What makes good office space

Areas where people can relax, as well as work without interruption are important. If you cannot do this, perhaps a rule where headphones on means Do Not Disturb to help with this.

We could have gone down the route of installing slides, meditation pods and artificial grass in this article. I doubt many people reading this will have those budgets, hence the more practical suggestions on how to make a great office space for your team. Click here to talk more about what makes a great office space. Site by 3mil. Helping Hand What makes a great office space? Here are our thoughts… 1. Comfort Whether you are moving into a bigger office, smaller one, or simply reviewing your current space, comfort is key.

Security Peace of mind is key to productive working. Facilities A microwave and a kettle is no longer enough. Privacy Open plan offices are efficient uses of space, but they also mean that everyone can hear what their desk neighbours are talking about.

Share Tweet Share. In fact, some of their best work may occur elsewhere in the office. Employees recognize that a change of scenery — or just a change from seated to standing — is an effective way to keep their creative juices flowing and their energy levels high.

You can incorporate this new mobility into your office layout by providing employees with a variety of workspace and seating options. Give your employees the flexibility they crave by incorporating adjustable-height desks, multi-person tables, stools, and a variety of other seating options into your office environment.

On Friday afternoon, gather your team together , uncork a bottle of wine or pop the top on a can of beer, and talk about the work week gone by. This is a productive way to wind down, solve problems, and get inspired all at the same time. Another essential component of a productive office environment is the presence of quiet areas for focus and concentration. We recommend pushing the quiet work area to one corner or one end of your office space.

Then arrange other areas according to increasing noise levels. Try to keep the quiet areas as far away from the collaboration and socialization areas as possible to prevent the activity in the latter from becoming a distraction. If you only use the collaboration section periodically or for team meetings, it can make an excellent buffer between the quiet areas and the rest of your office. Either way, design an open space with a large table and plenty of seating that you can use to bring everyone together.

Training is an essential component of work in the 21st century. Well-trained employees are happier and more productive because they are confident in their ability to get the job done right the first time. The collaboration area or conference room can double as a training space, but what happens when the conference room is in use and you need to introduce one of your teams to a new software tool? Color is an important addition to any office environment. It communicates a sense of atmosphere that can affect your employees in a variety of ways.

If your office layout is permeated by neutral grays and tans, employees can feel uninspired and sluggish for no apparent reason. If dark colors dominate your office space, employees can feel tired even first thing in the morning.

But drab colors do nothing to encourage creativity and focus. To keep your employees energized and engaged, punctuate your office with areas of bright color. There are myriad ways to incorporate color—from desk accents to exposed steel to the furniture itself. Simon Hansen, founder and blogger at Best Sports Lounge, also believes efficiency and productivity start with a strong company culture that rewards effort and encourages employee buy-in.

It's important for companies to reward progress, assure flexible working and encourage the key people in their company: their employees," Hansen said. Sometimes it does come down to the design of an office, though. Kayla Pendleton, owner and founder of coworking space Her Space, recognizes that and incorporates it into the physical design of her locations. And when something makes you unhappy, you are simply not as productive or engaged as you could be," said Kenny Trinh, managing editor at NetBookNews.

Trinh said there's no perfect or "best" office layout, but as long the needs of your employees are prioritized, you're on your way. Fertsch's company makes a stand-to-sit desk that encourages changing positions and moving throughout the workday, but you can build other opportunities for movement into your workspace.

Things like putting the copy machine or phone on the opposite side of the room from the computer and having a central water cooler create reasons to stand and move.

Part of creating movement could also mean giving your employees the opportunity to work from home or create flexible schedules , if your business allows for it. Tip: Creating movement can also mean offering flexible work schedules or the option to work from home.

No, really! An assortment of plants isn't just for pretty social media photos. They serve a great benefit in an office as well. She stated that houseplants are not a traditional method of creating a productive workspace, but that doesn't mean their impact is imaginary.

From reducing stress to increasing productivity and creativity, plants have oodles of pros. Smartphones, tablets and other gadgets can help you stay organized and efficient, but they can also be a big distraction and time-waster. With layoffs in the early s recession, and again in , surviving workers regained some space, largely because companies held long-term leases and were loath to invest in office reconfigurations.

But as hiring rebounded, leases came due, and redesign budgets recovered, organizations again began fitting their people into smaller and smaller spaces.

If the aim really is to boost collaboration, you need to increase the right kinds of interactions and decrease ineffective ones. That means you need to understand current patterns of interaction and consider how you want to change them. Using sensors and digital data to track interactions at a large German bank, MIT researchers found that in cases where intrateam cohesion was more predictive of productivity and worker satisfaction than cross-team collisions were, increasing interactions between teams undermined performance.

So they moved teams into separate rooms. And after using Humanyze technology to track interactions, a major energy company decided to increase communication between departments that had strong process dependencies and reduce communication between other departments by colocating some in a new building and moving others offsite.

If people need uninterrupted time to focus, distractions are costly. The best way to find the optimal workplace design for particular groups is to run rigorous experiments. That means collecting and analyzing data on interactions, developing a hypothesis about how to improve them, and testing your hypothesis against a control group.

Mori Building, one of the largest property-management companies in Japan, did this in early when it sought to create more-productive collaboration among the teams in its corporate headquarters.

The office architecture was open, but by using wearable sensors some of which were supplied by Humanyze to track face-to-face interactions, Mori discovered that employees largely communicated only with those on their own team. It chose a corporate floor on which seating was arranged by team interior design, real estate consulting, sales, and so on.

When Mori measured face-to-face interactions in that configuration, the results were clear: Although interactions between teams increased, those within teams fell drastically, with people spending 1. Mori was initially pleased with the results. But there was a dark side: It turned out that managers were not only communication bottlenecks but also gatekeepers of quality. In bypassing them, workers caused problems downstream; within six months, productivity had dropped and client complaints had risen.

And although the reduction in meeting time seemed beneficial, in retrospect it seemed that those who gained more solo work time would have produced better work, more efficiently, if they had attended more meetings to receive guidance, while employees who had relied on meetings to ensure an orderly way of dealing with issues now felt burdened by people coming to them on a whim until they began hiding out in the coffee shop downstairs.

In the end, Mori went back to fixed seating by team and reduced the amount of open space. The company had been planning to move to free-address seating to increase interactions among teams, but it realized that would be highly disruptive to collaboration and abandoned the plan. Such experiments require time and money, but many organizations find the costs trivial in view of the benefits generated by what they learn. Obviously, it pays to experiment with designs if a company is intending an overhaul to its space like the one GlaxoSmithKline a Humanyze client is planning at its corporate headquarters in London.

Executives were considering a new office format and decided to build one small portion of it as a pilot, which they call their workplace performance hub. The firm invited academic partners in architecture and behavioral science to help design experiments in the space. It will soon have rotated two teams through the pilot space—one did so during the first nine months of , and a second is being planned as we write this—tracking relative to a control group measurements that include steps, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, lung function, posture, well-being, collaboration, and performance using everything from wearable devices and Kinect sensors to surveys and traditional performance-management systems.

A major U. It chose the one that created the collaboration and focused-work patterns that best matched its goals and rolled it out across the organization. The cost was not trivial; it amounted to millions of dollars. But the firm was far better off than if it had picked a design without running experiments and subsequently discovered that it had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on an ineffective configuration.

That sounds impressive, but keep in mind that you need to experiment long enough to understand all the dynamics in play. As Mori discovered, initial results can be misleading. When conducting such experiments, you need to consider the privacy implications of collecting the necessary data.

Email and especially sensor metadata is sensitive.