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.