TMCnews Featured Article

If you have a physical office or offices, chances are, you have some sort of a gateway for visitors to encounter. For many companies, it's a reception desk or area. You may think it exists simply to help visitors understand where to go. But it's a whole lot more than that.

A reception desk is essentially a barrier between the public and your employees, helping define where the work area begins. It's a place to gather information from clients entering your building, a privacy area to protect the receptionists' items (and the data on his or her computer) from the public. It's also the first thing visitors see when they enter the building. Consider the message an old, worn out and cluttered desk sends to clients and other visitors when they enter your office.

For all these reasons, it's critically important to get the gateway to your office – the reception desk – right, says office furniture specialist Interior Concepts in a recent blog. One way to get it right is to be sure that any components purchased for a new reception set-up are both “adaptive” and “universal.”

In order to be adaptive and universal four things need to be able to happen, according to Interior Concepts.

•       The desk needs to be freestanding.

•       The desk needs to have the ability to change material quickly as trends change.

•       The desk needs to be adaptable to technology today and into the future.

•       The desk needs to be customizable to fit the unique space requirements of your front reception area.

Features to avoid include temporary gimmicks that serve little purpose, installations that require a complete tear-down to replace or alter, overly large or too-small work spaces, wire management systems that expose ports, outlets and cabling to visitors, real wood or fabric that is hard to keep clean and maintain, and built-in computer connections that may be replaced by something different and more advanced in just a few years.

Most of all, companies need reception desk installations that suit them (and not the company down the hall), which means they require a great deal of customizability, flexibility and modularity.

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