By Bond Collective Staff
It’s a fact: office layout affects the productivity of you and your team. Few things are worse for focus and engagement than a disorganized, chaotic, and noisy environment.
How, then, can you arrange your work environment to promote creativity, inspiration, and efficiency?
In this article, the design experts at Bond Collective give you office layout ideas that inspire productivity so you and your team can do the job right the first time.
Office Layout Ideas That Inspire Productivity
By Bond Collective Staff
1) Add Green To Your Workspace
One of the easiest ways to improve your office layout and inspire productivity is to bring the outside in.
No, this doesn’t mean opening the windows whenever possible. It means accenting your decor with plants of all sizes, shapes, and colors.
Research shows that teams that work in sight of even a single plant are more productive than their plantless counterparts — even in the lean workspaces occupied by entrepreneurs and startups.
If you’re stuck for ideas on how to green up your office layout, try arranging a few plants on the windowsills in your office or clustering them in a drab corner of the room.
And for more suggestions on using plants to improve productivity in your work environment, take a few minutes to read these helpful articles from the Bond Collective blog:
2) Light Up Your Office Layout
Natural light in your office is always best, but it’s often impossible to arrange things so that everyone is close to a window.
Instead of falling back on the harsh blue light of compact fluorescents, furnish your work areas with lights that give off the softer red, orange, and yellow wavelengths.
You can even implement lights that change automatically to mimic the transition from the morning blues and greens to the afternoon reds and yellows.
If outfitting your entire office with more natural light is not practically or financially feasible, try adding an adjustable-wavelength lamp to each workstation as a supplement to your current lighting.
Need more information on lighting for your office layout? Check out these articles:
Office Lighting: Everything You Need To Know For Your Office Space
9 Office Design Tips From The Design Team At Bond Collective
3) Work Standing Up
While seated workstations are the norm in most every office layout, these aren’t always the best options for long hours of focus and efficiency.
Give your team’s productivity a boost by incorporating standing workstations at various places around the office or replacing static desks with adjustable-height desks wherever possible.
Doing so gives your team members the ability to switch from seated to standing whenever their body demands it and helps them avoid the negative health impacts of sitting for prolonged periods of time day in and day out.
Provide a variety of different work positions in your office — including standing up — and your team will be happier, healthier, and more productive than ever before.
Delve deeper into the benefits of standing and adjustable-height desks with information from these articles:
4) Place Tools Close At Hand
Few things destroy productivity like having to trek from one side of your office to the other to use the copier or retrieve needed supplies.
This may mean purchasing and maintaining multiple pieces of the same equipment, but consider it an investment in your team’s productivity rather than a higher-than-normal expense.
When the necessary tools are close at hand, your team can shave minutes off the time it takes to do regular and repetitive actions like make copies, retrieve print jobs, and send faxes.
The time saved, at first, may not seem like it would increase productivity, but make note of all the instances your team performs these activities throughout the workday and you’ll see that the savings really add up.
For example, in a poorly arranged office layout, making copies takes five minutes because the machine is on the other side of the room. If team members make 200 copies while at work, that’s more than 15 minutes of lost productivity every day.
During a regular five-day workweek, that’s 1.25 hours during which your team could be focused on the current project.
On the other hand, in a well-arranged office layout, that same task (making copies) takes two minutes because one of the machines is only a few steps away. In this arrangement, team members lose just six minutes of productivity every day and only 30 minutes per week.
That’s a significant savings that can have a serious impact on the way you do business. And it all comes down to proper office layout.
Get more advice and guidance on this topic by taking a few minutes to read these articles:
5) Focus On Accessibility
In small offices, easy access to all parts of the room isn’t usually a problem. In large, open offices, however, trying to get from point A to point B can be like running an obstacle course.
When setting up your workspace, it helps to visualize your office by the primary activity conducted in a given area.
If the primary work area is in the southeast corner and the restrooms are in the southwest corner but they’re separated by a wall, a conference room, and several private offices, your team members will have to walk up, over, and down rather than heading straight there.
That’s not an efficient office layout.
It’s not always possible in some buildings, but do your best to make all parts of the work area easily accessible no matter where you’re coming from or going.
Don’t let the complex task of designing your team’s work area get the better of you. Check out these informative articles:
6) Arrange Desks Facing A Wall
There’s much debate in the business community about the best way to arrange desks for maximum productivity.
We recommend placing desks facing a wall whenever possible. This limits distractions from activity and conversations going on within the team member’s field of vision.
Granted, it’s not always possible to arrange all of the desks this way, but even positioning a few workstations this way can improve your office layout and your team’s productivity.
For more on arranging your work area — at home or in an office environment — check out these informative articles from our blog:
Customize Your Office Layout For More Productivity
Everything we do at Bond Collective is geared toward boosting the productivity of the members who work there.
We design all of our coworking spaces with your professional image in mind. That means multipurpose work areas, vivid colors, natural lighting, comfortable furniture, and much more. All so your team won’t be distracted by their surroundings and lose focus.
You can even customize your office layout for even more productivity. At Bond Collective, you can change the space your team occupies from one month to the next.
That means you can be working at a hot desk in September, move to a private office (or a private suite of offices) in October, and then switch to a dedicated desk in November.
It all depends on what your team needs to stay productive in a rapidly changing business environment.
Bond Collective even goes above and beyond the norm for coworking spaces by offering industry-leading amenities, such as:
Lightning-fast WiFi
Photo and sound studio (Gowanus only)
Guest reception and greeting
Regular on-site cleaning
Mail service
Complimentary beer, coffee, tea, water, and fresh fruit
Other food and beverages for sale
Office showers with towel service
Bike storage
Rooftop lounge area
Mothers’ rooms
Pet-friendly environments
Curated and networking events
Whether you’re a team of one, a traveling freelancer, a startup, or a team of 100 or more, Bond Collective can help you maximize productivity, avoid distractions, and take your business to the next level.
Visit any one of Bond Collective’s many locations in the United States, including workspaces in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas. Or call us today to find out more about everything we have to offer.
And while you’re at it, schedule a tour to experience first-hand how the boutique work environments at Bond Collective can benefit your business.