Guide to Creating a Flexible Office

Explore the possibilities

Before choosing a path, you need to understand the concepts of the new workplace, and ways different designs benefit different types of companies.

I recommend: The Whole Building Design Guide, a resource organization for the design community, offers a helpful overview of Design for the Changing Workplace. Although located in the UK, Flexibility offers a site chock full of good ideas and resources for flexible office planning. See what's percolating at the Fraunhofer Office Innovation Center (OIC) in Germany, a lab for new ways of working. Take advantage of your tax dollars at work and download the U.S. General Services Administration's report on Innovative Workplaces: Benefits and Best Practices, which includes numerous case studies you can use as blueprints for your own design.

Ask an expert

Office planning consultancies, sometimes also known as facilities planners, are adept at developing an understanding of your business needs and mapping those to a matching floorplan.

I recommend: Facilities planning consultants Office Space Planners know the nuts and bolts of the new workplace, and they work in all 50 states. Check out enterprise design consultancy Intentional Design, or ask My Office Planning Group to hook you up with a consultant or dealer from among its consortium.  Of course, who's a better expert about what your employees need than they are? Consider conducting an office survey to discover what your workers want in an office design.

Use software to try out designs

If a consultant is beyond your reach, software may help you translate what you've learned about leading-edge offices into a design for your company.

I recommend: Business graphics software SmartDraw offers facilities planning tools, including sample office floorplans to get you started. Live Interior 3D helps you design your office in three dimensions.

Shop among vendors whose products match your plans

Figure out what you need? Go buy. Can't exactly figure out what you need? Go buy -- the bigger vendors are up on modern office designs and can tell you where their products fit. Just remember that, unlike the office planning consultants, the vendors are not objective.

I recommend: Clone Cubicles sells cubicles, sure, but they also provide onsite space planning and design, and even a free service through which they crank out a design to your specifications in 48 hours or less. Biz furniture maker Herman Miller's site offers design ideas and case studies, plus Design Centers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles where you can walk through the latest office designs while learning about their benefits; check out H.M.'s V-Wall movable walls.  Knoll, another leading office furniture source, also offers leading-edge ideas for workplaces; see Knoll's Impromptu Team Areas. Ergo In Demand sells a wide variety of partitions, desks, tables and chairs, including partitions that connect by magnets so that they can easily be pulled apart and reconfigured to create instant teamrooms or new private spaces. Office supply vendor Smead offers mobile computer workstations that go wherever the work is.