In several past articles, I have discussed the important connections between the decisions and results of your commercial Interior design project and other aspects of your business enterprise. From human factors to effective marketing, synergy needs to happen.
The space planning strategies, the traffic patterns that your employees, clients or customers must follow, the emotional and visual impacts of color — and your choices concerning furnishing and equipment — are all part of what your business projects to its consumers.
As time and innovation move on, many, many changes occur in the fields of health, furniture design, efficiency paradigms and performance technologies. Those changes have significant consequences!
There’s nothing new about acknowledging progress. But, those many challenges (that progress presents) can seriously affect your bottom line and severely impact who wants to work for you or where customers and clients choose to bring their business.
Your grave considerations — as a business owner, employer, professional services provider or public services agency — involve the necessity of contemporizing. Addressing contemporization (as anyone in business surely knows) can be quite costly, disruptive and otherwise challenging. The “catch 22” is merely that, to a large degree, change can be imperative regarding competition and efficiency.
A typical example from the recent past involved the public/social awareness concerning the connection between workplace “disability” issues and poor seating. The advent of remedial “ergonomic” seating validated the matter as a serious health issue. That, obviously, became a severe workplace issue and employer expense. Health professionals drove the workplace awareness of the situation from acknowledgment into remedies.
(Another interesting innovation is the availability of desktop components that adjust to allow a person to sit or stand, intermittently, while working on computer tasks.)
The furniture design industry responded with various solutions, and those answers, in turn, led to the connections between seating and our keyboard orientation. (Kind of like that funny old song about the neck bone’s connected to the shoulder bone, etc.) Together, those connections became new acknowledgments linking health, cost, efficiency and bottom line. You know that one! Bite the bullet, make the investment and get the reward down the line!
Old paradigms concerning employee incentives, work satisfaction, workplace environment expectations, benefits, and investments vs. profit margins have been (thankfully) re-visited and re-drawn! Addressing those realizations is a significant issue — especially to the small business market.
Your community Interior design professionals — in all aspects of the industry — can offer valuable insights, analyses, and remedies concerning where your operation stands in the above-cited considerations. Where health and enterprise converge, there are many workable solutions that can safeguard you, your enterprise, your employees, and your market share. (Many Interior design professionals offer insights and recommendations concerning these essential connections, at no initial cost.)
It’s important to learn the realities and the connections between your thriving and profitable business operation and the implied risk of obsolete Interior configurations and components.
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer (CID) in private practice for over 30 years. Boccabella provides Designing to Fit the Vision© in collaboration with writingservice@earthlink.net. To contact him call 707-263-7073; email him at rb@BusinessDesignServices.com or visit www.BusinessDesignServices.com or on Face Book at Business Design Services.
