The Way to Your Employees’ Hearts Is Through Your Office Design
Your office design is a love note to your employees and a genuine reflection of your company culture and employee satisfaction.
While you shop for chocolate covered strawberries, colorful flower bouquets, and other goodies for that special someone in your life, take a moment to think about what might make your employees feel enamored and engaged: namely office design. That’s right, the physical features of your workspace have a pronounced effect on the way your employees think, feel, and behave—essential features of company culture. That means Facilities plays a crucial role in the formation and maintenance of this culture.
But First, What Is Your Culture?
Harvard Business Review has boiled down corporate culture into eight distinct types: Caring, Purpose, Learning, Enjoyment, Results, Authority, Safety, Order.
The first four corporate culture types tend to favor flexible environments—being more open to change—while the latter four tend to favor more stable environments. However, Authority, Results, Enjoyment, and Learning types tend to also favor more independence than Caring, Purpose, Safety, and Order types.
Your company may fit perfectly into one of these culture types, or a more common workplace type. Once you’ve identified your company’s culture, Facilities can discuss how you want that culture to be expressed and reinforced through your office design.
Once you’ve identified your company’s culture, you can discuss how you want that culture to be expressed and reinforced through your office design—both decor and layout. Layout is how you use your office space. Decor is one way to differentiate these spaces.
How to Express Your Culture Through Your Office Layout
All eight culture types have varying needs when it comes to sound levels, interaction needed with other coworkers, and how much space is needed for various work activities. Here are some ways to think about these needs.
Benching vs. Cubicles
This is a biggie. If you have teams that tend to collaborate more, as is common in the Caring, Purpose, Safety, and Enjoyment cultures, think about clusters of workspaces or even benching. If you have teams that prefer quieter spaces, like the Authority, Results, Learning, and Order cultures, think more along the lines of cubicles.
Private Offices
Authority, Results, Learning, and Order cultures can all need spaces even more private than cubicles, whether that’s because they feature roles that require more privacy for legal or competitive reasons, or because the quality of their work depends more on their ability to concentrate. Private offices may seem old-school in an open-office-obsessed world, but they are essential for these kinds of cultures. So, don't retire the private office just yet.
Conference Rooms
Conference rooms should have a different energy than spaces devoted to regular employee work. Fun names are an easy way to differentiate, but establishing room themes that mesh with your culture can deepen the connection, especially when reinforced by the decor. Google’s office in New York, for example, includes rooms named after neighborhoods like Washington Heights and landmarks like Radio City.
Break Rooms
Wellness is a concept that can have a place in several of these cultures, including Purpose and Caring types, and you can cater to them with a variety of wellness-themed break rooms, like Box Studio's “Zen Den.” But even if your company has very results-oriented employees that might benefit from space to re-center themselves, consider turning a break room into a meditation room. For Enjoyment types, think about bringing an outdoor feel to the workplace.
Reception
Reception is the first area your visitors see when they walk into your office. If you’re a more Caring environment, you want a warm, perhaps even cafe-like ambiance to greet people. Enjoyment cultures might think about life-sized Jenga or other games to give visitors a fun way to pass the time as they wait.
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How Do Office Decor and Company Culture Interact?
Companies often treat culture development and office design as two completely separate efforts.This is a huge missed opportunity. After all, what could be a better inspiration for the design of your company's physical space than its mission, value, ethics, expectations, and goals? Could there be a stronger reminder for those intangibles than the way the company's physical space is put together?
The Walls Speak
Some companies have a culture centered around a particular Purpose where idealism and altruism are primary drivers. Maybe they are focused on being united to do good for the long-term future of the world. In that case, having visual reminders of your shared ideals such as posters, artwork or hand-painted messages on the walls might be the way to go. A company that is united around selling functional training equipment so people can get stronger and more mobile might give their employees exercise balls and standing desks instead of chairs to reinforce that purpose.
The Sum of All the Parts
Other companies have cultures centered around Learning. They might choose to infuse the office design with things that promote exploration, expansiveness, and creativity. Maybe there’s a climbing wall in the entryway. And to do the kind of deep work required to really learn, sometimes people need complete silence. So the more creative types might be tucked away in a quieter part of the office or have access to soundproof office pods.
Even the Floor Plan
Where employees are placed in the office could also affect your culture. Pixar, for example, famously put animators, execs, and editors all in the same work area and saw collaboration across those groups skyrocket. A study from Cornerstone and Harvard Business School found that placing the right type of workers near each other, “...generates a 15 percent increase in performance and up to $1 million in annual profit, while placing toxic employees next to each other increases the probability that one of them will be terminated by 27 percent.”
With Facilities at the table, you can win your employee’s hearts.
Facilities management has evolved from the days of changing light bulbs and stocking the break room. Today, facilities managers have earned a seat at the table in discussions around company culture and office design. Next time your company takes up those topics, make sure that seat isn’t empty.
With a well-designed and decorated office that reflects your values, your employees will be eager to take their working relationship with your business to the next level.
Workplace Design Trends Forecast 2019
Do your employees look forward to coming to work? If not, consider these six workplace design trends for creating a truly enjoyable workspace.
Think about your workspace for a moment. How’s the light? What sort of art is around you? How about plants? Does your work align with the people sitting next to you? Is it mostly filled with workstations or shared spaces? Is it noisy? How does it affect your work?
We know that where an employee works can be just as important as how they work. In other words, the physical environment that surrounds an employee, and how well it compliments their work style, can have a direct impact on both productivity and work quality. Thinking about that, does your workplace need to make some changes in 2019? If so, here are six topics to keep in mind.
1. Track Workplace Occupancy
Most corporate space is underutilized 60% of the time, according to the 2018 Occupancy Benchmarking Guide. Do you know how many people are working in your space? If not, it’s nearly impossible to make informed decisions about how much and what type of space your business needs. When you do get your tracking into place, Corovan and our sister company Corodata have some ideas on how to best use the extra space. (GlobeSt)
2. Find out What Your Employees Want from Their Space
One way of doing this is a “stay” interview—like an exit interview but done before your employees have decided the grass is greener elsewhere. Talk with high performers about what environment is most helpful to their work style, and to managers about how to best set up their team’s space. (CMSWire)
3. Redesign for a Mature Workforce
The number of workers aged 65-74 is set to grow in the U.S. workforce by 4.2%, and those 75 and up by 6.7%, according to Deloitte. These workers may have different working styles and needs than those from other generations. Inclusivity doesn’t only apply to race and gender in your workplace—you also need to take the needs of older workers into account. This can be as simple as offering personalized lighting or making sure employees know they can change the colors on their display, to ease eye strain. (Deloitte)
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4. Employee Engagement Isn’t Just About Experience
A shocking statistic from Gallup says that only 27% of employees strongly agree that they “believe in their company’s values.” Employees who don’t buy into their company’s mission are often less engaged and easier to lose. Reminding them of this mission through their workspace is one way to help that buy-in, and creating an employee experience center can also have a positive effect. (Gallup)
5. Create an Environment for Creatives to Thrive
Making sure your employees have plenty of engaging work as well as the physical and mental space to accomplish it to the best of their ability is crucial in creative fields like marketing or game development. A little thing like making every surface a writable surface in a particular area can encourage creativity even in fields that don’t demand as much of it.
People in creative jobs (writing, design, etc.) don’t respond well to micromanaging, Marvel genius Stan Lee often pointed out. One way of manifesting this trust from management would be to place their workspaces away from management and more business-focused employees. (HBR)
6. Give Facilities a Place in the Culture Conversation
Your company’s culture is crucial to maintaining and attracting top talent. Your office space should reflect this culture, so you should bring Facilities managers into every conversation you have about the topic. Take, for example, Scholastic’s newly designed headquarters in New York: It’s a beautiful, fun space that tells you everything you need to know about this storied publisher. (Quartz)
The average person spends a third of their life at work. So it should come as no surprise that workplace design is an important part of their employee experience. Some office layouts may be perfect for some employees while grating on others and it’s impossible to please all of the people all of the time. But the degree to which your various workspaces promote productivity, collaboration, employee satisfaction, and company culture can have a significant impact on your bottom line. The right facilities support partner can help.
2018 Workplace Tips Roundup
A new year is upon us. What better time to look for ways to improve your workplace? Make room for 2019 with these proven workplace tips.
This list of 10 workplace tips we discovered in 2018 will inspire you to create the best office environment possible in 2019—whether that’s encouraging employees breaks to cut down on musculoskeletal disorders, coming up with memorable names for your conference rooms, or setting up a fun zone.
1 | Ask your employees what they need
Do they think the office lacks activity-based workspaces? Are they worried they’ll be seen as less hardworking for taking breaks? Send out a survey to see what changes employees are looking for. You might get some unexpected insights along with great, creative ideas.
Read more: Your Summer Workplace Change Guide
2 | Give employees incentives to take breaks
A short break can go a long way, but sometimes employees don’t feel empowered to take these breaks that can recharge their creative batteries. Try instituting a “break challenge” in which employees log their break hours during the week and are rewarded when they reach a target number of break hours.
Read more: How to Encourage Your Employees to Take Breaks
3 | Make employee health a priority
Sitting all day is not ideal for the human body or your business: Musculoskeletal disorders, caused in part by sitting or standing in an unhealthy position, cost businesses $20 billion per year. Encourage your employees to live active lives. Don’t just offer them a gym membership, though—make sure they have the opportunity to go during the workday, if they so desire.
Read more: Ergonomics: It’s Not Just About Chairs
4 | [Trend Update] Create Activity-Based Workspaces (ABW)
No, this doesn’t mean you make your employees do jumping-jacks. ABW is the biggest trend since the open office: a transformational business strategy that provides employees with the workspaces that are ideal for completing various work activities (21, to be exact). Provide couches and whiteboards for brainstorming, soundproof booths for phone calls, home-like comfort zones for quiet single person tasks, and themed conference rooms to make meeting face-to-face fun. Then watch productivity soar, and retention increase by more than 10 percent.
Read more: Join the Activity-Based Working Movement
5 | Jazz up your conference rooms
They’re not just conference rooms—they’re your office’s centerpiece. They tell clients what kind of business you are, and are an expression of your culture for your own employees. At the very least, enlist your employees’ help coming up with interesting names for these rooms.
Read more: What Does Your Conference Room Say About Your Business?
6 | Create a warm ambiance
Do this by reducing your reliance on harsh fluorescent lighting and painting your walls. What colors are right for your office depends on what kind of energy your employees need. But whatever you do, don’t leave your office walls beige or gray.
Read more: Ergonomics: It’s Not Just About Chairs
7 | Make space for fun
Half of all work-related parties take place in the office, so why not do some rearranging for maximum festivity? The goal is to make the space feel as different as possible. To do this, you can put up or remove temporary walls, move desks nearer to walls to create large open spaces, and maybe even splurge on temporary decorations.
Read more: 6 Epic Office Holiday Party Ideas
8 | Look for sources of tension
Maybe it’s a new team member, or an entirely new office space—any change in the workplace can affect productivity and happiness. The rollout of new workstations, in particular, can turn into a sore spot, if some employees are seen as benefiting more than others. Communication from leadership is key in these cases.
Read more: Helping Employees Respond Positively to Workplace Changes
9 | Install noise-absorbing elements
You can cut down on ambient noise by incorporating sound-proof materials into your ceilings, floors, or walls—or all three. As a bonus, these materials can create an interesting visual design that makes your office unique.
Read more: How to Reduce Noise in the Workplace
10 | Make standing desks available to your employees
Not everyone is going to want one, but providing the option of a standing desk communicates to your workers that their comfort is valued, and encourages a more active working environment.
Read more: Ergonomics: It’s Not Just About Chairs
Need help implementing these tips? We can do that.
From ergonomic furniture to the manpower needed to rearrange or move your office, Corovan’s got you covered. Get started »
How to Encourage Your Employees to Take Breaks
It’s proven that enforcing regular employee breaks such as walks, coffee runs, lunch, and vacations will bring huge productivity rewards to your business.
When it comes to maximizing your team's productivity and creativity, very few methods are as effective as implementing a healthy schedule of breaks throughout the day for your employees.