5 Elements of a Successful E-commerce Office
Creating the perfect working environment is essential for any business, including businesses that operate mostly online. While online storefronts let you engage customers without setting up a brick-and-mortar retail space, you still need to maintain an e-commerce site, fulfill customers’ orders, and operate effectively as a business.
Having a suitable work environment is important. This often means setting up an office that can fully support business operations and growth. To create a suitable, highly effective work environment, here are the five elements that you need.
1. Enough Space
Forget about trying to work in a cramped space. It is much better to have extra space than not have enough for the entire team. With the market offering plenty of opportunities for e-commerce businesses to grow, you want to invest in extra space to anticipate a growth in team members.
Having enough space has its advantages. For starters, you can be more flexible with the layout of the space. You can also create an effective flow within the office, allowing different departments to work together in a better, more seamless way.
2. Flow
Speaking of creating flow, you want the layout of the office to fully represent an effective flow. For example, placing the finance and accounting department closer to the sales team, while allowing for other departments, such as marketing and engineering, to have easy access to the same space, is how you create a healthy flow.
The same is true with flow for a particular department. The engineering team can have different sections for different functions such as UI/UX and backend engineering, but the flow between each section needs to match the flow of your native workflows.
3. Lighting
A good work environment is not complete without good lighting. Gone are the days of using fluorescent lights; they flicker and are seldom comfortable, plus they are not energy-efficient enough by today’s standards.
Natural light is the best kind of lighting. Utilize big windows whenever possible to bring in more light to the office space. Alternatively, you can use daylight LED bulbs and strips to add more light to the space without consuming a lot of energy.
4. Gadgets and Networking
To make the office space functional, you have to make sure that the on-site networking is robust and capable. Rather than handling IT-related tasks such as networking in-house, it is actually more efficient to hire a managed IT and cloud service provider to do the hard work for you.
24x7it.com is a leading name in managed IT and cloud services. The company can fully integrate your intranet with cloud services, mainly because they have a wide range of services that cover both – and many other – IT needs.
5. Ventilation
Last but certainly not least, make sure the space has good airflow. Now that you have layout, lighting, and networking figured out, making sure that you have a good ventilation system that keeps the space comfortable and fresh is the final piece of the puzzle.
Get these five elements right and you will end up with an office space that boosts productivity to a whole new level. You’ll be surprised by how quickly investments in a good office space pay off.