The storage problem moved, it did not leave
For years the plan was to shrink storage. Go paperless, drop the personal filing cabinet, move to shared desks, and the rows of lateral files could come out. The square footage went to collaboration space, and on paper the storage problem was solved.
In practice it relocated. People still have a coat, a bag, a laptop charger, a water bottle, and the few physical things a workday produces. Teams still have shared supplies, samples, equipment, and the box of things nobody can throw away. When the desk that used to hold all of that disappears, the stuff does not. It ends up on the floor, on windowsills, on top of cabinets, and in the one closet that overflows by the second month.
The answer is not to rent more space. It is to plan storage deliberately for the way people actually work now, which is mostly without an assigned desk.
Personal storage when nobody has a fixed desk
The moment you move to shared or hot desks, you owe people somewhere to put their things. Skip this and the desk-sharing plan quietly fails, because people will camp at a desk just to have a home for their bag.
Day-use lockers are the standard fix. A bank of lockers near the entrance or the work neighborhood gives each person a place for a coat, a bag, and a laptop on the days they are in. Electronic or app-based locks let any locker serve any person on any day, so you need far fewer lockers than you have people. A floor of one hundred who come in sixty percent of the time does not need one hundred lockers.
Size the mix to what people carry. Most need a small-to-medium locker for daily items. A smaller number of larger lockers cover the people who bring more or store equipment. Putting lockers on the path from the door to the desks, rather than in a back corner, is what makes people actually use them.
Shared and team storage that earns its footprint
Personal storage is only half of it. Teams accumulate things, and shared storage is where the floor either stays clear or slowly fills up.
Put storage where the team sits, not in a central room. A credenza or a low storage run at the edge of a team neighborhood keeps supplies, files, and equipment within reach of the people who use them. Central supply rooms turn into dumping grounds because they belong to everyone and no one.
Make storage do a second job. Low storage credenzas double as a room divider and a surface for a printer or a coffee setup. Tall storage can define the edge of a neighborhood and absorb sound at the same time, which we get into in our piece on open-office noise. Storage that also shapes the space earns its footprint twice.
Spec lockable where it matters. Shared floors need some secure storage for equipment and sensitive files. A mix of open shelving for fast-moving supplies and lockable cabinets for the rest covers most teams.
Planning storage into the layout, not after it
Storage fails when it is the last thing added. The layout gets designed, the desks and meeting rooms get placed, and storage gets whatever is left over, which is usually a corner and a closet. Then it overflows.
Draw storage in from the start. A space plan should show where the lockers, the team storage, and the secure cabinets go before the furniture order is placed, sized to the headcount and the in-office pattern. This is part of how we space-plan a floor, not an afterthought to it.
Count the storage you already own first. Steel filing and storage lasts for decades, and a reconfiguration often keeps most of it, just relocated to where it now makes sense. There is rarely a reason to buy all new storage when what you have still works.
For the storage that no longer fits the new way of working, the old lateral files and pedestals, our RESEAT program helps you resell, donate, or recycle them instead of paying to landfill steel that holds its value. Bring your floor plan and your in-office numbers to the Hooksett showroom and we will spec a storage mix that fits the space you already have.
