Style: Formal or Avant-Garde? When shopping for cubicle furniture, you want to make sure you have the right look. Office furniture comes in a wide assortment of colors and styles, so it’s easy to buy cubicle furniture that, upon further examination, is revealed to clash with the existing environment: walls, floors, ceiling work, lighting, etc. So when selecting your cubicle furniture, think of the overall look of your office. Is the dominant style traditional, or modern? This will influence your choice of cubicle furniture, whether it’s stylish and high tech, or traditional and earthy.

Give some thought to the impression your office furniture makes on clients. A firm of accountants needs different styles of cubicle furniture from an ad agency; a call center shouldn’t have the same kind of cubicle furniture as a law firm! The impression you make depends largely on what your clients need from you. A design firm wants its cubicle furniture to look adventurous and creative; an accounting firm needs cubicle furniture that helps it look solid and dependable.

You should also be mindful if the style of cubicle furniture you’re selecting is timeless, or is bound to go out of style in the next few years. Sure, your cubicle furniture looks great now – but in five years, will the new employees be as squeamish in their office furniture as they would be wearing 1970s-era leisure suits?    (read more)

The office cubicle is only a stepping stone to a bigger office, the thinking goes. Senior officers shouldn’t be put in an ordinary office cubicle, they should be put in an office of their own! One with real hardwood office furniture and not the usual particleboard crap of the hoi polloi!

The corner office, though, is more and more becoming a thing of the past. Real power can reside from a corner office cubicle, not an oak-panelled corner office.

Hizzoner Works from an Office Cubicle

Consider the mayor of New York City. Michael Bloomberg got rid of private offices and settled on an open office cubicle design that mimicked a Wall Street trading floor. “Walls are barriers,” Bloomberg told Time Magazine, “and my job is to remove them.”

A 2007 renovation upgraded the bullpen, adding a sweet flatscreen TV to the mix:

Since the last time we published a list of cubicle accessories (titled “Pimp My Cubicle”), we’ve come across a bumper crop of more cubicle decorations that you can use to liven up your cube.

Personalize your cubicle with these cubicle accessories, and not only will you come across as a more interesting person, those fabric walls won’t feel like they’re closing in much.

Image courtesy of Jailbreak Toys. All rights reserved.

App Magnets. Can’t afford an iPad? Use these magnetic cubicle wall accessories from Jailbreak Toys to transform your magnetic whiteboard into the next best thing. No, you won’t be able to use these to surf the web, find your location, look up movie schedules, or improve your sex life… but can a real iPad secure those notes and bills to the wall? We didn’t think so.

Each App Magnets cubicle accessories set comes with 18 individual epoxy magnets, each measuring 7/8″ x 7/8″, and retailing for $12.99 (less $486.01 compared to the real thing).

(Continue reading about these indispensable cubicle accessories)

For many business owners, refurbished office cubicles represent the absolute last choice for furnishing their offices. These days, it doesn’t have to be.

Refurbished office cubicles are not just cheaper than brand-new, they’re often not much different from brand-new.

It’s not a small benefit, as office managers seek to balance cost, function, and appearance. These days, refurbished office cubicles are the best way to reach that balance.

As used cubicles cost almost half of its new counterparts, it wins hands-down in the price department. As function goes, refurbished office furniture performs as well as brand-new, so office managers suffer no sacrifice in that area.

And as far as appearance is concerned, only the most eagle-eyed of office workers will be able to spot the difference between refurbished and brand-new.

More good news after the jump. (read more)

If you’re a facility manager checking out cubicles for sale, count yourself lucky. At no other time in cubicle retail history, since Herman Miller’s Bob Propst invented the office cubicle in 1968, has stock been so high and price points so low. But how will you choose from the wide selection available in the market? Simple – consider the factors presented below.

Collaboration potential. According to a 2008 Steelcase Workplace Satisfaction Survey, making connections with coworkers represents a huge quality-of-work issue to a majority of respondents – 98% believe they require access to the right people, compared to 97% who believe they need access to the right technology and tools.

This affects your choices when checking out cubicles for sale – do your cubicles permit collaboration? Do individual cubicles have space for colleagues to come in and discuss? Do you have specialized cubicles specifically for group work, absent a readily available conference room? In a work environment where consultation is key to productivity, these may be make-or-break questions when considering cubicles for sale.

More criteria after the jump. (Read more)

Armless office chairs are usually the last choice for many office workers. No surprise there – why give up the comfort and great optics of an office chair with arms?

Still, armless office chairs have a role to play in the office. A supporting role, true, but an important one nonetheless.

Armless office chairs are ideal for offices with little space to spare and only a tiny budget to work with. Sometimes the two go together; tenants of small office spaces generally don’t have much overhead to splurge on the latest Herman Miller office chairs for the whole crew. So armless office chairs can, and do, fill the slack.

Because of the lack of arms, armless office chairs can be slid under the desk with little trouble. And the lack of arms doesn’t get in the way of most armless office chairs’ appearance: they come in a wide variety of designs and colors, one of which is bound to suit your office needs.

Even with armless office chairs, you still need to do your due diligence with regard to comfort and adjustability. Your armless office chair should be adjustable, and work well with your body frame.

If you’re in the market for armless office chairs, you should test more than one before settling on your final choice. (In our opinion, Cubicles.com’s seating department is a great place to begin choosing.)

This is crucial – there’s a high correlation between comfort and productivity, and you don’t want your armless office chair to get in the way of working effectively!

The recession has provided one upside to new businesses – many real estate companies offer more than just cheaper office space, they provide free furniture too!

Al Harris at RichmondBizSense.com reports how landlords have used old tenants’ furniture as an incentive for new prospective tenants who don’t mind taking over old furniture as long as it saves money.

“It was an enormous factor,” said Andrew Rose of Elephant Insurance. The UK-based auto insurance company opened their first U.S. division last year at Innsbrook in a former Capital One building that came decked out desks and chairs, filing cabinets, refrigerators, cafeteria equipment and trashcans.

“At the time the cost and complexity of taking a space that needed to be fully outfitted versus a turnkey solution was fantastic and the economics were phenomenal,” Rose said.

“If you look at the value of the furniture and accommodations we got here, conservatively a half million to $800,000,” Rose said. He couldn’t say how much they pay, but said it was “a stones throw away from free.”

The packages vary – some companies will throw in the furniture for free, others will need to pay a little extra. That extra is, of course, a fraction of the cost of buying brand-new furniture for the whole office.

Getting office furniture in the package is hard to beat (though we should say Cubicles.com‘s refurbished office furniture comes close), and having that as an option may be a Godsend to new offices trying to grow in today’s uncertain business environment.

Office dividers are a necessary evil in today’s workplace – unnoticed and even uncomplimented when they’re working as promised, and utterly confining at their worst. Nobody calls office dividers their “favorite bit of office furniture”. And that won’t change anytime soon!

So when you’re looking for office dividers for your company, don’t imagine a process similar to picking out a rug or a lamp; nobody’s going to want partitions that set off their blue eyes, they’ll just want something that doesn’t get in the way!

Choosing the right office divider is still important, though – employee morale can still be affected by bad dividers, even if good dividers don’t seem to have any effect.

Know your dividers. The dividers used for cubicles are called half-height office dividers, smaller compared to the full-height office dividers that stretch from floor to ceiling. The difference between the two is crucial – half-height dividers offer a greater sense of openness, while full-height dividers have a feeling of permanence and solidity.

For a divider that falls half-way in between the two, you might want accordion wall dividers, which reach from floor to wall but are easily set aside when you want to remove a barrier between two office spaces.

Mobile partition walls are the lightest type of divider – they can be moved from area to area, and are light enough to be assembled or disassembled when needed.

Choose the right supplier. Once you’ve decided what kind of divider you want to use in your office, it’s time to look at the supplier who can get you what you want. Your facilities manager should be able to tell you what suppliers in the area can provide the kind of office dividers you’ve set your mind on. Google can also help turn up the right suppliers. (Or if you want good value and quality too, might we recommend you check out Cubicles.com’s line of cubicles?)

Choosing the right office dividers is easier than it looks. With the advice listed above, choosing and using can be a breeze, with your colleagues enjoying their office and you smiling at the thought of money well spent.

Non-green offices and green offices alike share the same water mains, electric lines, phone cables, and roads – living off the grid is no alternative for most businesses, that’s for sure!

But the line between green offices and their wasteful counterparts is a thin one – and it has to do with how much energy your office expends in any given day, and how much your office has done to conserve the energy it uses, or to minimize its use.

According to the US Department of Energy, total energy consumption in an average office breaks down by the numbers:

Thermostat/Air conditioner, 39% of energy consumption. Keeping cool (or warm) is a positive energy monster – but you can’t freeze your employees to death, can you? Green offices do their part for their employees and the environment by changing roof coatings and insulation to protect against heat and cold, or by setting the thermostat a little closer to outside ambient temperatures – to a cooler setting in winter, or a warmer setting in summer.

Lighting, 30% of energy consumption. By opening the office windows to let natural light in, or by switching light bulbs to the compact fluorescent type, offices can save up to eighty percent of the lighting energy they use.

Office equipment, 16% of energy consumption. Real green offices make sure that office equipment use is conserved and minimized. This includes switching idle computers off and converting monitors to power-friendly LCD or LED monitors.

Water heating, 9% of energy consumption. Like thermostats, water heating can be conserved, too – reducing water temperature to 120 degrees, for example, saves up to 18% of total energy use. Low-flush toilets can help reduce energy consumption even more, as they save up to 50% over more old-fashioned commodes.

An eco friendly office is easy enough to commit to, if one just sticks to superficial environmental advice (save water! Print on both sides of the paper! Unplug that PC after use!). But it takes a real green warrior to meet environmental targets using eco friendly office furniture.

The government has been helpful enough, providing green furniture standards that provide a standard to live up to. The EPA in particular offers procurement guidelines to help you select eco friendly office furniture that lives up to the government’s high standards.

New furniture, then, can be selected using the EPA’s guidelines, which call for FSC-certified wood, water-based or bio-based glues for laminated surfaces, and recycled materials where possible.

New eco-friendly office furniture can also be bought based on their recyclability in the future – tables and chairs made of plywood, steel, chipboard, and plastics can be recycled easily at a processing plant, while compact laminates and MDF are more difficult to recycle in the future.

Go refurbished/remanufactured, if that’s an option for your office – not easy if you have a reputation to uphold, but getting easier due to the glut of furniture (you can thank the recession for bankrupting a significant number of businesses, freeing their relatively pristine furniture for use in the market).

Take the furniture our guys at Cubicles.com are ready to offer you – lower-cost, recycled workstations recreated from used cubicles – processed with eco-friendly procedures to replace and recycle the parts that can still be used.

Cubicles.com uses low-VOC coatings and recycled fabrics in its remanufactured cubicles. They look brand new, but come having already made most of its impact on the environment!

Buy local. Even if your furniture demands can’t live up to the earlier two points, you can still go green with your office furniture, simply by buying from a supplier nearby. By buying local, you cut down on the carbon emissions created by transporting your new furniture from point A to point B.