Designing Your Office for Productivity

Can your office design have a significant impact on your employee productivity? Absolutely!

If you have been looking for ways to improve productivity and also need to update your office design, here are some great tweaks and tips that will really make a difference.

First, let’s talk about productivity. To encourage improved productivity in the office, you will first need to provide your employees with the tools they need to do their jobs adequately. The right technology sure helps, but you need to combine it with the right environment for maximum impact. Computers and software can only do so much.

Here are our top tips for designing your office with productivity in mind:

1. Flexible Spaces

Open office design is great in theory, but to encourage maximum productivity, flexibility is the key. Being able to vary the work environment now and then, either to get a change of scenery or to accommodate groups of various sizes, stimulates the senses and improves creative thinking, which is what you want to encourage. Think about including a combination of open seating areas, social spaces, and private huddle spaces for more focused thought.

2. Improve your Office Lighting

Poorly lit offices are almost as bad as offices that are lit with nothing but harsh, fluorescent bulbs. Eye strain causes headaches and fatigue, does a number on your mood, increases the incidence of sick days, and reduces productivity in general. Including a lot of natural light in your office design is ideal, but when that’s not possible, choose indirect lighting (as opposed to overhead lighting), use lampshades to diffuse harsh light, or choose upward-facing lamps that bounce light off of walls and other surfaces.

3. Color your World

Color has been proven to have a marked effect on our emotions and our productivity. White is considered to be one of the worst choices for office walls, while green stimulates creativity and blue improves productivity. Is your office a high-stress environment? Maybe pink can help.

4. Reduce the Noise

Excessive noise—any noise, in fact—is one of the biggest complaints among office employees. It causes undue stress, lowers job satisfaction, and causes your productivity to take a hit. Sound-masking systems that emit a low-level white or pink noise that effectively cancel out a lot of distracting ambient noise, including distracting conversations. Alternately, playing soft music through a central system will do much the same job.

5. Create an active environment

Encouraging your employees to move about the office is a great way to help them refresh and renew their focus. Providing standing desks or adjustable-height desks relieves the monotony of sitting in one place for too long and may also help them stay healthier, reducing sick time and lowering their stress levels.

In conclusion, these are just a few ways to design your office for greater productivity. Small changes often yield big results, and without having to rethink your whole office design, you may be able to breathe new life into your teams, simply by making improvements in these areas.

For more ideas on office interior design and how it facilitates the way we work, reach out today.