Nowadays, many companies are choosing to install glass rather than drywall partitions in their offices. The main reason for this growing trend is because glass allows more light into the inner recesses of commercial office spaces, helping to create a more pleasant environment for those who work in them for 8 or 9 hours a day. If you would like to replace your drywall partitions with glass ones or you are fitting out a brand new office space and think that glass could be the way to go, the first thing you need to decide is whether you should opt for clear or frosted panes. Below, we take a look at some of the factors that may influence your decision.
Should You Choose Frosted or Clear Glass Partitions?
When you are weighing up your options, consider all of the following factors carefully and ask your employees for their opinions too.
- Need for Privacy – If your senior employees often entertain visitors in their offices and need to be able to do so in privacy, frosted glass is obviously the best choice. Trying to conduct secret negotiations in an office with clear glass walls can make the occupants feel like animals trapped in a zoo. If privacy is a major concern, you should make sure that at least a third of your partitions are frosted rather than clear glass partitions.
- Communications – If members of one department need to be able to see members of another department to facilitate communications between the two, frosted partitions could be a bad choice. While clear panes of glass will allow for less privacy, they are certainly the best choice for firms who place interdepartmental communications at the top of their list of priorities. While voices may still carry through frosted glass, depending of course on the thickness and height of the partitions in question, it is far more difficult to communicate with people that you cannot actually see.
- Collaboration – You could be forgiven for thinking that, as with interdepartmental communications, the best way to foster collaboration between different departments is to use clear glass partitions rather than frosted ones but this is not necessarily the case. You may well find that installing clear panes in every area will actually stifle collaboration to some extent as small groups of employees from different departments could feel like they have nowhere private they can go to discuss new ideas. The best option is to have a mix of clear and frosted partitions to ensure that private meetings can take place in certain parts of your work space, while still retaining an open plan feel.
- Aesthetics – Something that many companies neglect to consider when making the choice between frosted or clear glass partitions is how they will look in the workplace. Unless you have a particularly diligent team of office cleaners, clear glass panes could take on a rather smeared appearance after a while. If you like the idea of clear glass but you do not want your offices to look unclean, you will need to make sure that your cleaning team know what they have to do to keep your new partitions spotless at all times. If you would rather have partitions that can be left for a few days without looking uncared for, frosted panes may be your best option.
Another important factor you need to consider is cost. If you would like to find out just how much it will cost to install new frosted or clear glass partitions in your office, please feel free to call and speak to a member of our sales team whenever convenient.
