Productivity and Design: Tips and Tricks (Part Two)

In part one of our series we looked at some of the best ways to design your office for productivity, with sensory factors such as smell and temperature featuring high on our list. Now we have even more tips to help you create a space which makes your employees feel comfortable, content and ready to work. Take a look, and see which ideas could benefit your office:

Go Green

Many businesses are trying to think ethically, and incorporate environmentally friendly practices into their operations – but while you’re going green externally, remember that it’s just as important to nurture some plant life inside the office itself. Decorating the office with real plants, rather than plastic imitations, will help to refresh the space by pumping oxygen back into the air, and simultaneously lift the spirits of everyone in the room.

If live plants aren’t an option, then even something as simple as the picture of a natural landscape can have a boost on morale. Consider encouraging your employees to set their desktop backgrounds to woodland scenes rather than cute cat pics!

Get Refreshed

Whether it’s the body or the brain that’s getting a work out, everybody needs fuel to keep them going through a long working day. Proper hydration is essential, so make sure people are getting a lot of use out of the water cooler – and if you’re sharing one across several rooms, consider investing in a couple more.

A great office practice is to run a tuck shop, stocked up with healthy snacks and accompanied by an honesty box for employees to leave a donation every time they take a bite to eat. If you make it easy for people to get the nourishment that they need, then they’re less likely to start flagging as the day goes on.

Start an Ideas Wall

One of the brightest brains in the office has just had an incredible idea to help boost profits next month – but before they have a chance to do anything with it, their phone has rung and they’ve had three urgent emails appear in the inbox. Just like that, the idea is gone into the ether!

With one of your walls given over to a giant ideas board, this doesn’t have to happen any more. Let people scrawl their ideas on a whiteboard as soon as they pop up, ready to be brainstormed and improved upon at a later date. This way they will be remembered and shared, and the short trip across the office will give an added boost to the circulation. Bonus!

Bring People Together

If you have a lot of people with similar job descriptions working from one office then it makes absolutely no sense to have them scattered across the room, or even across multiple rooms. You might think that productivity would benefit from putting people with different goals and thought processes together, however research has demonstrated that the opposite is the case.

Once you’ve grouped people appropriately, you can get an even bigger benefit from their collective minds by hosting monthly or weekly meetings in which proud achievements and possibilities for the future are shared and discussed.

Clear the Air

Poor air quality is one of the quickest ways to make your employees feel sluggish and unproductive. We’ve already discussed plants, which are a quick and easy way to clear the air; a second option is to install air filters. At the very least, open up some windows to let in a breeze!

Great office interior design really can be the fastest way to increase both productivity and employee happiness, and a lot of the tips that we’ve explored across our series are incredibly simple to implement! For some more permanent changes, talk to our design team and get an up to date office that makes use of all the most recent research and design knowledge: contact us online or at 01553 811 833.