For a more productive workplace, make these 6 effective changes

There are different ways to view productivity.

Employees see productivity as keeping their heads down and ploughing on, whereas organisations see it as overall performance and output. To be successful, companies need to balance both of these by juggling the many factors that influence them.

The key to getting the most out of people is by ensuring that they get the most out of the space around them.

Research by Leesman, however, recently found that:

Only 57% of employees agree that their workplace enables them to work productively.

Companies are trying all sorts of outlandish methods to boost productivity. Some pump billions of dollars into glitzy new headquarter offices with impressive glass structures, but end up with people literally walking into walls (concussion ≠ productive work). While other companies find success implementing eccentric schemes such as rewarding workers with pizza and compliments (note to self – try this at Sony).

However, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel or go overboard to see improvements in output. There are many small, cost-effective yet progressive steps that companies can take to increase productivity and to promote smarter working practices. Here are my top 6 suggestions for your organisation.

1. Musical chairs – seat people strategically.

“Any C.E.O. thinks a lot about where people are sitting — who they can walk around and have casual conversations with” says Diane Greene, Google Cloud CEO.

Earlier this year, the New York Times wrote an article about the way Google and Facebook structure their offices to increase productivity. For both firms, the teams seated closest to the boss were those working on A.I. developments. It’s no coincidence that two of the world's leading tech companies both took this strategic move, but why? A.I. is seen as the future within these businesses, so should have the closest line to the boss, and should be in the best position to share ideas and run concepts past company leaders and other strategic teams. 

While your business may not be looking to A.I. for the future, speed of innovation is still likely to be integral to your strategy. You can take learnings from the likes of Google and Facebook by assessing where employees sit to create opportunities for spontaneous interaction. Encourage productivity by creating a seating plan that places specific teams, groups of people, or seniority bands close together depending on who needs to, or should be, talking to whom the most. This will allow ideas to easily be shared and bounced off the most relevant team members. Proximity sparks conversation.

And talking of seating, do not forget ergonomics. If budgets permit, look at height adjustable desks, good seating, standing desks, and treadmills. Consult with your staff and get professional advice to tailor equipment to individual health requirements.

2.  Room to breathe – create quiet spaces.

Dedicated quiet zones can help to combat the noise and heat of trendy open plan offices.

In a survey by Unispace, 15% of respondents flagged noise as the primary cause of inefficiency during the working week, second to this was a lack of quiet areas with 13% of respondents citing this as the primary cause of inefficiency. A lack of privacy (9%) and temperature and air quality of their office (7%) were also listed as factors impacting productivity.

Granted, you may not be able to redesign your open plan office by building rooms and sectioning space off, but you can create dedicated quiet zones or turn existing meeting rooms into silent rooms that allow people to concentrate when they need to.

Clever workplace design can make these areas feel integrated and part of the office without isolating those who use them. From a cultural perspective, you need to ensure everyone feels comfortable taking time out and heading to one of these spaces when they need to. 

Remember as well that ‘breathe’ means just that – check your air quality and flow, and fix the basics – air conditioning, heating, purification – to maximise comfort and brain oxygenation. And as for ‘quiet spaces’, another back to basics tip is to prioritise good toilets. Private, clean, well ventilated, sound proofed and spacious, preferably discretely located, and not unisex. With employees using bathroom facilities 3 to 4 times a day, it’s essential for good sanitation and personal comfort and dignity. Fantastic amenities, combined with allowing people to choose how they work will deliver productivity.

3.  Give the brain a break.

You know that feeling when you’ve been staring at a spreadsheet or Word doc for hours on end, and nothing new is coming to you? Well I do too, and whether it’s making a cup of tea, socialising (aka scrolling through Instagram), or going for a walk, we all know the benefits of taking a break.

Workplaces weren’t always as break-friendly as they are today. For most of the past 100 years the office resembled an assembly line in a factory, and it wasn’t until the dot-com bubble hit that companies began to experiment with more user-centric amenities and interior design, throwing bean bags and free food into the mix. Organisations learned that if we allow our brains more of a break, our productivity will be increased when we knuckle down to work.

CBRE’s latest Healthy Offices research suggests that there is a direct relationship between wellness measures and the bottom line as companies can improve employee productivity by an average of 10 per cent. Many companies have taken this to heart, such as WeWork for example whose social activities, ping pong tables, and free beers or grapefruit water, have contributed to a unique way of working and a market cap of $20bn.

However, setting up ping pong tables or installing a slide just because another company has done it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s appropriate for your company and culture. It can actually become vacuous and awkward, especially if it’s based on some short-lived trend. It’s not about the number of extravagant perks, it’s the level to which they satisfy worker’s needs and create an environment that supports people to work better.

But why leave all this to WeWork? Find out what really matters to your employees and redesign your office space to allow your employees a small break in their working day, to recharge their brains and fundamentally increase productivity. Whatever you design though, you want it to last longer than the initial ‘that’s cool’ reaction of seeing a foosball table in the corner. Consider the approach, methodology and thought processes adopted by other organisations, and not just their outcome. A foosball table might not be for your team, but a yoga room might just be the ticket. 

4. Isolation leads to stagnation – bring people together. 

We roughly spend half of our time working alone (concentrative) and half of our time working with others (collaborative). We need the quiet time to crack on with tasks but we also need to share ideas and work in teams. It’s quite simple but often gets overcomplicated with elaborate workplace schemes. To achieve a high performing workplace you need to find the right balance to make these two types of working as effective as possible. I touched upon quiet spaces for focused work in point 2, but what about bringing people together?

Open plan offices were created to do just that but a recent study found that they can actually exacerbate isolation and result in less collaboration among employees. If anything, there’s a growing need for meeting rooms and closed spaces that allow people to choose the type of work they need to do. Research has also shown that we perform at our best when we feel competent, autonomous, and connected to others. So, what’s the answer?

Foster an environment where communication is open and fluid amongst team members, as well as across teams and across seniority, to enable collaboration and productivity amongst your team. In meetings, get everyone involved as much as possible, sharing the role of speaker amongst different people. Ask questions and encourage feedback.

There’s no one-size fits all model, so you need to consider how you can create a workplace that caters to all, allowing people to work individually but also to interact and share ideas with others. And when it is time to work together collectively, push people to communicate in person, not digitally.

5.  Create a work-life balance.

“Companies are suffering from tremendous productivity problems because people are stressed out and not recovering from the workday”, says Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte.

I’m half Australian and half Finnish, but have been living in London for many years. I often look to my family in the Nordics and my friends Down Under with a glare of envy and jealousy. Finishing work at 4pm or going for a swim in the ocean before work, while here in London the (lack of) work-life balance is characterised by packaged sandwiches at desks, checking emails at home and most people probably spend Sunday afternoon prepping for Monday morning meetings.

Although seemingly harder to implement, creating a work-life balance echoes my sentiment from point 3 about giving your brain a break. A massive 4 out of 5 businesses are reported to offer inflexible working hours and work practices today. If companies seriously want to improve employee wellbeing than they need to trust their employees more. Research from Bupa found that nearly a quarter (23%) of UK employees said they would feel more motivated if trust was placed in them. And over a fifth (22%) said it would help them to feel happier and more productive at work (18%).

However, not all the blame can be put on the organisations that employ us – sometimes we unbalance our own lives. Societal pressures can lead us to believe that in order to be successful we should be busy, which skews our values and actions. Guy Kawasaki summed this up well in one of his posts on LinkedIn:

“Our two main metrics for success are money and power, and they drive us to work longer hours, sleep with our phones and tablets, miss important moments with our families and impacts our health.”

?Stop the “glorification of busy”, trust your employees, and be more flexible. Setting core working hours of 10-4, while letting your employees decide whether they work 8-10 or 4-6 to make up the hours will allow individuals, with their own lives, a bit of flexibility. And giving employees an element of control will also empower them and make them generally feel a lot happier at work. Look at the practical things you can do to assist staff, promote loyalty and reduce staff burnout and turnover. For instance, if you cannot provide a gym and crèche at work, try to find good facilities near the office and negotiate significant corporate discounts for employees.

6. Smart workplaces – transform with technology. 

To finish with my favourite concepts: workplace technology and smart offices. The reason why this excites me is because technology is becoming a real strategic driver of change within the office environment. Organisations and people (yes, that means you and me) have become seasoned in our use of technology, and we’re now more likely to experiment with it. We’re open to exploring the possibilities of how technology can improve and streamline our workdays, and we’re even starting to demand it.  

According to a study by DEGW, employees estimate that they waste on average 33 minutes a day related to finding colleagues, meeting rooms, and arranging or getting meetings started. Don’t allow your workforce to waste time like this. Explore the various intuitive wayfinding, and room booking solutions that make everyone more efficient with their time. Remove the barriers to collaboration with wireless presentation solutions that allow you to stream content from laptops directly to meeting room displays. Make buildings run better by collecting data from sensors that provide insights into how people work, and feed that back for continuous improvement.

Even existing technology is making change possible. Consider QR codes, which are decades old, that we are now taking advantage of in the workplace. Together with my colleagues at Sony we’ve developed a way for employees to control a meeting room’s devices and lighting just by scanning a QR code on your mobile phone.

Related: Why smart workplaces will become commonplace

Smart and intuitive technology solutions are the ultimate tool for increasing office collaboration and productivity, but when combined with the previous steps I outlined you’ll be able to drive, facilitate and encourage workplace productivity on a whole new scale. Start small with a simple seating plan reshuffle, move on to finding out what you can do to help your team work more effectively when it counts, and if you have the resources, look to the technology that can support productivity amongst your team.

Let me know the methods you already use to encourage productivity in your workplace, or which tactics you plan to use in the future...