The working environment in a business is essential to get right because if you let it deteriorate in any way, that’s going to have a direct impact on the productivity of your business, especially when it comes to the happiness of your staff. With that in mind, here are some tips to improve the working environment.
Provide The Right Lighting
Lighting can make a huge difference to how a person feels in a space. Remember the feeling you get when you walk into a room that’s well lit with warm light, or you see that natural daylight flood into the room? That feeling is what you want for your staff members at all times. Wherever you have a window, make sure it’s big enough and free of anything that might be blocking out the light. If you don’t get much sunlight or daylight in general, then try to mimic it by using artificial lights. The warmer they are, the better they’ll feel for your staff. Anything too clinical is not going to make for an enjoyable, working atmosphere. Try to brighten up workstations too with any desk lamps that might be needed.
Quieten Your Open Plan Space
With your working areas, you might have a mainly open space layout, and that is something that is definitely more popular nowadays. Businesses can benefit from open plan spaces and what it brings to the overall environment. However, the only downside that comes with this open plan space is the noise levels. It can be quite distracting for those who like to work in peace and quiet. Loud phone voices and general chatter can be a little too much, especially when staff members are manning the phones. With that being said, you might want to consider sound masking for offices and perhaps thinking about implementing rules for workplace noise levels. You could mention that any conversations, work, or personal, should be done in the meeting rooms or in communal breakout areas.
Improve Communications
Communications are an important part of the workforce because if there’s a lack of it, mistakes can be made and projects can experience delays or problems. That’s not something you want for your business, especially if it seems to be happening more often than not. Think about how you could better your communications as an organization, whether that’s between colleagues in the same team and connecting the departments properly. You might want to consider what different platforms are out there to help with communication so that less issues crop up. The more you can improve communications, the more effective work becomes, and the happier your staff are.
If you’re struggling to find what’s going wrong, then you can certainly find some benefits from asking your staff directly about what can be done differently.
Quash Any Workplace Fallouts
People don’t get on, that’s only to be expected when it comes to the workplace. You are going to have colleagues who may fall out with one another over work politics or project disagreements. When this happens, it’s important to have a process in place that quashes any workplace fallouts quickly and effectively. If you’re letting relationships boil over and get worse without solving it, you put everyone else in the picture, and they’ll start suffering from the fallout too. No one wants a negative atmosphere, so as the employer, there needs to be some authoritative decisions made by you. Try to solve these issues as soon as they arise, and it will definitely make for a calm and pleasant environment.
Build Relationships With Team Days
With your workforce, you’re going to need some team-building days here and there. That’s because it can really help to connect departments together, rather than keeping them apart. It can be very easy to have different friendship groups in a company, but it’s important that everyone have a united front as a company. That’s why team days are so popular to do for companies who want to build relationships between departments and colleagues. Consider what might be fun for your company to do and do these themed days out every so often in order to help those new team members. It’s always important to team build, and it can be done in a fun way. Many businesses will choose activities like inflatable obstacle courses, paintballing, or a holiday away somewhere!
Improving your working environment is definitely important, so take these tips forward with your own business and see what can be done to improve the workplace.
