Quality usually comes at a slight premium – and many of us wonder why we should pay more for a product we could get cheaper somewhere else. Nowhere perhaps, can this question get more pertinent than in the purchase of office products – and especially office furniture like office chairs, office desks and workstations. The nature of these office products is such that the price difference between the top quality products and the lowest quality products can be so significant that even the most price-insensitive of us gets to notice the difference.

Of course, not every office equipment brand being sold for a higher price is necessarily of higher quality, and it worth making this distinction right from the outset. There are indeed some instances where by paying the higher price, you are paying for nothing more than the vendor’s huge brand name – and this is something which is unadvisable to do, because you should be getting something extra for every extra dime you have to spend.

But in the instances where office products are being sold for a premium because of their higher quality, they often make a very worthwhile investment.

For one, higher quality office furniture is likely to last for longer than mediocre furniture, and sometimes the difference in durability can be often worth the little extra you have to pay for the quality office furniture. In line with the well worn adage ‘buy cheap, buy twice’ you might find yourself paying what to you appears to be a cheaper price for a piece of office furniture, only for you to end up having to buy another similar price a few months – or even weeks in the worst case scenarios – down the line. In this case, you end up spending what you thought you saved by purchasing lower quality office furniture – and perhaps even a little more. If durability is one of the qualities vendor of high quality furniture are touting for the product, then it is worthwhile for you to consider buying that particular piece of office furniture, especially if you can verify the vendor’s claims of its durability with users who have had a good experience with the furniture.

Secondly, higher quality office furniture sends out the message that you are an organization that values quality. This can be an important message that can pay great dividends if it gets well passed over, because people will usually be more willing to do business (or to get served in the case of non-business organizations) by an entity that values quality. Remember in business, image is everything and if your prospective customers perceive you as an organization that values quality, then their perception becomes their reality. Even when you come to business negotiations, if you have managed to convey the idea that you are an organization that values quality, you will find your customer getting a bit shy of quoting too low a price – in line with your ‘classy’ appearance. It is all about leveraging on image to influence the customer’s psychology, and it often works.

Every prudent business owner recognizes the need to keep their staff happy continually. Disgruntled staff can be a huge liability to the organization, as they are bound to make more deliberate mistakes and to treat customers badly in businesses where there is direct customer-staff interaction, leading to loss of business in the long run.

In a bid to keep their staff happy, many employers invest in the most obvious things – good pay, flexible working hours, a comfortable dress code whenever possible – and so on and so forth. And while all these contribute to keeping the staff happy, there are other smaller things that could influence staff mood and that unfortunately many business owners choose to ignore. Take for instance things like office seating. Unknown to many employers the quality of seating they invest in could have a huge effect in staff satisfaction and performance in the long run.

As more and more employers get sensitized on the role that office seating has on staff satisfaction and productivity, many are finally seeing the need to invest in quality office seating – right from the office chairs used by the ordinary office staff to the egg chairs in some office and the executive seats used by top brass in their offices.

This shift of attention to office seating is in part motivated by the realization that the way a person sits affects their energy consumption in working and that in some cases, energy management can be just as important as time management. It is in realization of this factor that the concept of what has come to be known as ergo dynamic seating – often implement through an office posture chair, came to find widespread acceptance.

The office posture chair works from the understanding that the range of office equipment referred to as ergonomic office seating – right from office chairs, egg chairs and executive seats derive the ‘ergonomic’ quality from the posture in which they allow the people working while seated on them to sit, but don’t optimize on the same.

People who have used the office posture chair have testified to huge energy savings they gain by using the posture that such a chair – which comes with a number of extra features above what an ordinary ergonomic office chair comes with – forces them to work from.

This is a huge departure from what we had in chairs that were said to be truly ergonomic – but whose use still left the users drained of energy at the end of the working day, often leading to resentment and health complaints in the long run.

The beauty of the office posture chair is that it does not cost so much – and it tends to be in fact cheaper than most of the ordinary ergonomic chairs which offer no more extra value for the extra price they are sold at. Even where the office posture chair happens to be sold for a price as high as the price of an ordinary ergonomic chair, it does at least offer some more value to show for the little extra that one has to pay for it – though as mentioned, in most cases it tends to cost less than an ordinary ergonomic chair. Talk of more value for less cost!

Presentations have become a way of life in today’s corporate world – to an extent that some executives are always moving from presentation to presentation, where they participate either as the audience or the facilitators. The growing importance of presentations perhaps has to do with the fact that the corporate world is fast moving towards a point where the success (or otherwise) of an organization depends on how well it manages to get pertinent information, and communicate the same information to the people who matter to it. A business organization that has a growth plan will, for instance, increasingly find that its ability to get financing for its project depends to a large extent on how well it can communicate what it is doing to potential financiers, as well as its ability to communicate what value it can add to the lives of its potential customers.

Now communication experts will tell you that your ability to get a message across to whatever audience you want to get it to will depend to a large extend on the media you use for the same. Use a lackluster media – and you risk having your audience sleep all through your presentation, and therefore not getting your message across to any one. Even if you don’t succeed in getting your audience to sleep through your presentation, you might have an even more difficult time trying to convince them about whatever it is that you are trying to persuade them – whether it happens to be to finance a given project or to buy a given product – thanks to your poor presentation equipment.

It is recognition of the role that the media one uses plays in getting their message across that many organizations are increasingly willing to invest whatever is required to get state of the art display equipment – from whiteboards for boardroom presentations, to noticeboards for internal office use and literature dispensers for use at network building forums like conferences. For those that are willing to go high-tech (and many are increasingly willing to go this route because the stakes are high here), there is always the chance to enhance a presentation with the use of equipment such a projectors, which must be used alongside projection screens.

The thing with most of these display and presentation equipment is that prices between the various models of the same item – say prices between two models of projection screens – can be so varied that one wonders which one to buy, given that many people are not willing to pay less and end up paying again a few months down the line – and neither are they willing to pay more just for the sake of a big brand name, without any extra value for the little more that they pay.

Price should however not be the only consideration in buying presentation and display equipment. The most expensive equipment is not always the best – and neither does buying display equipment at the cheapest price always represent a saving. The best way to go about shopping for display and presentation equipment is using references from people who have previously used the equipment (this should be easily available from online and offline forums), rather than taking the vendor’s word (which is bound to be subjective) about their product. In this respect then, shopping for display and presentation equipment calls for an investment of both the money you spent in buying the equipment and perhaps more importantly, the time you spent looking for information – and verifying that information -about the equipment before sinking your money in it.