When you buy office furniture, your goal is to arrange a comfortable and safe workspace where you or your employees could be most productive. Curved office desks have become one of the hottest trends in office interior design today. Let`s take a closer look at the phenomenon and try to understand why and how your business can benefit from this seemingly unusual but essential piece of furniture.
What should you look for at an office desk?
When it comes to office desks, most people pay attention to the size of the tabletop, storage options and colour and design of the furniture piece—those pretty understandable and reasonable parameters. According to recent research, an average office worker spends at least 5 hours and 40 minutes per day behind the desk. Naturally, your office desk must provide you with enough space and storage options for all your papers, equipment and necessary gadgets.
Comfort and safety are also crucial features. You want to make sure that you can hold your posture while working to avoid the notorious aching back at the end of the day. And of course, it is critical to have a steady, well-established piece of furniture made out of high-quality non-toxic materials to make sure that the desk itself is not a hazard to your health and safety.
And, of course, your desk should simply look nice! The office setup creates the image of your business for visitors, customers, prosperous investors and partners. You don`t have a second chance to make the first impression, and the overall look of your workplace does most of the job.
But you can find all those features on a regular rectangular office desk. What is the big deal with curved office desks, then?
Indeed, any standard office desk can easily meet all the legal safety requirements and even be a trendy piece of the office interior at the same time. But we live in the era when businesses that want to stand out from the crowd of competitors try to look beyond the standards, basic requirements and traditional approach. Office furnishing takes on a new meaning today.
What are the benefits of curved office desks?
Despite being a core of a comfortable, safe, fully-functioning workplace, curved office desks manage to carry several non-obvious functions:
- They help businesses save money optimizing the available space;
- They help employees become most efficient;
- They help to preserve and even improve the health of people that sit behind them, boosting motivation and reducing the number of sick leaves;
- They are among the most eco-friendly furnishing solutions;
- They significantly enhance the design and atmosphere in the office.
As you might have already noticed, most of those functions hardly ever come to mind when we talk about office desks. If you need to optimize the available space and use it wisely, you will hire a designer who will help you move the furniture around. You would do the same to build the image of your business and create a motivating environment in the office.
You can adjust the existing furniture according to the safety requirements and, of course, look for furniture made out of eco-friendly sustainable materials if you are aiming for a reputation of a green, environmentally aware business.
And this is precisely what most companies do today. All those measures take much time, effort and money, but it seems like this is what you have to do today to stay in the game and meet modern trends and standards.
But what if we told you that just one piece of office furnishing – a curved office desk, could help you kill all those birds with one stone. Let`s go over the specific benefits of curved office desks that you may not find in most other models.
Space.
A curved office desk will help you optimize the available space and get the most of it. The curved shape of the such desk`s tabletop allows you to sit comfortably behind the desk.
It may seem that a rectangular office desk offers a more extensive tabletop for your documents and equipment, but it is an illusion. Its straight shape often prevents you from using the available work area efficiently as you simply won`t manage to reach a further corner.
The L-shape design provides users with a more expansive workspace without needing two separate desks. This can be especially beneficial for employees who need space for both computer equipment and paperwork or other tasks.
Additionally this makes better work conditions for users of multiple screens, as there is additional workspace available.
Traditional desks often leave corners of the room unused or underutilized. An L-shaped desk can fit snugly into a corner, maximizing the space in that area.
The biggest part of an office desk price tag is the legs, the frame, the structure of the desk. L-shaped desks offer extended desktop space but add just one more leg than a rectangular desk. To achieve the same amount of desktop space with rectangular desks, it would require 2 or 4 (depending on construction) additional legs,which would increase the cost significantly. So curved desks offer better square footage of desktop per pound!
Moreover, while the curve will enable you to use the whole available tabletop, you get a chance to benefit most from each square inch of the office that you are paying for.
Those features make curved office desks integral parts of modern, efficient business budget planning.
Comfort and safety
Working behind a desk with a curved edge, you don`t have to lean forward or to the sides to reach every corner. In other words, a curve desk shape prevents you from traumatizing your spine or overloading it. Moreover, it prevents you from leaning towards the computer screen, which is one of the main reasons for visual impairments caused by blue light.
Not only a curved desk prevents trauma, but it improves the posture, which leads to balancing the cardiovascular system and breathing, making you or your employees most efficient during the workday.
Moreover, a curved office desk might be the only solution for the notorious strain and possible carpal tunnel, which are common among office employees today. You may order a curved office desk designed precisely for a left or right-handed person. It will provide support and additional space for the wrist, preventing the trauma.
Eventually, businesses that equip their offices with curved office desks notice that their employees take fewer sick days, being most motivated and efficient at work. Moreover, they face much fewer lawsuits connected with workplace accidents, trauma or safety issues in the office.
An eco-friendly furnishing solution
The shape of a curved office desk allows you to utilize its whole space efficiently. According to legal requirements, a standard private office workspace should be between 90 and 150 square feet. A curved office desk allows you to get most of it while using much less material.
As we mentioned above, curved desks offer more desktop space per used metal for legs and frames. Production and fabrication of metal is the very high energy demanding, therefore produces most emissions. Curved desks are therefore less polluting, per square foot of desktop, than other kinds of desks.
The furnishing industry is one of the main reasons for deforestation worldwide. Businesses that chose curved office desks don`t only manage to optimize their budgets and get the most out of the available workspace but also contribute to a more sustainable furnishing that requires fewer commodities.
The ergonomic shape of a curved office desk also makes it more lightweight and compact, significantly reducing emissions and carbon footprint during transportation.
Design and aesthetics.
Most people don`t even know how much their surroundings influence their behaviour and decision making.
A study published several years ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has experimented with office employees` productivity, motivation and interaction based on the interior they are placed into. According to this research, the shapes, and primarily, angles surrounding us, determine our behavior in many ways.
Both male and female employees of different desk jobs appeared more aggressive, impatient and even anxious at a workplace equipped with standard rectangular-shaped furniture and design elements.
At the same time, the same people seemed to have changed utterly once they were offered to work in a space with more ergonomic and curved designs. They have almost immediately demonstrated the ability to cooperate and solve tasks as a team even though they have just met and seemed to disagree on the most professional matters only several hours before.
Later on, during questioning, most of them could not explain their behaviour and sudden change of heart once moving to a different office. However, they frequently mentioned that it was something about the atmosphere in the workplace that influenced their attitude.
Researchers observed the same colour patterns, equipment supplies, and even odours in the test offices to make the experiment clear. Eventually, they concluded that the shape of the office furniture indeed has a significant influence on employees` attitude and motivation at a workplace.
You can benefit from this principle also if you receive customers, visitors, prosperous investors or business partners in your office. Placed into a comfortable, relaxing atmosphere, people initially relax, become more cooperative and open to suggestions.
A curved office desk is not just another piece of furniture. It is a powerful and efficient tool that can help your business get ahead in the competition by optimizing the budget and boosting revenue through higher employees` motivation. A curved office desk will help you create a comfortable, efficient and safe workplace that will encourage, inspire and attract people raising your credibility in the eyes of customers, business partners and competitors.
You can view our range of curved desks to see some examples of products and finishes.
