As a business owner, it’s important to understand how the efficiency of the office space your team works in directly impacts their productivity. Simply put, an office space that is cluttered, poorly organized, and ill-designed is not a pleasant or a motivating place to work. If you feel that your team could use a little extra energy in their work, then starting with an office redesign may well be the best place to start. Here, we’re going to look at some steps you can take to ensure that it’s at its best.
The Importance Of Good Workspaces
If you’re looking for the hidden productivity killers in your office, then you need to start with the spaces that your employees get their work done in. If you’ve got them in a cubicle crush, then the cramped settings can heighten stress levels, making them more likely to burn out and impacting the workplace culture. Yet, a fully open plan office brings its own challenges, such as making it much easier to distract them. Creating hybrid spaces, allowing teams to shift between privacy when they need it, and collaborative spaces when working together, can help them get a lot more done, depending on the kind of work that they’re doing.
Make Way For Work
If you have a larger office space with a team of workers, and many of them consistently need to be able to communicate and collaborate with their team members, then you have to make sure that navigating the office isn’t a nightmare. Provide walkways that allow them to cut through the noise and reach the other coworkers easily, ensuring that they don’t waste time making their way from one end to the other. Similarly, for appliances and assets that are shared regularly by team members, such as the printer, make sure that they are situated in a space that makes them roughly equidistant from each end of the office. Don’t position any workers too far from them. It might seem like just a few steps every day, but in terms of motivation and productivity, those can add up.
Clutter And Claustrophobia
As mentioned, working in a cramped workspace causes stress, and it can be a distraction all on its own. However, you might have the space that you need, technically, you’re just making poor use of it. For instance, you may have work equipment, desks, and furniture that are taking up space that could be much better used by one of your workers. Streamlining the office by downsizing its contents can open up a lot more space. If you’re not looking to sell that extra office equipment (as you may need it at some point) then a storage company could help you find the temporary space to place it. If you find yourself running out of space for the resources you need, you may have to consider moving into a larger office space.
Implement A Good Filing And Storage System
A well-organized office doesn’t just make it easier for your team to find space to work, it also helps them better manage the resources that they need to complete that work, as well. A poorly organized and messy filing system isn’t just an eyesore, it’s going to actively make it tougher for your team to find the documents that they might need. Labeling folders, organizing filing cabinets alphabetically or by purpose, and making your storage areas a lot more easily accessible can make retrieval faster and easier, meaning a lot less time spent looking for things your team needs.
Make The Move To Digital
If you’re running out of space because you have too many cabinets and your filing system is getting labyrinthine despite your best efforts to organize it, you may need to take a digital approach. Moving all of your document storage to digital devices may sound like a tall order, initially, but digitizing documents isn’t that difficult, and it can be done gradually to avoid it becoming a major project. Storing your necessary information on the Cloud not only helps you save a lot of space that can be better used to improve productivity, it may also be a lot more secure. After all, anyone can physically access an open file cabinet, whereas digital security measures ensure that they need the right security clearances.
Addressing the woes of the office can lead to a much more motivated, productive, and efficient team. It has impacts not just on the practicalities of how they work in the space, but their mindset as well. With the tips above, you can ensure that your office is an asset, not a liability.
