What makes your business successful? It’s not just your own incredible acumen or the unique selling proposition of your product or service. It’s how well you’re able to keep your team motivated and productive. Having an excellent company culture, great working relationships, and a streamlined approach to teamwork and delegation aren’t the only things that can affect that productivity. Your office can, too, and here are a few ways to tap into its potential.
Invest in a bright, energetic setting
Light, color, and aesthetic affect our mood and our energy levels much more than we might realize. Simply being surrounded by the right colors in a well-lit office can help us feel a lot more engaged a motivated. Investing in good lighting that keeps the office bright and clean looking, as opposed to the dull glow of fluorescent, which has been proven to have a net negative effect on both productivity and motivation in the workplace.
Keep it clean and pleasant
You want your employees to be engaged with their work, to take ownership and pride in their place in the team. To achieve that, you have to ensure that the office is somewhere they’re relatively happy to be. If it’s in a state of disrepair and rarely cleaned, it’s to feel anything but aversion towards it. Keeping the office clean is essential for creating a positive space. What’s more, it’s hard to be productive when you have heaps of boxes and papers blocking the walking routes throughout the workspace.
Make sure it’s safe and comfortable
You want employees to invest their energy into their work, so you need to be willing to invest in them. Particularly, you have to ensure you take your responsibility for their health and safety seriously. Ensuring the workspace is fit for work, with hard-wearing safe surfaces like epoxy flooring that mitigates the risk of slips, trips, and falls is one example. As is investing in ergonomic furniture that can prevent from developing back pain, shoulder pain, and all the other aches that are so common in the office environment. Both lighting and cleanliness play a crucial part in maintaining that safe workspace, too.
Have a designated break room
It has been shown that taking breaks at your own desk is bad for both your breaks and your work. Simply put, when you’re stuck in your work zone, it’s too easy to get stuck in your work brain. As a result, breaks aren’t as refreshing as they might be. Without a refreshing break, productivity decreases significantly after about 60% of the way through the day. That’s why some sort of separate break room that allows the team to get away from their workstations is crucial to their overall productivity.
Hopefully, the tips above make it clear that the workplace has a lot more to do with the work culture than many realize. Is it time to look back on your office and think about how it can be used as an asset, not just a place?
