One of the biggest reasons that mobile office partitions are so popular in North America and in countries across the globe is the fact they make it easy to adapt almost any type of administrative workspace to meet the ever-changing needs of commercial organizations in the 21st century. The accelerating pace of change in the world of commerce has made it more difficult for companies to design office spaces that work well for their employees over a long period of time but with the clever deployment of moveable partitions, this problem can easily be solved. If you are not sure whether office dividers are a good choice for your firm, consider the following situations in which they will almost certainly prove to be invaluable.
When Demountable Walls Really Make a Difference
In all of the situations listed below, your company will find it much easier to organize employees and their workspaces if it has invested in a good-quality modular partition system such as we produce, supply and install.
- Downsizing – While rarely desirable, downsizing is a fact of life for many companies in the corporate world: something that has to be faced every now and again. This is especially true for firms involved in what are viewed as cyclical industries, such as energy and resources, where the boom and bust nature of the business requires companies to be able to deal with fluctuating levels of employees over the years. If your organization is faced with the task of downsizing and letting part of its workforce go, the ability to quickly turn small, empty offices into larger, populated ones will make things much easier to manage as far as the overall office layout is concerned.
Of course, the flip side of downsizing is up-sizing: something else that all companies involved in cyclical industries have to deal with on a regular basis. With demountable walls, you can reconfigure your office space to suit increasing numbers of employees just as easily as decreasing numbers. You may need to train your in-house maintenance team in how to move individual panels but once they are familiar with the system you have in place, you will be able to cope with both downsizing and up-sizing with ease.
- Merger – In the event that your company should merge with another commercial entity in the future, there is no doubt that a major reorganization of your corporate workspace will be required. Companies that merge often have to lose a certain number of employees but the overall combined workforce is almost always larger after a merger than it was before. However, the type of reorganization that is required as a result of a merger is not the same as when a company simply up-sizes or downsizes. Some departments may grow while others may shrink, and it is quite possible that there will be some completely new departments looking for a home at the same time. With all of this to consider, you can see why demountable walls would make the task of reorganizing your corporate headquarters after a merger that much simpler.
A future merger is, of course, not an event that you can predict with any certainty or something that is likely to happen very often in the lifetime of the average company. However, the ability to change your office layout at will could come in handy during short-term collaborative projects with other companies as well, not just for permanent mergers, making portable dividers a good investment for firms of all sizes in all types of industries.
- Expansion into New Fields of Operation – When a company expands its operations into new industries or new geographical territories, demountable walls can come in very handy. While you may not wish to create completely new departments for many of the administrative functions that your new operations require, creating task forces in existing departments by dividing office spaces into two could well help the employees in question to focus on their new responsibilities more easily. It will also enable them to collaborate with their co-workers regarding their new duties without disturbing the rest of the department, i.e. those workers who are still carrying out administrative functions for the original field of operations in which your company was involved.
If your company ventures into completely new industries, it will almost certainly need to create some new departments as well but these are likely to be considerably smaller than existing ones. You can quickly and easily partition off small spaces for these new departments if you are already using a system of demountable walls to divide your corporate workspace into physically separate units.
- Takeovers – Another commonly-faced situation in the corporate world that necessitates the rapid reorganization of office space is a takeover. Whether you swallow a small but dynamic rival to ensure they are working with you rather than against you or take over a much larger organization in order to benefit from economies of scale, you will need to rearrange your company’s headquarters to cope with the situation that arises. Moveable partitions make creating new workspaces of varying sizes an easy task and will enable your company to combine, divide, merge, or obliterate departments at will. If you were to attempt this type of major reorganization in an office without easily-reconfigurable demountable walls, it would be much harder to achieve your goals. Unlike mergers, takeovers of varying sizes can happen quite often during a company’s trading life, especially in more dynamic industries such as finance and digital technology, which is why it is a good idea to make sure that your firm is ready for them whenever they may occur.
There are many other situations in which office partitions come in handy and the ability to quickly reorganize your corporate workspace is something you will come to appreciate much more once you can actually see how easy it is to do and how little effort it takes with portable dividers. For more information about creating a flexible workspace, call or email us today.