Your Guide to Sharing a Custom Home Office With Your Partner

Adam Bender | Oct 19, 2022

Everyone has heard that working from home is on the rise. Whether it’s because of the pandemic or just due to your circumstances, you may find yourself in a home where not just one, but two people are working from home. It can be tough enough to find and afford a living space with one home office, let alone two. Can two people share a workspace? It is possible to share a custom home office, but there are some guidelines that you need to keep in mind to do so peacefully and efficiently.

Identify Work Styles
Know What to Share and What Not to Share
Set the Ground Rules Ahead of Time

With this guide, you can figure out the right way for you and your partner to share a home office so that both of you can have productive workdays.

Identify Work Styles

You may be compatible with your partner in your home life, but are you two compatible as workers? Both of you may have totally different work styles. Different work styles can mean that both of you need different things from the workspace. Figuring out what your work styles are can help you design a home office that works well for you.

Science of People identifies six different work styles. Looking at them, you may be able to identify some features of a workplace that people might need, depending on what style of worker they are. For example, the “Wonder” style of worker needs creative inspiration. They may do better if they’re positioned near a window that they can look out of, as opposed to a blank wall. The ability to observe nature or even people-watch while working may be helpful to their process. On the other hand, the “Invention” style of worker likes brainstorming tools. They may find it helpful to have a whiteboard in the room near their workstation for brainstorming.

If you and your partner have different working styles, neither can expect the other one to change to conform to their style. The only solution is to do what you can to adapt the room for both of you in your own spaces.

Know What to Share and What Not To Share

There are some things that you won’t share with your officemate. You’ll both need your own computers, for example. Other things should be shared. It’s very unlikely that either of you would print enough or shred enough to require two printers or shredders. Just have one of each that is equidistant from each working space so you can share as needed.

Other things are less obvious, though. Should there be one phone line in the room? Two? Or none at all? If the two of you are working for the same business or working on your own shared business, one phone line may be enough, even if you’re doing very different jobs. If the two of you are working for different businesses, or each of you is working for yourself, and you’re sharing the office but not sharing a lot of office hours because you work at different times, you could have two lines in the room. On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons why you might have no telephone lines installed. Maybe you both work the same hours every day, making it impossible to take or make calls without disturbing the other – in that case, plan on taking calls elsewhere in the house. Alternatively, perhaps neither party needs a landline for your job. If both of you can rely on cell phones, great; just make sure that each has private time for work calls or a place other than the home office to make and take those calls.

Set the Ground Rules Ahead of Time

Depending on what each of you does for work and what each person needs to work effectively, there are a lot of different options for ground rules, but it’s a good idea to hash them out and settle them before the two of you start working together.

For example, if one of you can’t concentrate without music in the background, but the other person is completely distracted by music, it may need to be a rule that the person who needs music wears earbuds when both people are in the office. If one of you sees clients in person, that worker may need to designate specific hours and days for that, when the other person can arrange to work elsewhere, work different hours, or be off work, and both people will need to stick to that schedule. You will need to figure out how to accommodate each other and make an agreement to stick to that.

Additionally, you should make it a rule to clean the shared office regularly. Both people should agree to a cleaning and organizing routine so that no one feels like they’re doing all the work to maintain the shared workspace. With the right custom office products and accessories, you should be able to keep the area from getting too messy to begin with, but some straightening and cleaning will still be required.

Conclusion

Sharing a home office is possible, but it takes understanding, knowing what to share and what not to, and setting expectations ahead of time. If you can do that, you can share a custom home office efficiently.