Increasing Employee Morale with Great Office Design
The way you lay out your office can have a transformative impact on the efficiency of your employees, but also how they feel about coming to work each and every day.
Far too often company culture is the only thing considered when it comes to employee morale, but there are a lot of other pieces to this puzzle. Increasing employee morale with great office design is a cornerstone of building a more welcoming, more open, and more collaborative space – and that’s what we hope to help you with and the rest of this quick guide.
Obviously, the physical space and real estate limitations you may be contending with when it comes to your specific office are hurdles and obstacles you’ll have to clear independent of the tips and tricks highlighted below.
At the same time, though, there are always approaches you can take to boost employee morale with intelligent office design.
Let’s dive right in!
Work on Flow First
If you do absolutely nothing else – nothing else entirely – to go about increasing employee morale with great office design other than improving the overall flow of your office you already have handled the bulk of the heavy lifting in this department.
In an ideal situation, you’re able to look at the entirety of your office when it is completely empty – devoid of people and furnishings – to get a feel for how you’d like to set things up and how you’d like things to flow.
In the real world, however, this is rarely the case. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a look at your office after hours (most people have left) and see if the flow is conducive to easy communication, collaboration, and helps to foster efficiency.
Look for stumbling blocks and barriers that negatively impact your space while optimizing flow and you’ll find that employee morale skyrockets almost overnight.
Strategically Locate Collaboration Spaces
The whole “open office” approach has sort of been debunked in the last few years, with study after study showing that it doesn’t actually improve efficiency but instead elevates stress a lot more than expected.
At the same time, the collaborative benefits of open offices definitely is something to look to implement in your office space – even if you aren’t going to be knocking down walls or tearing down cubicles anytime soon.
People still need to feel like they “own” their own little corner of real estate in the office but there should be spaces that have been clearly and strategically located as team work areas and collaboration zones. The spaces should almost always only ever be used when collaboration is necessary, giving these physical spaces and atmosphere that helps to elevate collaboration and sort of “triggers” that kind of teamwork effort, too.
Implement these design decisions the next time that you get a chance to overhaul your office and you’ll find efficiency, morale, and the general happiness of your employees and your team increases immediately.