Personal storage and lockers have been a common fixture in many offices for years. However, they are proving highly relevant in today’s current environment.
Types of Workspace Lockers for Personal Storage in the Office
Lockers are modular and adaptable so they are well suited to the flexible office. Lockers also have the opportunity to customize designs to suit different brands, locations or themes. This creates many options when choosing the most appropriate storage solution for your workplace. Here, we summarise some of the key points to look out for:
Materials
Choose a solution that is both sustainable and responsibly sourced. Declare labels help you to see what has gone into the making of a product, which enables designers to make a big difference.
Locks
There are a variety of locks depending on your strategy, from mechanical locks to electronic, including biometric locks, like fingerprint scanners. Mechanical Locker options are simple, effective and low in cost. Electronic Locker options allow for a more dynamic locker assignment with full security control and audit trail, with no keys and no manual record keeping. One advantage of electronic locking systems that’s now more relevant than ever, is that they offer potentially safer and more hygienic access through presenting a tag or fob that the employee uses means there is no ‘sharing’ of keys.
Agile Lockers
When looking at Agile locker solutions, we normally categorise them as ‘Assigned’ or ‘Non-Assigned’. The advantages are different for each, but both offer design choice, customization, and benefits to the workplace. Providing a permanent locker for every employee can be more expensive and requires a lot of space. Half of the UK’s workforce is mobile. For a company that embraces agile working, activity-based working, or shift work. Providing personal storage lockers for each employee means that the locker goes unused most of the time. An electronic locker allows you to allocate lockers dynamically.
Assigned Lockers
These are generally used when everyone is in the office, or perhaps in a team. These will normally be used on a 1:1 ratio. Usually, these will be accessed with a locker key, which can cause some frustration for the facilities manager when keys go missing!
Non-Assigned
These are tech-enabled solutions that allow an administrator data into locker usage and give them more control. They are highly popular in a hybrid workspace that offers more flexibility, this is because you do not need a 1:1 locker ratio, a user can present their staff card, pass, or fob and be assigned a locker to use for the day. The assignment works on rotation so the locker use is optimal.
Not all locker systems are as flexible and adaptable as ours, but with a system like our HotLocker, your investment isn’t tied to a particular location. So, if you move offices (or redesign an existing space), you can rebuild and relocate your electronic lockers however and wherever you need them, making them a truly future-proof and long-term investment.
Personalized Locker Solutions
Open-plan workspaces have always been popular but in different ways. Right now we are seeing most office designs incorporating different neighbourhoods and zones to allow people the flexibility of working where it suits them – whether that’s a quiet booth for focus or in a collaboration space, or even in a scrum auditorium-style seating for meetings.