How to Create an Ideal Work Environment
Your business’s work environment will have a considerable effect on the quality of work that your team is able to produce and their overall happiness. If your work environment is lacking in certain areas, it could end up having an impact on the quality of service your clients, as well as leading to a variety of other avoidable problems. So, how do you create an ideal work environment?
It’s a tough question to answer, but there are some core differences that businesses around the world are realizing make a real and positive impact. Those are the changes we’re going to discuss below, so read on to find out more.
- 1. Make Office Hours More Flexible
- 2. Add Recreational Areas for Break Times
- 3. Create Initiatives That Promote Employee Wellness
- 4. Make it Clean, Sanitary and Comfortable
- 5. Allow Employees to Customize Their Desks and Workstations
- 6. Make the Most of Natural Lighting
- 7. Implement an Open-Door Policy
- 8. Make Meetings Purposeful
- 9. Boost Productivity By Avoiding Work Overload
- The Right Environment Makes Employees Want to Stick Around Longer
1. Make Office Hours More Flexible
Does this directly have to do with the physical work environment? No, but by making office hours more flexible, you’ll be able to get the most out of your employees. 73% of employees said that flexible work schedules increase their satisfaction at work according to a survey conducted by Workest.
Workers are likely to give more and perform better if they’re able to make their work schedules fit their lifestyle. This is something that’s been proven time and time again in offices and workplaces around the world. Flexible working hours can mean allowing employees to start late and finish early or vice versa depending on their different needs. It’s definitely a change your team will appreciate.
2. Add Recreational Areas for Break Times
Breaks are important to employees and they should be important to you too. When your employees aren’t given adequate time to take a break from their desks, they tend to overwork themselves and feel more stressed. By giving them specific areas where they can enjoy their scheduled breaks, they’ll be able to wind down and return to their work more energized and ready to work hard.
3. Create Initiatives That Promote Employee Wellness
There are lots of ways in which you can engage your employees and take steps to support them. One great example of this is setting up initiatives that promote employee wellness. That might mean offering workshops on how to maintain a healthy work-life balance or free gym memberships. Those a just a couple of examples among many more that you could implement, so give this idea some thought.
4. Make it Clean, Sanitary and Comfortable
Simply putting more effort into keeping your workplace clean and sanitary can make a big difference in how your employees feel about coming to work each day.
No one wants to spend their day in a space that feels unclean and messy so this might be the first step to create an ideal work environment. If you feel your office is less than clean, this is something you should prioritize before worrying about anything else. People will feel more comfortable, relaxed and productive when they’re at work if the space is nice and clean and that’s good news for everyone.
Also, with proper sanitation, you can likely reduce the amount of germs that fly around the office during cold and flu season which could result in fewer employees taking sick days.
(Recommended Read: How Does Office Cleanliness Improve Productivity?)
5. Allow Employees to Customize Their Desks and Workstations
Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the biggest difference for employees. People like to feel a sense of ownership over the area in which they work and can create an ideal work environment within your office right at their desks by decorating with things that make them feel comfortable.
Enforcing rules that say they’re not allowed to do that doesn’t make much sense. From your business’s perspective, what difference does it make if the employees customize things a little? It helps them feel at home in the workplace, so it can only be a good thing.
Note: We do suggest that you discourage employees from using scented candles and aromatherapy diffusers at their desks. This could trigger allergies and cause other employees discomfort.
6. Make the Most of Natural Lighting
There’s nothing worse than a dark and dingy workplace. People hate feeling trapped in offices that have no natural light. It impacts people’s moods. One study cited that 75.8 percent of employees find natural light important to them, yet only 56.9 percent are satisfied with their current lighting situation.
Not having good lighting can cause physical problems also like eye strain, headaches, and fatigue which can cause dips in productivity and take a toll on employee health.
Try to make the most of the natural light that your workplace has available. You can rearrange desks and encourage people to have their meetings in areas of the office that produce a lot of natural light It’s a small thing but it can make such a big difference.
7. Implement an Open-Door Policy
An open-door policy is great for your business and your employees because it helps to break down the barriers that stand between the business’s upper management and the employees they are in charge of.
An open-door policy simply means that employees are able to communicate with the senior staff in an open way. It means that they can come to management with problems without having to worry about repercussions. It’s a positive step for any business to take and costs nothing.
8. Make Meetings Purposeful
15% of an organization’s time is spent in meetings and unproductive meetings waste more than $37 billion per year, according to a list of meeting statistics published by High-Five. The same article stated that 73% of people work on other things during meetings – yikes.
This is clearly a problem and one your business should try to take seriously.
First of all, it’s probably a good idea to cut down on unnecessary status meetings if not much is getting accomplished and they’re not having a positive impact. The ones you do hold need to be made meaningful and purposeful.
9. Boost Productivity By Avoiding Work Overload
Overworking your employees is something that’s always going to backfire on your business. People don’t work productively when there’s too much pressure on them. If they feel overworked and overloaded, they will become stressed out and their productivity and efficiency levels will drop.
You can help to boost productivity by avoiding these situations by communicating with them to better understand when the workload is becoming too much for them to handle.
The Right Environment Makes Employees Want to Stick Around Longer
If you want to hang onto your company’s top talent, it pays off to provide everyone in your office with the right kind of healthy work environment.
It’s more than worth your time and energy to make your work environment one that’ll help to get the most out of everyone working in it. Don’t underestimate how important these kinds of changes are and the impact they’ll have on the output of your employees and the business in general.
Sometimes, creating a healthier work environment is as simple as keeping an office clean and dust free. If you feel like your office and employees could benefit from having a cleaning crew come in and make your office pristine, contact the experts at MC Janitorial by calling 913-286-1808.