Gone are the days, when the office was just a place of work. The office environment is an essential element that not only influences an employee’s productivity but also plays a vital role in creating the overall employee experience at the workplace. The happiness and productivity of your employees often depend on how functional and beautiful your office is. That is why companies are investing much more to ensure that their workplaces walk the talk and reflect what they stand for. The right kind of environment makes all the difference.
With a mindful approach to design, we can create environments that help people make great things happen. The Office of today and tomorrow is truly flexible and has the power to make people more collaborative, productive, and even healthier. Here are 11 ideas and tips to help you achieve maximum employee engagement and create inspiring workspaces.
1. Inviting meeting rooms
Most meeting rooms are cold and dull. They aren’t suited for creativity or even collaboration. Add couches and chairs and help bring people closer together. You can hang a screen on the wall for presentations. Give it the feeling of a coffee house or living room and employees will prefer it.
2. Vintage Look
The vintage look gives a timeless, boutique feel. Vintage furniture, local art, unique design pieces, and cozy nooks and mini-lounges, are all customized features when incorporated in the boutique office design, create the same sense of prestige and luxury of a vintage-style boutique space.
3. Flexible spaces
Flexibility is the key to a new-age office design. Add height-adjustable tables for standing or sitting, tables that allow for small groups to gather within a larger, collaboration-ready room, or semi-private breakout spaces for casual brainstorming sessions. Consider modular furniture that can be moved, mixed, stacked, and stowed. Using movable furniture, large openings and doors, movable living wall dividers, and easily repositioned chalkboard, whiteboard, or electronics.
4. More privacy and fewer distractions
We need to add interior design elements to break up the visual and noise distractions in an open floor plan. Using plants and other natural elements to construct dividers, movable panels, or privacy screens can go a long way toward solving these issues.
5. Minimizing Clutter
In the flexible workplace of today, a messy desk is someone else’s distraction too. We need to rely on being a little more organized. Various options of storage solutions are an important part of an efficient workplace.
6. Promoting activity
Our bodies are made to be in motion and not to be seated at a desk for longer periods of time. Employees should have spaces encouraging them to take a walk. Support with technology and allow employees to work from anywhere in the office. Standing and walking meetings are also becoming a norm now.
7. Lighten up
The more natural light you can let into the workplace, the better. When designing for natural lighting, make sure to keep harsh glares off of computer screens. Add skylights or taller windows. If natural light is a challenge, it’s better to light spaces with indirect light whenever you can.
8. A sense of community
Shared tables are appearing in the workplace. A sense of community is now becoming an important part of the work environment. Shared tables are also home-like, promoting the increasingly family-style, collaborative work that is happening around them.
9. Take a break and relax
Businesses are adding back cozy, comfortable, private spaces for their employees. Many progressive co-working spaces are creating areas like a coffee shop, library, or a quiet reading room. Some businesses are adding restaurant or phone booths for workers to be alone and reduce distractions.
10. Biophilia
Biophilic design is becoming a standard practice for designers and architects. The WELL Building Standard is helping raise awareness and provides guidelines based on biophilic principles. Integrating nature into office spaces through light, color, materials, patterns, textures, sounds, and living plants is being embraced by all businesses.
11. Color Scheme
Dull, monochromatic workspaces kill creativity. Colors and artwork can all help people maximize their productivity at work. Color can also improve efficiency and help with communication. Consider different colors and shades of spaces according to what needs to happen inside them. Blues and greens improve focus and reduce fatigue, reds inspire passion and energy, and yellows promote optimism, development, creativity, and innovation.
The Takeaway
Progressive businesses need to have the right kind of offices. The most successful workplaces will continue to move in the right direction of more flexibility, better sustainability, more diversity, and more social impact. They will spearhead the movement for a great place to work which will inspire our future generations.
