Introducing plants into the workplace has become a well-worn approach to reducing employee stress and improving productivity.
In fact, it’s more common than ever to find natural features livening-up the office.
But gone are the straggly spider plants and tobacco-stained yuccas redolent of the 1960s and 70s. Indoor landscaping has come on in leaps and bounds and is today a far more professional undertaking. External specialists will maintain office plants while quietly replacing those showing signs of failing, with the aim of keeping up the required levels of verdancy.
However, one thing that hasn’t changed is the use of plant pots. And despite their aesthetic appeal, many of these are still causing obstructions in offices. Along with rubbish bins, plants do much to clutter offices and provide trip hazards.
Today, however, workplace storage is at hand to help address the problem. And it’s not just for plants. Instead of being used to simply to hold files and personal effects, storage is increasingly called on to support a wide variety of essential roles within the workplace, from recycling strategies to soft seating. By integrating these functions into storage units, clutter — the enemy of productivity — can be reduced, maintaining ‘clean lines’ within the office landscape.
Steel storage manufacturer Bisley has worked on a number of high-profile projects that address the problem of integrated planting into a wider storage solution. Its storage-top steel planter boxes, for example, have waterproof plastic liners to reduce the risk of water or compost dripping onto the floor or leaking into the storage below. Natrually, these planters can be colour-matched to integrate with the storage furniture.
At One Angel Square, the Co-Operative Group’s new Manchester headquarters, such cabinets (Bisley’s LateralFile)were used throughout to provide essential storage with a sleek and minimal design. Three-drawer high cabinets were topped by integrated planters, providing greenery throughout the workspace while taking-up no additional floorspace for plant pots.
Super storage
Beyond potted plants, storage can support a wide variety of functions. The use of counter-height storage — usually placed at the end of runs of desks — as the location for shared resources, such as printers and scanners. The sense of neatness is further enhanced by feeding power and data cables through gaps between adjacent cabinets, the holes closed-off by removable covers which can be colour-matched to the furniture.
More recently, recycling units have been incorporated in a similar way, with separate bins for different types of recyclable material — such as glass, metal and plastic — accessed through slots or flaps. Bins inside the cabinets are removable, ensuring that the whole system is easily maintained and serviced. At a stroke, the visual clutter of ugly litter bins and unsightly recycling boxes became a thing of the past.
Technological advances have also prompted changes in storage design and the integration of different functions. For example, huge growth in the use of smartphones, laptops and tablets has prompted the incorporation of USB charging points within personal lockers. This avoids having a jumble of cables and adapters on a desk or at floor level.
Furthermore, wipe-clean boards can be fixed to the back of cabinets for ad hoc presentations and low-level units can even be topped with upholstered cushions to create informal seating. Banks of storage — either low-height cabinets or tall cupboards — can also be harnessed to subdivide open-plan workspaces without the need for additional screens.
What’s more, they are easy to move should the space need to be reconfigured at any point, perhaps to accommodate changing staff numbers or different teams. Bisley’s Glide II sliding door cupboards can also be fitted with perforated and foam-filled doors, which provide valuable acoustic dampening within often-noisy office environments.
Sense of belongings
The nature of what has been stored, and where, has changed radically over recent years. Indeed, there is a growing need to store personal effects — everything from motorcycle helmets to make-up. This can often conflict with the shift away from pedestals underneath desks to the more efficient banks of lockers and filing cabinets.
Mindful of the psychological impacts this shift can create — such as a sense of loss of status and feeling of impermanence — some employers have worked with designers and manufacturers to try and make remote personal storage more enticing. For example, at the BBC’s new premises at Salford Quays, banks of lockers feature photo holders on each door for customisation. These multi-coloured doors also give the locker zones a vibrant personality.
In some workspaces that have embraced these new ways of working, storage is often put on wheels so that it can follow the employee around as they ‘touch down’ at different locations. Some units are designed to wrap around bench-style desks, providing under-counter file storage, space for personal belongings and a lid that can be raised as a mini-screen to help demarcate space.
Security issues
However, the introduction of mobile storage and remote lockers has raised issues of security and access. After all, a worker’s possessions may no longer be in their line-of-sight, instead hidden far away at the opposite end of the office.
So the solution here is portable locking mechanisms, to be used in offices where lockers are not individually assigned to employees but used on a first-come-first-served flexible basis. This means that the employee effectively ‘owns’ the lock and can use it on any free locker of their choosing.
Digital combination locks have also made significant inroads, thanks to the ease with which actuation codes can be reprogrammed. Smart locks even know who, when and where they were used, adding to the sense of security.
Yet even with these developments in storage solutions, clutter can remain a problem. While the use of paper within offices has reduced, the amount of clutter hasn’t diminished — it’s just become a different type of clutter. For several years, storage manufacturers have tried to force the elimination of clutter by providing sloping or domed tops to cupboards and drawer units.
This simply means that it is impossible to leave things on top of them. However, it will take more than domed tops. It is essential for organisstions to adopt a clearly defined storage strategy on clutter that is carefully policed. It is also important to provide appropriate storage. There’s no point providing banks of filing cabinets if people need to store mobile phones and a gym kit, or want a secure place to charge their tablet.
All in all, there’s a growing demand to make storage perform numerous tasks beyond the simple act of storing things. Bisley’s Be range is a response to all of this. It’s been developed to integrate power and data management while answering the problem of where to position storage. While it might be more spatially efficient to locate banks of personal lockers and filing cabinets away from desks, both operational efficiency and staff morale might be boosted by keeping files and personal effects close to hand.
Storage solutions such as this provide flexibility, with bench desking interspersed by ‘fly-under’ and ‘fly-over ‘storage. This can take the form of simple open-fronted shelves or cupboards with space-saving sliding doors. It also provides localised meeting and training areas, as well as partially-enclosed private touchdown workspaces.
Of course, all of this represents just the latest salvo in the ongoing war between cold numerical efficiency and the actual experience of working in the modern office environment. In the past, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other, but these days, with these highly flexible furniture developments, it seems to be occupying a more sensible, middle ground.
