How To Get The Most From Your Office Space

Whether you're planning a move to a new office or trying to get more out of the one you're already in, the questions are largely the same: does the space actually work for your business and your people, or is it just a room full of desks that everyone just has to put up with?

The average worker spends over 3,000 days in the office across their career. The quality of the environment has a real effect on productivity, wellbeing, and whether your team chooses to come in at all. In the age of hybrid working, an office has to earn its place. It needs to be somewhere people want to be, not just somewhere they feel obliged to turn up to.

Ideally, team members should feel motivated, creative and energised at work, while at the same time being able to remain focused. They need to be able to work alone to get their jobs done and in collaboration with others when needed. There are a number of ways to improve your office space to help achieve the right balance.

An Honest Appraisal

Before you view a single new space or move a single piece of furniture in your current one, be clear about what the office needs to do. A lot of office problems come down to a mismatch between how the space is set up and how people actually work. That mismatch often goes unexamined for years because no one stopped to ask whether the setup still made sense.

Start with headcount. Hybrid working means you probably don't need a desk for every person every day, and a realistic count of who's actually in on a given day can change how much space you think you need. If you're improving an existing office, this is also worth looking at: desks that sit empty three days a week might be more useful as a quiet room or a collaboration area. Our article on how much office space you need has a framework for working through the numbers.

Then think about what else the space needs to do. Quiet zones for calls that need privacy? Storage for physical stock? A room that can actually fit the whole team for a monthly town hall meeting? Accessibility modifications? If you're choosing a new space, defining these before you start viewing saves time. If you're in an existing space, it's worth asking honestly whether these needs are being met or just quietly worked around.

Get your team involved at this stage. The people who use the space every day know where it fails them, and asking them early rather than presenting a finished plan means the changes are more likely to be received well and improve productivity.

Getting The Layout Right

Layout is one of the highest-impact changes you can make, and if you're just rearranging existing furniture it costs nothing. The principle is straightforward: the layout should reflect how people actually work, not how someone imagined they would work when the office was first set up.

There are three broad approaches:

• Open plan groups desks together and makes the most of floor space. Good for teams that work collaboratively most of the time. Harder going for anyone who needs sustained concentration.
• Individual desk layouts give each person their own defined space and more separation for focused work. The trade-off: fewer desks fit, and the space tends to feel less social.
• Modular or mixed layouts combine both: some desks clustered for collaboration, others more separated for individual tasks. This is the most common request from tenants at AEIP, and usually the most practical for teams that need to do both.

Sketch it out on paper before you move anything. Ten minutes with a pencil saves a lot of dragging furniture around.

Think about meeting space too. If your building has shared meeting rooms, consider them before deciding you need to dedicate your own floor space to a boardroom. AEIP's Enterprise Centre and Davidson House, as well as Donside Co-Working, have meeting rooms available to all tenants. For informal catch-ups couple of chairs in a quiet corner works perfectly well without needing to create a separate meeting space.

Natural Light Matters

A Future Workplace survey found natural light was the most important workplace attribute for employees, ahead of everything else on the list. Other research has linked it to better sleep, fewer headaches, and less eye strain. If you're choosing a new office, it's worth factoring in alongside the rent. If you're already in one, think about whether you're actually making the most of the light you have.

Try to arrange desks so everyone has a sightline to a window. They don’t all need to be sitting right next to one. Just being able to look up and see daylight occasionally makes a measurable difference. Where glare is an issue, adjustable blinds let people manage their own situation without making it worse for everyone else.

If your space is short on natural light, decent artificial lighting is worth the investment. Harsh fluorescent strips are genuinely bad for concentration and mood, and replacing them with LEDs that match daylight colour temperature is not a big job or a significant cost.

Air quality and temperature belong in the same conversation. Stuffiness kills concentration. The argument about office temperature is probably unwinnable (there will always be someone in a jumper and someone fanning themselves), but giving people some control over where they sit goes a long way.

Ergonomics & Equipment

People spend upwards of five hours a day at their workstations, which is a long time to be sitting in the wrong position. The basics are well established: monitors at eye level, feet flat on the floor, mouse accessible with the arm roughly at a right angle. They're also the things that get ignored until someone starts complaining about a bad back or a stiff neck.

Height-adjustable desks are worth considering if the budget runs to them. Standing for part of the day is better for backs and tends to sharpen focus. If you're not replacing desks, monitor arms and a decent chair can make a significant difference for much less money.

Shared kit like printers and servers needs to be somewhere accessible without being disruptive. If it's currently located`     next to the person who's on the phone all day, that's a layout problem worth fixing.

On connectivity: check that your internet speed actually suits how your team works, whether you're reviewing an existing setup or moving somewhere new. Remote calls, cloud storage, and video conferencing put more demand on a connection than most businesses realise until something stops working at the worst possible moment. At AEIP, our offices include category 5e cabling and a shared high-speed fibre connection, but it's a question worth asking wherever you are.

Colour, Decor & Brand

How much you can change here depends on your situation. In a leased space you generally have a free hand within the lease terms. In a serviced office you may need landlord sign-off, though most will consider it for longer-term tenants if the changes are reversible. If your current office is beige and you own the property, you have no excuse.

Colour does affect how people feel in a room. Green calms, blue tends to aid focus, yellow and orange lift energy. Your brand colours are a reasonable starting point, but using them wall to wall tends to look more like a trade show stand than a place people want to spend their working week. Accents on a neutral background usually work better.

Where redecorating isn't on the table, artwork, plants, and decent furniture choices change how a space feels without needing approval from anyone. A well-presented office also matters for clients and new hires who come in for the first time and make up their minds about you quickly.

Storage is consistently underestimated. Clutter accumulates faster than anyone expects, and no amount of asking people to tidy up replaces having somewhere to actually put things.

Plants, Friction And The Small Stuff

Pot plants are one of the easiest, cheapest improvements you can make and the ones often dismissed as too minor to bother with. The evidence says otherwise: studies have linked indoor plants to lower anxiety, less fatigue, and a 15% productivity boost compared to offices without them. They're cheap, they work, and they're one of the easiest improvements you can make to an existing space today.

While you're taking stock, make a list of the small things that cause daily friction: the socket that's in the wrong place, the Wi-Fi that drops during calls, the noisy kettle that takes five minutes, the printer nobody can connect to, the dripping tap, the kitchen that makes you feel slightly depressed every time you use it. These things feel too small to fix, so nobody fixes them, and everyone lives with them indefinitely. However, small annoyances compound over time, and they shape how people feel about coming in.

Maintenance matters too. In a serviced office, cleaning and repairs are typically handled by the landlord. In a leased or owned space, you're managing more of it yourself. Either way, establish a clear process for reporting and dealing with issues before things deteriorate. A scruffy, poorly maintained office affects morale faster than most managers appreciate.

IT & Connectivity

If you're moving, sort your IT well before the move. Not the day before. A team that can't connect to anything on day one is a team that spends the day unproductive and grumpy, and the memory lingers.

Whether you're moving or reviewing your current setup, think through how your team accesses shared files and tools. Can everyone find what they need? Is the video conferencing reliable enough for client calls? Is there somewhere quiet with decent audio for calls that need privacy? If the answer to any of those is "sort of" or "people manage," it's worth fixing properly rather than continuing to manage around it.

Sustainability & Standards

Basic house rules are worth establishing clearly, ideally when you're moving in or doing a reset on an existing space: clear desks at end of day, communal areas kept tidy, nothing blocking access routes. Offices that skip this conversation tend to decline gradually. Getting standards back up once they've slipped is much harder than setting them in the first place.

Businesses in Scotland have legal obligations around waste separation and recycling under the Waste (Scotland) Regulations. Check whether a waste collection contract is already in place or whether you need to arrange one. In addition, switching lights off and not leaving equipment running overnight are small habits that matter both for environmental reasons and, depending on your contract, for your energy costs.

Consult Your Team

Whether you're setting up a new office or improving an existing one, the most useful thing you can do is ask the people who use it. Not just tell them what's changing: asking what would make a difference to how they work, and what's currently making it harder.

People who've had a say in their workspace tend to take more pride in it. You'll also catch things you wouldn't otherwise spot. The team member who knows the afternoon sun makes one corner unusable. The one who's quietly been working around a connectivity problem for six months. The one who's clocked that the meeting room is too small for the whole team but hasn't said anything because nobody asked.

Keep collecting feedback once any changes are in place, and act on what you reasonably can. An office is rarely optimal from day one, whether it's brand new or freshly rearranged. The willingness to adjust based on how things work in practice is what makes the difference between a space people tolerate and one they genuinely like coming to.

The effort of setting up or improving an office thoughtfully, and keeping it that way, is what turns a functional space into one your team will actively choose over the sofa at home. That's true whether you're starting from scratch in a new building or just finally fixing the things everyone's been quietly complaining about for the past five years.

Office Improvement Action Checklist

Even picking one or two of these points to introduce is a good start when improving your office space

• Maximise natural light where possible, or use high-quality artificial lighting.
• Ensure ergonomic workstations, including adjustable desks and chairs, and provide training on their proper use.
• Encourage regular movement and stretch breaks throughout the day.
• Use colours strategically to influence mood and reinforce branding, incorporating them through decor if redecoration isn't an option.
• Provide diverse meeting and collaboration spaces, equipped with reliable technology for hybrid working.
• Create quiet zones for focused work and calls, using sound-absorbing solutions.
• Address office temperature by considering individual preferences and providing options for personal control.
• Ensure excellent ventilation and air quality.
• Involve employees in decisions regarding office improvements to ensure relevance and buy-in.
  

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If you're thinking about a fresh start in a new office in Aberdeen, we'd be happy to show you around Aberdeen Energy and Innovation Parks. We have serviced offices, leased units, coworking space, laboratory and workshop space across two sites in Bridge of Don. Get in touch today and we’ll be happy to help.