Modern offices are often open plan with lots of natural light, creating a friendly, comfortable, inspiring and productive workplace.
The range and flexibility office partitioning offers make it a great option to maximise your working environment by creating additional private meeting spaces or break-out areas, especially if your budget is tight.
The benefits partitioning offers
- Privacy
A modern open-plan office with lots of natural light creates an environment that promotes collaboration. Although this is great for employee well-being and productivity, privacy is still needed.
Partitioning allows you to create privacy with an open-plan feel, especially when using glass, and you don’t have to sacrifice the look and feel of your open-plan office to obtain the privacy of a traditional office. - Less distraction
Finding the right balance between privacy and collaboration will depend on your type of business. Still, offering an environment optimising employees’ ability to do their job effectively is essential.
Partitioning can reduce visual and auditory distractions using blinds, frosted glass and soundproofing materials. - Natural light
Natural light promotes well-being and is proven to increase productivity over artificial lighting. - Visibility
Glass partitioning looks great and offers good visibility, thus showing employees and clients that you’re serious about your workplace and, in turn, more professional. - Aesthetics
Aesthetically pleasing surroundings can impact morale, promote happiness and help motivate your team to work smarter and harder in an environment they are happy to be in.
With the vast range of partitioning options available, improving the office appearance and creating pleasing break-out spaces is easy. - Versatile and cost-effectiveness
The flexibility of partitioning means you can dismantle and create a new configuration whenever you need to re-organise an area, making it much less disruptive than a structural change, which can be a huge undertaking, especially when budgets are tight.
If you move, you can even take your partitions with you, making it a mobile investment rather than a cost.
There is a wide range of partitioning alternatives available depending on your requirements:
Demountable partitioning
- Solid or glass panelling
- Landlord’s favourite as minimal impact on building
- Flexible, so easy to move around
- Easy to dismantle and re-erect
- Sliding or folding door partitions are great if you need to close or open up areas for different purposes
Glass partitioning
- Various combinations of solid, single, double or triple-glazed panels
- A comprehensive and varied range of glass panel options, i.e. full or half height, frosted, tinted, coloured or printed
- Frames can be steel or timber frame systems
- It can be tailored to suit your office design and is a great way to include company branding
- Allows good vision between areas allowing staff and managers to all feel part of the same team
- Maximum possible use of natural light
- It can be designed to meet suitable fire ratings and acoustic values required to comply with current regulations or your particular requirements.
- The glass in your partition can be designed to fit any space – even if you require a curved wall partition, that’s no problem.
- By law, your glass partition must have at least two visible graphical elements on the glass to prevent people from walking into it – this is known as a manifestation and is all part of the service CID provides
- Our glass partitions are completely relocatable and can be taken with you if you move offices
- Fire-rated glass partitions offer up to 60 minutes of fire retardancy.
- Glass partitions are easily maintained and cleaned
- All our partitions have the option to install integral blinds – blinds that sit inside the glass panes and can be opened and closed with ease – this enhances the already robust privacy of our partitions, opening them up to even more uses
- Our partitions are easily connected to the mains and have lighting and atmospheric controls pre-installed, meaning you can adjust the light and temperature to suit
- CID fact: Full glass partitioning continues to be very popular and probably makes up 30% of our partitioning business in commercial office environments.
Acoustic partitioning
- Ideal when an expanding workforce leads to noise becoming an issue
- Acoustic office partitions all have thick acoustic foam trapped between the panels to absorb office noise
- However, your chosen acoustic panels must be manufactured from the best quality materials that conform to current building legislation
CPNI Multi-Threat Walling systems
A multi-threat walling system is multiple layers of materials such as steel mesh, steel plate, ply, and plasterboard on each side of a steel framework. These are used to construct secure/critical areas within a building such as a control room, secret/sensitive labs, or storage areas/workplaces where additional security measures are employed to deter, delay and detect unauthorised access to assets at particular risk from these types of security threats:
- Manually forced entry attacks
- Ballistics or low-end explosives followed by manual forced entry
- Ballistics attacks
- Blast attacks
- Surreptitious attacks
- These partitions will still be finished and decorated like any other partition system, allowing them to blend into your existing areas.
- CID fact: About 25% of our partitioning projects currently consist of CPNI multi-threat walling systems, as some of our larger repeat clients work with secret or sensitive products and information that must be appropriately protected.
Traditional partitioning
- Traditional partitioning systems may be installed within commercial offices or industrial, medical or pharmaceutical areas
- These might include stud and plasterboard partitions, steel partitions, and clean wall laminated/whiterock partitions
Free Standing Office Pods
- One of the challenges of open-plan offices is creating areas for people to work collaboratively without disturbing others, particularly without adding walls to create separate meeting rooms.
- Working pods are ideal for offices looking for a low-cost, flexible and stylish solution to creating meeting spaces and break-out areas that make quiet, friendly rooms for team members to work together.
- If you’re working with a tight budget, office pods are quick to install with flexible designs that fit into any office style
How can I ensure office partitioning looks good and works for my office?
- Once you’ve decided that partitioning will suit your requirements, your next step is to consider employing a reputable office interiors specialist such as CID, who will help you to understand how best to configure your office space.
- Ensure that your supplier listens carefully to what you’re trying to achieve and prepare a series of 2D and 3D visuals to help you see exactly how it will work in your current office.
- Once the design has been agreed you will need to look at a wide range of samples and make decisions on things like colours, materials, fixtures and fittings and more.
- To ensure exceptional results, choose a specialist such as CID who can demonstrate their expertise in office partitioning and give you evidence of working with quality suppliers to provide the perfect solution.
