuss these different categories in detail while highlighting the characteristic and usability features of each.
To begin with, an office is defined as a place, or a room, where administrative work is done. It could be a small room, a floor in a building, or an entire building, that employs white-collared workers.
Broadly categorizing, a workspace is either a corporate space or a non-corporate space.
WORKSPACES — TYPES & CHARACTERISTICS
Corporate spaces are what we have seen in well-established corporate firms — multiple individual desks, cubicles, executive offices, manager cabins, and designated areas for meetings, discussions, conference, video-conference, training and other events/activities. They are designed to suit the traditional work-style and so operate as per set rules like dress code, timings, discipline, and management control over operations. These offices fall under organized real estate sector and so have high fixed costs.
Non-corporate spaces were driven by the concept of flexible working and are trending due to strong technological infrastructure support, their pay-per-use nature, and “no rules” policy. Non-corporate offices are further sub-categorized as alternate, transit, home and community workspaces.
i. Alternate offices or ‘office-away-from-the-office’, are “built” to suit time-bound, temporary projects. These could be business centers with individual desks and designated meeting/conference rooms, site office, or the client site, depending on the kind of work. These provide time and location flexibility but the management can incur high costs with little or no control on the team.
ii. Transit workspaces like hotels or airport lounges work best for business travelers. They are economical and support last-minute job completion.
iii. Home workspace is very popular with freelancers, startups, and working mothers. Though it may seem to lack professionalism, work-from-home guarantees time control and work-life balance which in turn enhances productivity.
iv. Community workspaces like coffee shops or coworking/shared workspaces are extremely affordable and popular with startups, freelancers and even corporate employees who prefer to catch-up on “quick-meetings-over-coffee”. Coworking/shared workspaces offer a perfect blend of office-like professionalism and flexibility which contributes to enhanced employee efficiency.
Apart from these, offices can also be categorized by workspace type:
a) Training room — uninterrupted spaces that comfortably accommodates different-sized groups for trainings. Equipped with comfortable seating, projector, screen and flipcharts, training rooms are designed for echo-free acoustic.
b) Team office — cozy spaces depending on the team size to encourage bonding, team offices have individual/shared desks, plug-points, and storage areas. The design and décor reflect team purpose and help enhance productivity.
c) Conference room — usually designed for 6–12 members, conference rooms resemble boardroom setup and are equipped with telephones, plug-points, flipcharts, and screen and projector for data/report presentation or for video-conferencing.
d) BPO spaces — shared or individual desks with telephones and computers that are used for customer service, business development and other BPO roles.
e) Day Offices — low-cost, instantly available offices on hourly or daily basis. You can use these offices are for quick and temporary usage in short term.
While Day offices are replacement for coffee shops, these are properly equipped with office amenities such projectors, whiteboards and wifi. Unlike cafes, these offices adds privacy to your business ideas and gives you a disturbance free environment.
Workspace images source: www.officingnow.com
Being a leader in coworking workspace provider, OfficingNow offers all of the above mentioned workspace types at the most pocket-friendly prices. If you own any such workspaces, furnished or otherwise, that are unutilized, list your inventory with us to make good use and money. Visit our website to know more.
