Can a Cool Office Design Win Recruits?

Back in the day, if you knew someone who worked in one of those trendy offices that had a table football game and a PlayStation in a corner somewhere, it was a huge source of envy. How different, it seemed, life must be, if your working environment was a little bit fun, rather than a sea of battleship grey, livened up only by a noticeboard where every post had dodgy Microsoft Office clip art on it. Then, as we headed into the early 2000’s, more businesses started trying to make their work sites feel a bit more fashionable and fun, and in some industries, particularly media and marketing, the ‘cool office’ basically became the norm.

Nowadays, most professionals with a few jobs under their belts have worked at or visited client sites where a lot of effort has been put into the office design. Sometimes this is part of a business’ brand – for instance, everybody knows Google’s offices are very cool – and sometimes it is done to attract and retain staff, and keep their morale high when they’re at the office.

Is a Cool Office a Job Benefit?
Working in attractive surroundings is more appealing than working in boring or shabby ones, obviously, but can a cool office ever be considered an actual benefit that comes with a job? Well, in itself, not really, but sometimes cool office designs provide practical features that can be seen as true, valuable benefits.

As an example, some offices have a workout room that staff can use. This is a real benefit because it can allow staff to do whatever fitness training they want easily around their work schedule and save on the cost of a gym membership. Even a really nice coffee machine can be a practical benefit if it means people don’t have to keep going out to buy coffee during the day and spending their own money on it!

Working Culture
Even when a trendy or fun office design doesn’t really offer anything that can be seen as a practical benefit for staff, it can give potential hires a sense of a working culture they may see as appealing. Many offices who have the classic ‘cool office’ accoutrements like pool tables and big screen TVs find that people don’t even really use them all that much, but the fact they are there shows that the company isn’t averse to people de-stressing and having fun during the working day, and trusts its people to manage their own productivity. It also suggests a working environment where people socialise and there is a sense of positivity and energy, and these things can definitely win over somebody who is trying to choose between potential jobs.

If you are pitching a job to a candidate from your recruitment database and you happen to know that the employer has a really nice office, especially if there are some features there that the staff seem to really enjoy as benefits, then while it may not be the ultimate selling point of a job, it is certainly worth getting your candidate excited about.