How Isolation Could Be Driving Down Your Workplace Creativity

Offices should be a hub of creative and innovative thinking, where employees can freely and easily express new ideas about how their company can work more efficiently and stand out from their competition.

However, you may not have realised that the layout of your office space may be quashing your employees’ ability to interact and express their own ideas, and therefore you may be driving down the productivity of your business.

At OfficeScape, we are experts in office refurbishment and design, and here we are going to show you how isolation could be driving down your workplace creativity.

The Illusion of Telecommunication

The way we communicate both in and out of the office has changed thanks to technological advancements. However, this is not necessarily a positive change, and has had serious repercussions on workplace interaction and creativity.

Isolation in separate offices or booths causes many employees to feel solitary while in the workplace, which can not only stem their productivity but also drive down their creativity and their morale.

Rather than restricting communication between co-workers to emails and the odd phone call, your employees should be encouraged to talk to those around them, interact to come up with new ideas and easily have the ability to ask others for their input when they are finding it difficult to go forward with their own work.

Interaction and Conversion – A Vital Link

Innovative thinking is at its strongest when employees are able to freely communicate with one another, whether this is at their desk, in hallways or in a communal area at lunchtime.

A study conducted to see how face-to-face communication affects efficiency in the workplace found that sales people who increased their social interactions with co-workers by 10% also found that their sales conversions went up by approximately 10% – causing many to speculate that increased interaction directly causes employees to be far more productive at work.

Major companies are already adapting their offices to facilitate increased communication between co-workers. Facebook has planned to have several thousand of their employees work on one long table and Samsung’s new offices are planned to be modelled around a giant hub of public spaces – showing that the isolated office is soon going to be a thing of the past.

As you can see, communication is essential for creativity and productivity in the workplace, and at OfficeScape, we can help you to re-design your office to facilitate this as much as possible. For more information, contact us today on 01553 811 833.