Office Design

In the wake of the pandemic, employee engagement has become a front-burner topic for nearly every employer. As companies navigate the return to working in person to varying degrees, they’re devoting more and more attention to keeping team members safe, happy and engaged.

What role can the workspace environment play in office wellness? A big one, in ways both good and bad. In fact, employers need to factor in at least four of the five senses in office design considerations (probably not taste, unless you’re providing lunch). Let’s take a look:

Sight:

Everyone considers colors when designing an office space, but perhaps not their potential effects on the people in it. There is science behind the psychology of colors and the emotions they can elicit. To greatly oversimplify, green is associated with creativity; blue with security, confidence and analytical thinking. Red promotes productivity in physical work (but may hinder analytical thinking), and too much white leads to boredom. Yellow? Well, people just don’t seem to like it. Use yellow sparingly. Check out the red pops of color at Fireline Corp. here.

Sound:

Too often an afterthought in office design, the acoustical properties of a space are vital to productivity and keeping team members happy. We’ve seen many very attractive spaces that are difficult to work in, especially in the age of the open office plan. This might be because workers are too close together or because the space is designed with hard surfaces that cause every sound to reverberate. It’s often easy to fix the latter situation with strategically-applied acoustical panels to deaden the space. Ensure workers have private, quiet spaces available in an open office plan. Make sure to approach office design with not only your eyes but your ears. Check out 3form Edge ceiling features here.

Smell:

Our sense of smell is tied directly to our memories, and is another factor in work productivity. Employers walk a difficult line right now: Spaces need to be cleaned and sanitized regularly, but the aromas of bleach, ammonia or other harsh cleaners can have a negative effect on productivity. These strong smells may also cause headaches or even allergic reactions. Consider cleaning products carefully and look for agreeable scents. Beyond that, you might consider enhancing office wellness with smells: Lemon is known to be good for creativity, and lavender is calming, to name just two examples. But again, you need to be mindful of potential allergies.

Feel:

No one’s going to be very productive, or very happy, if they spend their days working in an uncomfortable chair or at a desk that’s not an appropriate height. There’s such a wide selection of ergonomic office furnishings from so many manufacturers that there’s really no reason not to get this right. In general, consider adjustability: Desks that allow standing or sitting, chairs that adjust to multiple positions. Check out more office spaces at Visit Baltimore here.

As we approach two years of a radically changed work environment due to the pandemic, much uncertainty remains. Plans to return to the physical workspace have been derailed or delayed by the Omicron variant and organizations are grappling with how best to move forward. What has changed in the workplace, and what needs to continue changing?

Some businesses have decided that they can get along just fine with a remote workforce, at least in the shorter term. They’re in the minority, but many were already operating virtually pre-pandemic, so the transition has been easier. At the other end of the spectrum are those for whom remote work is not a viable option: service industries, manufacturers and so forth.

In the middle are the vast majority of businesses, trying to roll with the continued punches of COVID and figure out the best combination of in-person, remote and hybrid work for their own teams and circumstances. And if there’s one word to describe handling all this uncertainty, it’s this: adaptability.

That can mean a lot of things, but in terms of office design it’s really the continuation of a trend of several years: Many organizations had already seen the value of flexible workspaces in both the more efficient use of space and the ways in which they promote collaboration. That physical adaptability will now become even more important.

Remote and hybrid work means fewer opportunities for teams to collaborate in person, which is indisputably more effective. So when a team is in the same physical space, every effort needs to be made to maximize that opportunity with an environment that can adjust on the fly to changing needs.

Adaptability is required far beyond the physical workspace, of course. We still don’t fully understand how this prolonged stretch of diminished interaction will affect all of us as workers and as human beings, and business leaders will need to be even more flexible than their workspaces to accommodate the changing needs of their teams.