What makes an office space great? The answer is not that simple. It requires a lot of analysis about the work and people in a workplace. It depends on your company’s culture, diversity of employees, nature of work and employees preferences. Success follows automatically if office environment is right.
It’s a challenge for facility managers and other decision makers of a company to get the right workplace for their employees. How can they set up a workplace that’s not just a place to employ all employees but one that’s a strategic tool for production, teamwork, and growth?
Major workplace trends just don’t evolve overnight. There are people and organization who constantly works to achieve it. After lots of changes, failure and success they come up with some innovative ideas to improve a workplace. It’s a constant process.
Let’s discuss some proven innovative ways to make a workplace better for employee’s collaboration and productivity:
Create some overlap zones in office
According to the recent research, creating opportunity for unplanned interactions among employees improves performance. Design your office in such a way that increases the likelihood of meeting different employees without any planning.
The idea of overlap zone might not sound great but it’s proven to inspire collaboration. Overlap zones are those areas of an office where employees are likely to run into each other.
For designing these highly interactive overlap zones you need to analyze a lot about your employee behaviors. How do your employees go from a place to another in the office? Where do they go frequently Washrooms, Cafeteria and or water cooler? What sort of spaces causes them to run into each other more frequently?
Once you find the answers to above question then you can easily think of the changes to be made to create overlap zones in your workplace.
Unreserved seating plan or hot-desking
Many bigger employers are using hot-desking these days. It’s a concept of unreserved seating arrangements in which an employee can sit wherever he wants. Thanks to portable laptops and wireless internet to make hot-desking really hot.
In hot-desking there are no desks assigned to anybody. When the employee comes to work in the morning they can sit anywhere and start their work. From open desks to more public spaces like couches and bean bags are the part of hot-desking concept. For effective working of this concept, a company must take special care while designing their office spaces so that employee can move from one place to another without any problem.
Hot-desking might not be a good idea for few businesses so you need to act only after analyzing every pros and cons of it.
Design and implement a superdesk
Designing office around the concept of open office is in trends these days. What about designing a shared desk for all employees? Superdesk concept is getting popularity recently. Bigger companies are now spending time and money in developing super desks where all employees can sit together to work and collaborate. Private discussion rooms can be added in a workplace in order to provide quieter space to some employees in need.
Have a music room in office
Music can boost employee’s productivity and set a positive company culture. Sometimes employees need a break to blow off the work pressure and what’s better than the music? For a musically inclined person, music rooms can be the real stress buster. It’s the demand of great work culture to design a super soundproof music room in the company. Employees can go to the music room alone or in groups to play the music and get energized.
The best example of this music rooms in office is Linkedin headquarter in Mountain View, California. They have a great music room with high-end musical instruments like drums, keyboards, guitars, microphone stands, AV equipment and even stage lightings.
Allow pets in the office
It can be a topic of discussion that an employer should allow pets in the office or not? But there are many companies that allow employees to bring their pets to work these days. Allowing pets in the office can help employees to improve their work-life balance and helps them to get rid of stress. It requires some changes in the office space to accommodate pets comfortably. You have to invest additionally for those pets in order to please your employees.
Plants & greenery in the office
Who don’t like the plants, natural lights, and greenery? According to the latest research, adding plants and greenery in a workplace can increase the productivity of employees by 15%. Some companies started investing in plants and greenery around the office to make their employees happy and healthy. For example, Google’s office in Tel Aviv, Israel has an indoor orange grove. It makes Google employees feel that they are sitting outside in a park.In addition to greenery natural light is very important for employee’s health. Natural lights do a great job in reducing eye strains.
So these are the latest design trends in office spaces for providing better working conditions to your employees. You might not be able to implement all but starting with few can give you the better results.
Author Bio
Sahaana Jai is a content Writer at Furnished Office Bangalore, an Corporate Real Estate brokerage firm providing specialized services in property management, corporate leasing, online property services, investment and transaction Management.
