Office Observations – How The Workplace Environment Affects Productivity and Worker Wellbeing

By
IntelligentHQ
Office Observations – How The Workplace Environment Affects Productivity and Worker Wellbeing

 

Workplaces are where people will end up spending the majority of their working life. Sure, some jobs allow working from home, and some jobs mean largely working from a car or from cafes, such as sales representative roles, but for the most part an office building is where many of us will while away our weekdays. An office has an environment just like any other place, and just like any other place this environment can be beneficial or detrimental to the things that populate it.

A limitation at a home office, for instance, could be a lack of computer functionality. This problem can be fairly simply solved with a dual monitor stand for your home office, allowing you to have greater access to your work across two screens instead of one. An office with co-workers can be decidedly more complex, and that’s why we’ve decided to write up a run-through on how the workplace environment affects productivity and worker wellbeing.

Productive

Promoting an environment that produces productive employees can mean a number of things, and no one office setting will work flawlessly for every person because every person works differently. For someone that enjoys working in utter silence, a slightly noisy office space can be hugely irritation and distracting, whereas a different employee that finds silence distracting could see a dead-quiet office as being unworkable.

As a general rule, an office that has a low tolerance for non-work related things, such as phone calls or websites will have a more focussed employee group than an office that allows more personal time for their employees at their desks. A happy employee is a productive employee, however, and treating your workers like the individuals they are can go miles towards a more productive workforce.

Unproductive

An environment that produces unproductive employees is often one without balance.
Picture this: a worker is expected to work their fingers to the bone from 9am sharp to 5:30pm, after everyone else has left. This person gets called into their boss’s office if they don’t, and written warnings occur if that standard of work isn’t maintained day-in, day-out. At the same time, their co-worker can come in at 10am, work for a few hours, and then leave early, they are hailed as being perfect workers and are on track for high-level promotions. Finally, the boss themselves isn’t as hardworking as the first employee, and coasts on the results of their hard work.

This is a workplace in chaos, and the first employee is likely to quit before long, leaving the co-worker and boss to pick up the huge workload and struggle to fill the unsatisfactory roll. Unproductivity lies in inequality between levels, and a manager figure should always work at least as hard as their hardest-working employee to ensure they take a “leader” position, not a “boss” position.

Office Observations

Employee Mentality

Finally, we examine the mentality linked to those two examples above. Your workers will likely not feel appreciated or fulfilled in their work if they are not given the respect and commendations they are due, but they will also feel hard-done-by if they carry their managers on the shoulders of their hard work.

A balance is needed in a workplace, where everyone works hard and appreciates one another. Couple that positive, hardworking environment with well-fitted out workstations and you’ve got a team that can work together to get great KPI’s and enjoy the work they do at the same time, which is the dream of any leader.

Maximising the output of your workers is directly related to their work environment and job satisfaction, so work on making those the best that they can be and you’ll see a marked improvement in your overall office mentality.

Thought leadership series on the collaborative economy, sharing economy and blockchain, powered by Humaniq

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR