Tomorrow – Saturday 20 June 2015 – is officially World Productivity Day! It’s a little odd that such an occasion should be on a weekend, so being the productive folk that we are, we’ve made time to celebrate a day early and share our office-design team’s top three tips for giving your business’s productivity levels a timely boost.
1. Make light work of it
Too often, office refurbishments focus on the likes of the furnishings and flooring, but forget about the importance of light and lighting. To help your people become more productive, make sure you make the most of daylight – but also handle it with care! Without proper consideration and planning, it can adversely affect the room temperature and cause awkward reflections or shadows on computer screens or across office desks.
Artificial light should also be given thorough thought – and should be positioned, specified and controlled in order to be effective but not expensive. Systems that turn on and off in response to (or in anticipation of) occupancy are one of many smart ways to give people the light they need while reducing costs.
2. Get smart about space
If an office has 10 desks with one chair and one PC at each desk, how many people can work in this space? 10? Maybe 20 years ago that would have been the answer, but thinking about space more flexibly can send productivity soaring.
Often, people do not need to have a traditional desk-and-PC set up all of the time. Break-out areas are brilliant at encouraging collaborative working, free thinking and new ideas. Allowing home working a day or two each week – and accommodating the fact that some early birds might prefer to start and finish sooner, while night owls may work better later – can enable businesses to make more efficient use of an office’s resources, while at the same time making people more motivated.
3. Find the right degree of heating and ventilation
Numerous studies abound as to the perfect, most productive office temperature, but in our experience, some people like it hot, some crave it cool (and Goldilocks likes it somewhere between the two)! What’s more, those preferences can vary from day to day – and can be effected by a range of factors including the day’s weather, the mood in the office and nature of the task at hand.
This is why we recommend heating, air-conditioning and ventilation systems that can be easily programmed or controlled to deliver a working environment that keeps the hot shots, cool thinkers and even Goldilocks working away happily!