Creating adaptable work environments from start to growth.
For startups, there is a great deal of friction in creating physical environments along the journey and quest for greatness.
While initial founders can handle the coffee shop as the conference room or the corner of another office as home base, the functional and cultural requirements of an office quickly become a reality as a team grows in size.
Ignoring that reality may not doom a business, but it creates an avoidable drag on the overall mission of the company. Why? A well-performing environment is crucial in the high-stress, fastpaced crucible of a startup. There is a return on investment for the environment, just as state-of-the-art laptops and smartphones deliver a return to the business in terms of output.
At its core, the environment’s job is to quietly enable the success of a startup by letting high-performance happen — particularly in an organization that is constantly pushing itself to new peaks of success. The environment is critical in several areas:
- Stimulating productivity
- Providing a sense of stability
- Fostering collaboration
- Reinforcing transparency
- Cultivating a sense of culture, identity and spirit
- Evoking a ‘second home’ feeling
- Supporting talent acquisition and employee retention
For companies that have scaled successfully, the physical environment is rarely a perfect journey. But there are important lessons to be gleaned for new startups to ensure the environment performs today and avoids pitfalls tomorrow.
-Knoll®, Inc