Rent me: The search for what to rent continues– Co-working solutions vs. traditional cubicles by Lanzo

Ron Lanzo, AFR Furniture

As most of my readers have come to expect from this column, I’m always searching for the next new thing that’s available to rent. While on vacation in the Caribbean on the island of Nevis recently, I noticed a sign that read “Rent Me,” prominently displayed on this fancy little dune buggy type vehicle. It was sort of a modified off road vehicle and beach buggy combination with wide tires, no top and a sleek design. It was appropriately called “Super Buggy.” Looked like it would be a lot of fun cruising around the town, and the local beaches, with its wide footed stance along with deep tire treads it should enable drivers maintain much needed traction. Nevis is a British colony so they drive on the opposite side of the road there. I’m sure this adds much excitement driving around the island on the wrong side of the road.

Later that week we took the ferry to St. Kitts, and while walking around the town square, I noticed a number of “Segway” scooters for rent. Even on vacation, I find it difficult not to be thinking about what can be rented as opposed to simply purchased.

In the nine years that I’ve been at AFR Furniture Rental & Event Furnishings, my main focus has been to help our customers with prompt, and effective rental furniture solutions to their furnishings problems. Also keeping an eye out for changes and trends that I see taking place in our industry. We’ve seen a large increase in the demand for new ergonomic and flexible height adjustable tables which we wrote about in our last issue. These continue to dominate customer requests, but despite the fact that Scott Adams, the cartoonist who found fame with Dilbert, has been predicting the death of the cubicle, we continue to see lots of interest in cubicle rentals. In fact, more customers than ever want space defining offices and their employees must have defined territorial separation. Much like a fence provides both privacy and security in one’s own backyard. Office partitions afford a well-defined privacy boundary. What we are seeing however in terms of change is panel heights are getting shorter. The cubicle heights have come down, and we’re doing more rentals with 53” high walls and even 39” high privacy panels. So, people still want defined space, but they want to be able to see their colleagues. And management wants to be able to see all of the employees at a single glance in order to better manage the work flow. We’re seeing more people working in what has now become known as “co-working” space. You see this trend especially popular within the office suites industry at firms like Regus and WeWork.

In fact, this trend has run rampant within the executive office suites and co-working facilities across the country. This is probably one segment where it’s hard to find a private office and there really is a complete absence of panels or partitions!

Teams of employees working in clusters sitting together in what has become known within the office furniture industry as “Traders Desks,” named after stock and bond traders. These cubicle clusters or partition systems have very short panels so that the traders can talk to each other without having to stand up. Needless to say, they are very popular with hedge funds as well. Here at AFR Furniture Rental, we’ve seen several projects of late that have used short with our new Ascend product line, the height adjustable tables instead of desks or fixed height work surfaces! This offers employees the option of getting up and getting some much needed blood circulation to the lower extremities!

We’re also seeing a lot more interest in comfortable seating from our rental customers, as I had mentioned back in my article about “ergonomics” office workers, architects, designers and management are all paying attention to employee health and safety! They all recognize that comfortable employees are happy employees. Happy employees tend to be better motivated and definitely more productive than less motivated employees. Increased productivity translates to lower costs, increased profits and more satisfied customers.

Ron Lanzo is the commercial account executive for AFR Furniture Rental, New York, N.Y.