If you have ever had an experience whereby you found it difficult to work because of all the cluster you had on your desk, you have experienced a glimpse of the impact of your workplace on work productivity. And this problem alone costs businesses billions of dollars every year.
You should also understand why big companies spend a lot of money building incredibly beautiful structures and spacious offices which are incredibly organized and designed by professional internal decorators. They understand the impact of the workplace on productivity. And although you don’t have millions of dollars to invest in incredible workplaces, I will be showing you incredible tips on how to increase and improve productivity by creating a very productive workplace that would encourage your workers to get more work done and help increase your profits.
Spatial Arrangements
In a survey that aimed to measure employees’ performance and innovation to how they interact with their environment, the highest performing candidates had a greater variety of workplaces.
Solution: To help employees find and reserve workstations as fast as possible, you could harness the numerous productivity software and productivity tools that now exist. Those productivity tools can also help employees understand and use the options you have already provided to help them be as comfortable as possible whilst increasing employee productivity.
Regulate Noise
Open offices – which have become popular after the 1950s seemed to have directly impacted noise levels. Which could sometimes increase productivity, ambient sounds like the almost silent bustle of a coffee shop also ranked as one of the very biggest complaints.
And being cited as one of the main culprits preventing employee and workplace productivity, overheard conversations are very disruptive. And research shows in 14 studies linking noise levels to productivity that quieter working conditions experience 1.8% to 19.8% per cent gains in individual productivity.
Solution: Beyond noise-cancelling headphones, the use of sound absorbing materials could be very helpful. Use smart building tech like productivity tools (e.g. productivity planner apps) that help measure and control acoustics throughout the office, sensor networks, room reservation apps that could enable individuals to identify the availability of a room for their changing needs.
Regulate Lighting
Just as it affects general health and well-being, better lighting and access to natural light can boost office workers’ productivity. Research shows that in 12 studies relating lighting to performance, that increased productivity of 23% is achieved when exposed to natural lighting.
Solution: Tech has advanced so much as we now have LEDs and responsive lighting to make indoor lighting more cost-effective. And smart windows are making it easier for occupants of a particular location to enjoy natural light without having to be uncomfortable with people glaring at them from the outside.
Regulate Temperature
Recently, a lot of people have complained about how the temperature seems to be hot in a lot of places, especially indoors. You should already have an idea of how temperature could affect one’s comfortability in a location. And posing serious risks of impaired cognitive function, an office place that is either too hot or cold could lead to unwanted distractions. A study done in 1996 from the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy in Denmark showed that “providing workers with ± 3 degrees of individual control would increase performance for logical thinking and very skilled manual work by 3%, and increase typing performance by 7%.”
Looking at it closely, those gains in productivity improvement could directly impact how much more money a business makes. A 2004 Cornell study puts the figure to around $4,000 for just one full-time employee for a year.
Solution: You could begin to use building software that allows workers to regulate the internal temperature in their work space, to help improve comfort and productivity.