Your company’s productivity may depend on how happy employees are with their surroundings.
According to a recent survey by the corporate architecture firm, Gensler, employees say they’d work an extra hour per day if they had a better place to get their work done.
But a better place doesn’t have to mean a different place. Companies like General Electric and Group Health have benefited greatly just by changing the way they used their current office space.
In many cases, a redesign of a company’s workplace can be one of the most cost-effective ways to make workers more productive and retain them for longer periods of time.
So what works best? Architects and designers who examine the ever-changing workplace designs suggest the following fixes:
- Enclosed mini-conference rooms. Having a variety of options where workers can quickly get together without taking up a large conference room can increase collaboration and cut down on the distraction of workers congregating between cubes.
- Drop-in office spaces. If you’re working with a mobile workforce, chances are you don’t need traditional, full-sized offices. Smaller office space allows for “touch-down” workstations for workers from other offices.
- Lower the cube walls. Normally cubes can isolate workers, but separating workers with smaller partitions (four feet instead of six) grants workers a fair degree of privacy and encourages communication.
- Don’t give bosses all of the windows. Moving the executive offices to the center of the floor and rewarding workers who spend the most time at their desks with a nice view is a cheap, simple way to increase productivity and retention.
