These days, many businesses are offering employees the flexibility of working from home. This brings up a tricky question. How should you provision office furniture for workers who maintain a home office?

Buy

You can simply requisition and purchase office furniture for employees who are working at home in the same way you do for those who work at the office. The furniture rental blogger over at CORT recommends providing a workstation that is identical to the one the employee was using in the office to make the transition easier and maintain productivity. Of course, that only works if the employee has enough space to set aside for a full sized desk in their house. Some might only have room for a tiny corner desk like the one in the photo above.

Lease

If you lease, it’s easier to let the employee have some input on the size and style of office furniture you provide. After all, if they don’t like it you can always exchange it. You could even have the employee lease the furniture directly under their own name. That way, they can choose whatever they want (based on the monthly budget you provide). Plus, you aren’t stuck trying to retrieve the furniture from their home if they quit. It’s the leasing company’s job to be the repo man. On the down side, when you let an employee handle the process you may end up paying more than if your company negotiated the contract.

Reimburse

One of the simplest ways to handle provisioning office furniture for remote telecommuters is to let the employee expense it to the company. However, you may want to make some recommendations for the right office furniture to buy. You don’t want an off-site employee sitting in a poorly designed office chair all day at home. They need to purchase the same high quality, ergonomic office furniture that your on-site employees enjoy.

Do you remember this June when I asked the question “What if you lived in your office?” Well, if that scenario is coming true for you, I’ve found the perfect Christmas present. The Murphy bed/desk. This isn’t at all like you’d imagine it from cartoons about wall beds growing up. It won’t suddenly release from a hidden compartment in the wall and bonk you on the head. Modern designs are actually stylish and clever.

For example, the actual brand name Murphy Desk Bed makes it super simple to transition from desk to bed without even removing anything from the desk surface (and without gluing everything down). The desk surface lowers to the ground with your computer monitor, hard drive, office supplies, and desk accessories remaining nice and level. The bed folds down from what looks like a storage unit. It covers all the equipment, effectively protecting it from being disturbed.

Office furniture from a century ago isn’t designed for today’s modern technology. You won’t find it riddled with data ports and tricked out with articulated monitor arms. But there are a few features from days gone by that would still be kind of cool to have in today’s mass produced office furniture items.

Roll Top and Drop Top Desks

It’s nice to be able to lock the individual drawers on a modern desk. But it’s even nicer to have a lockable screen roll or down or fold up over the entire desk top. You could leave your good pens and your favorite stapler out on the desk without being afraid they would disappear. The computer monitor and that stack of work you left undone wouldn’t be able to stare accusingly at you either. Sure, finding a roll top desk that would actually accommodate a computer monitor would be tricky. But a laptop would fit in there easily!

Slant Top Filing Cabinets

The Klamath County Museum has just added an ancient wooden filing cabinet to its historical furniture collection. Besides being a lovely piece of equipment, this 4 foot high pedestal style cabinet also has a useful feature – a gently slanted top. This surface provides a place to open a ledger book or sort through a file folder at a comfortable viewing angle. Another feature of this cabinet that is surprisingly modern is its modular nature. It’s actually composed of five components that fit and lock together to create the full piece.

Solid Construction and Natural Materials

We think most designers would agree “wood and leather go together”. Both these materials have a unique grain that ensures no two pieces of office furniture are exactly alike. Back at the turn of the last century, a good office chair was made of solid oak with leather upholstery. While many of the parts were machined, the finishing was often a matter of custom craftsmanship. It’s no wonder you can still find a chair made 100 years ago that’s still in working condition today. Of course, the tradeoff is that these wooden chairs usually weren’t that comfortable. Perhaps we need to blend space age materials with these old fashioned good looks to create the perfect office chair today.