No matter if you are a public-facing business or a private office, sooner or later, you will need to welcome guests or visitors to your premises. When this requirement comes to pass, it’s important to remain as prepared as you possibly can.
Inviting guests to your business for whatever reason, be they there to utilize your services, or when entertaining business clients or greeting investors as necessary may seem simple on the service. Just bring them into the fold, welcome them, and stay polite, right? Well, this might be necessary, but there’s also a good amount of behind-the-scenes work that goes into ensuring someone can feel comfortable and safe within your premises as necessary.
In this post, we hope to discuss the art of welcoming people into your firm, how to go about investing in the best possible experience you can provide, and also how this can positively affect the development of your firm going forward.
Without further ado, let’s get started:
Security
Of course, ensuring proper security around your premises is a good means of protecting your business and those who staff it. Yet we must also make sure that our guests and visitors are afforded these provisions in kind.
This means using proper video networks to cover all aspects of the visitor areas. It may mean issuing them with a keycard and name badge to ensure their stay there is validated, and that they can access all areas confirming their permission level.
Depending on the size and scope of your business, other measures could be in place. If you run a server farm or critical infrastructure, for instance, even as a humble managed service provider, then gentle pat-downs might be justified. Depending on your business, the level of security needed will change. Yet it can be helpful to have an ‘approved’ means of verifying a guests’ right to be there ahead of time, allowing you to ensure they are not only safe but that your staff feels safe around them.
Welcoming & Staging Areas
It’s a great idea to invest in a welcoming staging area. This might take the form of a seating environment near your reception. First, considering utility is important. This might involve making sure that the seating plan is properly arranged, and the space is easily navigable. A water cooler can provide refreshment to anyone who may be waiting.
Second, comes decoration. You will no doubt find value and utility in using greenery to help space feel more natural. If you have free wall space, you might use it to showcase a well-designed chart of the history of your firm and your ambitions, including what your goals are today. Injecting a little bit of life into this area, no matter how humble your firm is, can make even the waiting process an enjoyable and informative one.
Of course, staging areas are also worth considering depending on how a guest might visit your firm. A loading bay that offers its own seating area through the office entrance doors can be helpful, allowing even those delivering on behalf of another firm to wait comfortably in lieu of being seen to.
Signposting
Even small business premises are unfamiliar territory to a new guest, and so it’s worth guarding against the possibility of them getting lost or feeling exasperated when trying to find their way around. Of course, guests should be welcomed and guided in person, but just in case that doesn’t happen for whatever reason, excellent signposting around the building can help.
This might take the form of actual signposts you can use to showcase where certain corridors lead. It may involve lines on the walls that someone can follow to a select location. Maps with ‘you are here’ declarations can help someone understand where they are in relation to other wings of the building. But perhaps most importantly of all, fire exists and evacuation notices can help anyone leave the building in a pinch, as they deserve to.
Meeting Rooms
Establishing meeting rooms, or a meeting room is a valuable use of your time. Not only can it help give you a little privacy against prying eyes and ears, but this kind of staging area can be a great manner by which to show off just how sincere your firm is in its pursuit of success.
Meeting rooms with adequate furniture, a television screen for a computer to showcase presentations with, and good branded mugs you can offer refreshments in certainly sells the image of being a firm with goals in mind and the willingness to invest in them. But you don’t need all the fancy trimmings to separate a space, no matter how humble, in which to politely discuss business with your guests. Or, perhaps if showing a visitor around, you can ask the office to transition to this space for their morning meeting instead of the general open atmosphere you usually go for.
Having a space to meet, in this fashion, is sure to help you thrive as a firm.
Furniture
If you have the justification for it, investing in good furniture for your office can be helpful. The same goes for the waiting area or meeting rooms you bring visitors or clients to. You don’t need the most expensive ergonomic furniture, of course, but it can be healthy to invest in sofas, armchairs, or a comfortable seating pod that helps them feel a little less frustrated with waiting.
Some firms think that it’s quirky and fun to use stools, or novelty bean bags, or other sofas that may not be in the best of condition, but even if you go for the most basic option, uniformity, simplistic design, comfort, and hygiene should always be the features you opt for. After all, visitors and clients know that the furniture you sit them on is something of a symbol for the kind of business you may provide to them going forward.
Lighting & Walls
Good, clean lighting is always nice. You don’t want the waiting area to look like a clinician’s waiting room, but you don’t want it to look like a dingy hideaway from the outside world. Light fixtures and perhaps a tactical lamp can help a room feel vibrant and inviting.
Of course, it’s also worth considering how the aesthetics of the walls can play into this, too. For instance, commercial wall coverings found here https://www.commercialwalldecor.com/commercial-wall-decor/type-ii-wallcoverings-2.aspx can be a great way of outfitting the space in a manner that balances practicality and beautiful aesthetics without limiting the natural light of space, or making a room feel oppressive.
This is important for your visitors of course, but also the staff that may work in your reception and the staging areas, as they will have to spend all day in this environment.
Organization
It’s good to organize your waiting space and how you welcome your staff. Once someone arrives, immediate notice should be sent to the person handling them that day. Keeping thor presence updated in your digital guest book can be important, as can making sure they know where the fire exits are. You may print them a temporary pass that helps them identify who they are and in what capacity they are visiting your office.
It can also be helpful for you to keep a super tight watch over your visit bookings to make sure you never have to feel at a loss as to why someone has arrived at your doorstep. If guests feel as though you hadn’t planned for them, even if they were told to come at this time, they will no doubt curate a negative first impression of your planning. This is why preparations in advance and informing your reception staff is such an important practice to get right.
Exterior Utilities
As guests, clients, investors or visitors come to your firm for whatever purpose, it’s important to remember that the interior waiting room of your building is hardly the only place their first impression is curated. Exterior utilities, such as the condition of the parking space, how well your office or business premises is branded, if the main entrance is obviously marked or not, and if they have to walk through smokers at the front door (when they could be situated away from it), will all have an effect.
Depending on the location of your office and where exactly it’s situated, you may have full, some, or little control over your external environment. At the very least, however, making sure your building conforms to that environment is important. Even remote-operated doors that are activated after successful use of the intercom can be helpful. The more you can curate that entrance surrounding the needs of your exterior utilities, the better. It might be that even in a city, you can negotiate a parking pass for those arriving at your firm, just to use an example.
With this advice, you’re sure to curate that worthwhile business welcome as appropriate.