2 Ways to Establish a Collaborative Workspace
In construction or design, there are two models to follow to achieve one of two kinds of spaces: designing from scratch, or as a renovation to an existing arrangement. The space created will foster either efficient channels of collaboration or creative ones. And these parameters are governed by one overarching constraint... your budget.
Collaboration Furnishing 101
The best way to save money is to make sure you don’t have to go back and fix mistakes that could have been avoided. So, before beginning, ask yourself a couple of basic questions:
- What’s a collaborative workspace?
- What kind of collaboration do you need?
The less your enterprise is designed to foster creativity as its core endeavor, the less your collaborative space will need to be a physical one. Instead, it will increasingly be a function of virtual space, conducted online using the Web, intranets, and commercially available collaborative software.
1. Efficient collaborative workspaces
Correspondingly, less input is needed from an interior designer. Most standard furniture is available from wholesale suppliers and your staff has three simple furniture requirements:
- Ergonomic chairs
- Properly sized cubicle walls
- Ample desk-space
If your business is also substantially worldwide (in staffing, customers, or both), then you may find that a cubicle-farm floorplan suits your purposes just fine. Shared physical and social space as an integral part of the workplace will be both unnecessary and unwanted. Coworkers inhabiting even adjacent cubicles may not know each other either personally or professionally, and share social and demographic backgrounds only by chance.
Thinking inside the box
The resulting mindset typically extends into the lunch areas, often the only shared social space to be found onsite. In these creatively sterile environments, private and public workspaces are essentially urban in that they are strictly segregated. Efficient collaboration is fostered by privacy, fairly strict rules of engagement, and relatively low-levels of disruptive sounds.
2. Creative collaborative workspaces
Think everything from start-up romper-room to carpenters’ cooperative. Here boundaries between public and private space will be fluid. This is the arena where you will be schooled in fostering spontaneous workspace collaboration, because freeform workplace communes will either regress to the mean or fall apart. Inexperience defines the enterprise, large or small. The past will be a poor guide because each location will have its own parameters, goals, and set of demographics. Your strategic goal will be to realize and furnish the floorplan that can help keep your revolution on track. Your choice:
Do it yourself or . . .
Get professional help
Entrepreneurs in need of easier learning curves will need expert design-advice as early as practical. The choice of an open floor-plan or closed, or some artistic combination, must be either considered in advance or, like it or not, confronted later. Creative furniture-design and layout must be more than scenery for it to encourage personal interaction, the first requirement of creative collaboration.