Your home office can feel like a major thing when you’re growing your business from home. After all, this is where you’ll spend your working days. Additions like houseplants, pleasing decor, and filing cabinets where you can store all your necessary paperwork are going to make a huge difference to how much you enjoy your time here.
Luckily, with complete control over your own office space, you can have a lot of fun getting this area just right. But as well as thinking about the best color for your office walls, you also need to think about the more practical stuff, including how you intend to host meetings in this space.
After all, even during a Zoom meeting, your background makes a difference, and issues including patchy wifi or too-bright lighting could quickly unravel your professionalism. Instead, you need to ensure this room’s meeting-ready at any time of day. And, we’ve got a few tips to help you do it.
Step 1: Think about your windows
Windows in any office can be great for providing natural light, giving you a view, and generally making the space feel more harmonious. Unfortunately, when the afternoon sun gets too low, they can also leave you with an on-screen halo that’s at risk of blocking your entire face. Given that your clients are after a meeting with you and not an indeterminate glowing ball, this is an issue you should offset by investing in either blackout blinds or exterior sunscreens. That way, even if a client requests a meeting in the middle of the afternoon, you’ll be able to block out the worst of the sun before you get going.
Step 2: Sort your lighting
While the too-bright sun is definitely a bad thing, not enough lighting can prove just as detrimental, especially for winter meetings that could easily take place in the dark. Thinking hard about office lighting is therefore crucial, though you might want to avoid stark overhead lights for the same reason that you may want to block out the sun. Instead, think about soft, eye-level lamps that you can place behind or beside your computer. That way, they’ll provide a gentle, non-glaring light source that’s just off-camera.
Step 4: Get a lock on your door
Working from home brings a lot of benefits but, in the afternoons especially, it also poses the risk of interruptions. You need to make sure that no one can just walk in during your meetings. A locked door is the best way to do that, and can let your family members know when you’re out of action, as well as free you to give your undivided attention to any meeting participants, without worrying every time you hear a tread on the floorboards outside.
Hosting meetings in your home office can be a lot of fun, but with aesthetics solely on your shoulders, it can also pose some unexpected setbacks at certain times of the day. Make sure they never leave your professionalism under fire by implementing these crucial pointers in advance.