You’ve done the necessary things for
your employees: ensuring a reward and support system that motivates, provide
training and personal development path, and encourage collaboration. But have
you looked at whether the space where your employees spend most of time at (the
office) is conducive for productivity? Here are 5 science-backed design tips
that will improve productivity in your office.
Any psych major worth their salt would
cynically be reminded of the Hawthorne Effect if asked whether office design affects
productivity. The Hawthorne Effect is also known as The Observer Effect –
people become more productive if they feel like someone is watching, regardless
of lighting condition. That said, Hawthorne Effect is based on studies
conducted in late 1920s and early 1930s on factory workers. In today’s
environment of knowledge workers whose idea of manual labor is pulling out
paper from the copy machine, things are different.
The following are
office science-backed design tips that are proven to increase productivity
levels:
Colour Code Spaces
Colours help us
compartmentalize what we see. We’ve known for some time that color impacts
productivity in the office. But we’ve recently learned how using color can help us retain
and extract information. This is why more office designs are being
color coded to help employees compartmentalize tasks. As shown in this infographic
by Taskworld, natural colours such as green and yellow are most
conducive for long hours of creativity.
Make Space for Creative Collaboration
Create clusters of
workstations for employees who work well together. A new
study found that
workers are more productive when they sit next to people who have complementary
work styles. In contrast, surrounding employees with the wrong people can bring
productivity down.
Make Employees Feel at Home by Bringing In
Homey Elements
Workers who work
from home are happier, less likely to quit and more productive overall. Call
centers report employees working remotely can handle 13.5% more calls. But, if
working from home is not possible, why not bring the home to the office? Use
hand-made fabrics to soften rooms, and use woods like oak, beech, or their bamboo equivalents to make your employees feel at home.
Shed a Little (Natural) Light In
Humans intuitively
strive to connect with nature. This phenomenon is called biophilia, and it’s
also one of the hottest design trends of the moment. One biophilic design that
is proven to help boost productivity: increasing natural light in the workspace.
More natural light helps workers get a better rest at when they go back home. Study shows that workers exposed to natural
light slept an average of 46 minutes more each night. Workers without windows
reported quality of life issues, including vitality problems and daytime
dysfunction.
Of course, this
doesn’t mean you should work in an office that looks like an aquarium. There
are moments where dim lighting is actually preferred – for example, in creative
workspaces that requires hands-on work.
Go Green by Getting Some Greens In
A Washington State University
study on productivity found
that people responded 12 percent faster on computer tasks when plants were in
the room.
Even without these
stats, plants have always been a welcome addition to any office. They add life
and color to a previously sterile room. But current trends have made more room
for plants in the office than ever before.
If you noticed a
pattern in the quoted studies, most of the science-backed design tips are about
how people tend to be more productive when they’re close natural textures and
elements. This is nothing new of course. From Aristotle to Thoreau to Dickens,
great minds have espoused the benefits of walking in the woods. If your office
is close to nature, encourage your team to go outside more. If – like the rest
of us urban dwellers – your office is nowhere near greeneries, it’s time to
bring nature closer in your workspace design.
