If you’re trying to boost employee productivity, take a look
at the environment they’re working in. A well-designed workspace can have
significant benefits, and if yours isn’t quite up to par, a few simple changes
can reap big rewards.
1. The Ergonomic Office
Human bodies come in a lot of different shapes and sizes,
and there’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to office furniture. Every
employee should be able to adjust their desk and chair so that they can sit and
work comfortably for extended periods, without suffering from common problems
like neck, back, or wrist pain. This is an important thing to reinforce on a
continual basis—it’s easy to slip into bad habits—so it’s helpful to display
graphics that model the correct way to sit and provide information about
furniture adjustment.
2. Reduce Clutter
Should you be enforcing a clean desk policy? It’s probably
not necessary to go that far, but it’s definitely good to encourage employees
to keep their workspaces well organized and free from clutter. Maintaining a
reduced-paper or paperless work environment is useful too—the clutter-free
concept can work well in the digital workspace as well as in the physical one.
3. Back to Nature
If making larger-scale changes to the office environment
isn’t possible, the simple addition of living plants to a work environment is a
quick and easy way to boost productivity, as well as improve the office’s air
quality. All that’s needed is a small potted plant at each desk, and there are
plenty of easy-care flowering plants that can thrive indoors.
4. Change the Colour Scheme
Colour has huge effects on emotion and productivity, but
don’t just look at colour—saturation and intensity of colour is important too.
Yellow promotes creativity, green calms, and blue is stimulating, but softer
shades of these colours are more soothing than bright ones.
5. Let there be Light
Natural light can boost employee energy, creativity, and
productivity, but that’s not the only benefit. In a retail or sales
environment, it not only improves employee performance, but also increases the
time customers spend in stores. While most offices probably aren’t going to be
able to make the kinds of changes that involve adding skylights or windows, one
thing you can do is maximize the number of employees who work near a window or
have a window view.
6. Rethink the Open Plan Office
Open office plans have long been considered the gold
standard, based on the idea that they promote employee collaboration and productivity.
However, open plan offices also tend to reduce employee job satisfaction,
largely because they lack privacy. In most open plan offices these days, what
you see is employees wearing headphones to create the illusion of privacy—and
little collaboration, because when the entire office can watch you and hear
what you’re saying, conversation is somewhat intimidating. Again, an office
redesign might not be possible, but employees should at least have access to
private rooms or spaces where they can work undisturbed when necessary.
7. Provide Opportunity for Movement
It’s well known that most people perform best in spurts, and
that the opportunity to take a five minute break every hour or so results in
employees who are overall more productive. And yet, many managers still insist
on virtually chaining employees to their desks, not realizing that they’re
reducing office productivity in this way.
8. Remind Employees that their Work Matters
Working every day at an office job isn’t exactly glamorous,
and for many employees it becomes a grind. They forget that the work they’re
doing is important, they stop caring, and productivity plummets. This is where
office branding can come into play—it reinforces your company ideals, reminds
people of where they work, and can help them remember that while they might
only be a small cog in a large machine, the machine still needs that cog to
function.
