It’s time to get back to work.

If you’re a business owner or manager, take note: the office should reflect the working environment in 2022. That means flexible and adaptive, with a variety of arrangements for different styles. The truth is that many offices simply aren’t ready for it. In this blog, we’ll offer a few tips (and accompanying products) that will get yours on the right track.

The word “comfort” is a broad catch-all term for anything that makes an environment more conducive to getting things done. But there’s much more to comfort than you might realize. There’s a lot of science behind it, with designers in industries from car design to office environments constantly tweaking and refining details to improve the user’s quality of life.

Designing the optimal office is an ongoing experiment. Private offices and cubicles of the 1980s and ’90s gave way in the early 2000s to open office layouts that removed walls and encouraged more collaboration (and fit more people in smaller spaces). And yet, while many loved the increased transparency and access to management, the open office was far from perfect.

Chances are good if you manage an office workspace, you already provide ergonomic chairs for your in-office employees (or you should!). A well-designed chair delivers both comfort and health-friendly support. The shift to working from home, however, hasn’t been kind on the backs, arms and legs of workers who divide their time between the office and working from home. Dining chairs, kitchen stools and even inexpensive office chairs found online simply aren’t designed to give remote workers proper ergonomic support for hours at a time.

For decades, the modern work environment was an either/or proposition: work on site or work from home. Sure, coffee shops and libraries worked in a pinch, but neither was a permanent alternative.

Task-based workplace design makes sense, right? Until recently, that’s simply how businesses usually sorted themselves, compartmentalized by various functions and tasks. Sales sat with sales, HR with HR, product management with...you get the idea. These departments often functioned independently, each contributing its part to the larger corporate picture. On a seating chart, it’s nice and neat. In reality, physical and organizational barriers can get in the way of office collaboration and cohesion.