Moving to a new office - What cool things would you do?

In desk USB Hubs.

 

These are all brilliant. Give your staff an alternative to going home when stressed or they have a headache. Make the office not suck so badly when they have to work late.

Also, if you can dedicate one chillout room / meeting room (something central with glass) to being a little 'kid friendly' you can also capitalise on the dads who had to look after the kids on the odd occasion while working late / working weekends. This happened quite a lot in one job I was in and I always worried that after they got bored of watching finding nemo and ruining my whiteboards they would go and destroy something else unseen.

 

i want all what the google office has.

http://1dak.com/people/google-office-pictures-47-pics/

 

Ooh, shower facilities are a good idea, and somewhere for staff to lock up pushbikes if they want to ride to work, and somewhere to hang their clothes.

 

I like all these suggestions, good way to encourage staff to exercise. How about a gym too?

 

Im in an office which used to be a very small meeting room (4 people max), it is now 2 work desks. And for some reason this is everyones chill out zone. There is 2 chairs in a bit of spare space behind me, and people come in to just sit down and have a chat, take there mind of work for a few (or 20) mins.

Nice to know people feel comfortable around me and enjoy a chat, but sometimes... seroiusly fuck off, i have work to do.

FWIW im not just meaning the workers, middle-senior managment do it aswell. Several times they have even sat at my desk and shared it with me on their laptop so they can hide from people constantly handballing shit up the ladder to actually get some work done.

FWP?

 

You have to learn how to tell them to bugger off so you can do your work.

 

Telstra does a similar thing with their T-stores and their display machines. The machines were constantly dying from no ventilation and were a right bitch to repair as they were crammed into a tiny space with cables galore everywhere. Bad, bad, bad idea.

 

So ventilate it, cool it, and make the space adequate.

 

Lol sounds like this is going to branch into a discussion about how we should use the buildings aircon to cool the workstations in their desk cavity's so they can be OC'd during the day....

 

Seriously, though if OP's got an enormous site and they are planning from the ground up, they can do whatever they want (if they've got the moolah for it, that is)

 

We are a pharma so everything thinks we have the dollars!!

From a more technical point of view I have so far:

1 ; Wireless with WLAN controllers for Office Network and Guest Network. Guest network to have a Hotel style password/time settings given out by the reception.

2 ; Meeting rooms with Ipad/Lenovo ThinkPad Tablets on the outside wall with meeting rooms availabilities and tools to book rooms / sync to desktops (we use lotus notes and our dev guy said we can do this)

3 ; More power and RF45 that you can poke a stick at on desks at desk height - we will request this but we need to see if we are building our own desks or use whatever we move into.

4 ; We have an existing server room with 3 independant a/c, we house all our own servers with off site DR. Moving forward our technologies will change - we'll most likely be moving most services into a co-lo but this is all still in development (our sys admin is slightly retarded unfortunately).

5 ; UC - we currently use avaya and most probably will move to a one number UC and probably hosted up to the wall port from a vendor.

6 ; Cable Management - No news on this yet as the site is still undecided but I want something that is kick ass - any suggestions?

 

Run cooled water lines to desks, use water cooling, anyone with me?

 

And a massive in ground setup like gigs!

 

Looks like you're focusing on more technical stuff. So I'll sketch out some ideas I had quoted for power reduction.

Get dimmable fluro batons. They usually have 4 set levels or so done through one of those "smart home" type touch panels. Everyone can have their own happy light level (No more people taping cardboard over lights or removing tubes). Great power savings as you can turn off whole areas / meeting rooms / the whole floor bar minimal walkway lighting and the office of the one guy working late.

In my unique situation, I was also looking to tie this to certain power points so that when all lights were off in an area after 5pm, a large amount of rather hungry, non essential equipment also went off (monitors, tv's etc) but PC's remained on. (because nobody can stand 2 minutes for a PC to boot and 10 minutes reopening their applications.. but they can afford 3 hours browsing the web).

One company I saw did the same thing (without the dimming) they just had a movement sensor and after 5pm the aircon duct and lights in a room shut off if no movement was detected.

And for anyone reading thinking "what the holy mother of... " in my circumstance I was looking at reducing a 12-15k p/m power bill for an office of under 100 staff. So the ROI on some of this stuff wasn't nearly as long as you would anticipate.

 

If you are going to be catering for a large number of wireless devices in a smaller area have a look at the Xirrus gear, http://www.xirrus.com/ we have them at work (Secondary School), they preform brilliantly, I have had 80 devices concurrently off one of the larger XN-8 units without a issue.

their management tool is top notch too.

 

Im in the USA helping my colleagues here for the new office we're moving into.
Here's some of the things we have.

Ipads on the doors for all conference/meeting/phone booth rooms.
- these link back to our google calendars for each room by a in house web application.

PoE for every port. We're sick of having the guys run around to patch ports in etc & reserving ports for phone or data sucks.

WIFI APs are PoE with a 10-15 foot loop of cable at their initial planned mounting point. Gives us some flexibility if the floor plan changes. We normally run two PoE cables just in case.

Guest/public wifi network.
All other ports are 802.1x auth back to company LDAP (inc staff wifi).

VC units have two 60 inch screens, larger rooms have multiple mic inputs.
One screen is for the HD camera feed, the other is for screen sharing.
- We have a mix of lifesize and polycom units.
- make sure sites that have a timezone overlap have equal VC capable rooms.
- In the room name so when people book them via calendars have room capacity and VC capability in the name. Saves people booking the huge conference rooms for a one on one VC call.

3 Internet connections. Primary & redundant for staff, guest wifi has its own connection.

Our comms gear & servers get proper racks and cable management.
- all our infrastructure is in data centres except for a few local servers.

6 foot wide desks, 3.5-4 foot deep.

Lounge areas etc with gaming consoles.

42-60inch TVs for teams to have wall boards up for project stats etc.

Large kitchen with seating for 30-50 people. (we get food delivered in all offices for staff).

Friday special, beer cart with sound system. We make all new hires take the cart around at 4pm to meet people they might not have already.

Most staff now get mac book airs. Others get mac book pros. If they want they pick a dell laptop/pc. Alternatively if there manager will sign off on it, they can get what ever damn computer they want.

Devs get dual 24inch monitors (u2410s or better). Designers get 30inch expensive mac or dell monitors. Business (finance, marketing, HR) users get a single monitor but if they request two they usually end up with it.

White boards on the walls for all meeting rooms except 1-2 fancy conference rooms.

White boards on the walls near each team.

And we wouldn't be an IT company if we didn't give everyone a herman miller aeron chair.

 

Devs need 30" love as well!

 

There would be only one feature I would require: the ability to work from home.

Why on earth haven't australian companies figured it out yet? If you let me do this, I will work for less money, and not a bit less either. I charge a little under $100 an hour, I would halve that if I could just work from home. Oh the joy, no suit, no commute, no shitty coworkers with their colds and annoying kids. It would be blissful.

Just think of all the cost savings too, you don't need to rent and maintain a giant building, I pay my own internet and electricity, I have my own computer, which kicks the pants off anything you'd give me anyway. We live in the future, why are we all still working in wage farms like industrialist minions?


But no, companies are all still stuck in this archaic mindset: If the employees aren't in the office, how can we monitor them? How can we make sure they are *actually* working? how can we make sure they do a full 40 hour week?

Its ridiculous, you don't need me working 40 hours, you need me finishing tasks, the two do not actually even correlate, let alone causate.


Guess what, most days, between the coffees and meetings and catch ups and general office time wasting, I only do half a day of actual work anyway! This is why I would charge less to work from home, because I know I can finish your project in an hour and then go and lie in the grass in the sun.

Offices are outdated and wasteful, transition your workforce into telecommuting, they will love you for it.

 

Mostly, I agree.

BUT, I'd much rather be at the office where the datacenter is, makes working on stuff in the datacenter much easier.

I'd rather have clients see me in the office, rather then at home also.

The 'office' I work in, is in a big building, There is 3 desks, 2 people who actually work here, 2 couches and a coffee table, then the datacenter downstairs. If I wanted I could work from home on days I REALLY don't want distractions, but our call center workers work from home. Just me and the boss here mostly for access to the DC and client meetings.