Home Workers Seeking Stand-Up Desks, Ergonomic Chairs For New Environments
Monk Office President and CEO Caitlin McKenzie
VICTORIA – With work-at-home becoming the norm for many employees during the COVID pandemic, companies like Monk Office have noticed demand for office furniture in particular has increased significantly.
“The furniture side of our business has skyrocketed,” says President and CEO Caitlin McKenzie. “Particularly the demand for transactional furniture, with people working from home, the demand and interest in that has seriously increased.”
The pandemic has made it necessary for workers to set up home offices, and while doing so, they’ve been making their own discoveries about options and accents to make their working environment more comfortable and functional.
Director of Retail Joanne Boyer notes Monk is seeing plenty of customization.
“People want flexibility within their desks, from sitting to standing, so they can have a lot of movement and activity while they work. They’re wanting more standing desks, or converters that sit on a desktop that allows them to stand up at a dining room table and do work, or sit down” she notes. “Ergonomics is so important, because you can only perch yourself on a cat stand for so long before you realize you have to have something better.”
Boyer notices that customers are wanting to customize what colour their desks are, and the colour of chair they use.
“We’re also noticing a movement towards our Comforts of Home collection, which includes items you have on your desktop that are beautiful to look at, and are functional. Things like book ends and storage units, plants, plants and more plants – anything in terms of a vessel you can put a plant in. We are seeing trends that we expect to see continue once the workers return to their office buildings.”
McKenzie notes that they are starting to notice minor crimping in the supply chain as demand has increased, with some customers orders being delayed due to manufacturing issues.
“The lead times for our goods coming from eastern Canada or from the States and overseas are seeing big delays in furniture, in particular,” she says. “Our operational team is handling that well, and as soon as they hear from a supplier that delivery time has been delayed, they relay that right away to the customer.”
McKenzie says that prior to COVID, head office team members at Monk were set up to work from home, so the transition to more in-home work has been fairly straightforward. She does look forward to a return to normalcy, and having workers back in the office on a regular basis.
“I’m a fundamental believer in teamwork and cohorts and feeding off everyone’s energy,” she says. “Monk will remain an office-based business, but we are able to accommodate a work from home program, should anyone need to do that. I’d like our customers to know that we’re doing this together, and we’re doing this, too.”
In a glass half-full way, having more people working from home has brought new opportunities to Monk.
“We heard a lot about offices closing down, or temporarily working from home, and we wouldn’t have thought that was an environment that people were going to put money into. But it has. It’s provided Monk Office an opportunity to show what we have to offer.”
Looking ahead to the pandemic’s end, Boyer says “We’re expecting a lot of people are going to be likely shifting to go back into regular work spaces in offices, but only for a couple of days a week. A lot of people who have been working from great home work spaces, will be going back into sterile offices, and they will want to bring some of that new office environment they’ve experienced there as well.”
