The Best Office Furniture for Social Distancing

The outbreak of COVID-19 has meant that more people than ever before are working remote.

As employees begin to return to the office, businesses must ensure their health and safety. This includes reducing the risk of infection by keeping spaces clean and ensuring people keep six feet apart.

Your office furniture and design can be a huge help or hindrance. Make sure that you have the best office furniture to keep employees safe, healthy, productive, and comfortable.

Desks and Workstations

Desks and workstations are crucial in any office. This is probably where your employees will spend the majority of their day and will be most productive.

As employees return to work, allocate specific desks to individuals. If you stop people from sharing space and surfaces, you reduce the risk of spreading infection.

Consider using singular desks or workstations that only one person sits at. Alternatively, invest in larger shared work stations, so that people can sit further apart from each other.

Partitions Between Desks

One way to keep employees safe is to install partitions or plexiglass between workstations. This will act as a physical barrier, helping to prevent the spread of infection amongst colleagues.

Comfortable Chairs

It is important that employees have comfortable and supportive chairs, especially as employees will likely be spending more time at their workstations than before. There will be fewer in-person meetings, and people may feel reluctant to move about the office as freely as they once did.

Cabinets or Drawers

Encourage employees to adopt a clean desk policy. All nonessential items are placed in cabinets or drawers nearby at the end of the day.

This makes it much easier to completely sanitize work stations at the beginning and end of every day.

Screens and Speakers

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, some employees may continue to work from home, either part-time or full time. Internal and external face-to-face meetings are also expected to reduce. This means that virtual meetings and collaboration will increase drastically.

Installing large screens and speakers may be a worthwhile investment for your company. This equipment should be compatible with your computer or mobile device. This would make it easier to see, hear, and communicate with colleagues, clients, and contacts who meet with you virtually.

Conference Room Tables

Conference rooms are likely to be underused. In-person meetings and conferences will be smaller, as more people work remotely and fewer people can share space while maintaining a safe distance.

Maximize the space that you have by investing in larger conference room tables. That way, you will be able to use most of the conference room space available, and safely seat employees six feet apart from each other.

Or, turn unused conference rooms into personal office space. Wall systems allow you to turn an open space into smaller spaces through a few glass partitions. When you’re ready to go back to business as usual, they’re easy to remove.