Improve Office Safety
First and foremost, your employees deserve to feel entirely safe at work. There are a few ways that you can ensure this: first of all, issue everybody with an ID on a lanyard so that you can easily tell from a few paces that everybody you meet in the building should be there. Issue visitors’ passes to people who are only there for the day. If you don’t have a doorman, it’s a good idea to have a door code so that only people who work in the building can get in and out – this could also be a feature of the ID cards that you hand out. Finally, you need to check out the safety of the building itself. Make sure that the plumbing and electrics are all entirely safe and up to date, and make sure that the building is prepared for anything that might happen – for instance, there should be smoke alarms and sprinklers in case of fire. Depending on where you live and the age of the building, you could also consider an earthquake retrofit that will ensure that people feel safe if a natural disaster occurs.
Add Comfort To The Office
It’s important to encourage your employees to be comfortable in the office. They’re going to spend a whole lot of time at those desks and in those chairs, so make sure that they’re of a high quality and that if employees need items like cushions and arm rests to improve their comfort, you provide them. Anti-glare screens will ensure that they get fewer headaches after looking at their computer screens for whole days, while footrests often mean that they might get fewer backaches. A few amenities scattered around won’t do any harm – invest in small things like good quality toilet tissue and soap for the bathrooms, a supply of snacks and coffee for the kitchen, and filtered water so that people can stay hydrated. It’s a small and inexpensive way to make people feel appreciated and that your office has lots of perks.
Ditch The Paper
These days everybody is rightfully becoming more and more interested in how we can preserve our planet and become more eco friendly, and one easy way to make sure that your office is more green is to go paper free. Removing all paper entirely might not be something that you can do immediately, but tablets can do the same work as a print-out in meetings, and people can take notes on laptops instead of in notebooks. When it comes to storage, the cloud is a whole lot easier and more convenient than using stacks of paper in filing cabinets. It doesn’t take nearly as long to find what you need, and in terms of physical space the cloud is a whole lot more convenient – do you really want to pay for extra office space to house filing cabinets when you don’t need to?
What About A Recreation Space?
We’ve all heard that all work and no play is decidedly not a good way to live your life. Even at work, it’s important to make sure that employees get regular breaks so that they have time and space that isn’t spent staring at a computer screen. A recreation space is an area to be creative, to get to know their fellow employees and build closer bonds and relationships that might just produce some magic when they’re in a meeting room and coming up with some new ideas. A pool table, a foosball table, or some arcade games are a great way to let everyone in the office chill out during their lunch and coffee breaks. It would also be good to make sure that you have a space where people can take a few moments when they’re feeling overwhelmed. A small outside courtyard is a great place for that – put a bench amid the greenery and anyone who’s feeling like they aren’t sure what to do next will feel instantly refreshed and able to get on with their days.
Lower Noise Levels
Communication is key in office spaces – you want people to be able to talk to each other, to spark off each other, and to come up with brand new ideas. But having an incredibly noisy office isn’t really good for anyone – it’s a distraction and everyone has different levels of what sort of background noise they can bear when they’re trying to get on with their work. A lot of people, such as salespeople, need to use phones too, and too much background noise will distract both them and the people they’re calling from their conversations. If you have the radio on in the background, try to choose an inoffensive music station that doesn’t distract too much from work – and prepare for arguments when people decide they want to change the station.
Cut Down On Meetings
It’s time to think about the meetings that you have and whether they’re strictly necessary. Meetings should be for discussing ideas and presenting feedback – if those items aren’t on the agenda, could the information be passed out via email instead? Likewise, it’s important to consider who really needs to be at each meeting. Could you trust each team leader to feed back relevant information instead of expecting everyone in the company to sit through an extensive meeting every morning when they could be doing work instead? Finally, you could consider standing meetings. They tend to move a lot more quickly and get through points faster, which means that considerably less time is wasted.
When it comes to improving your office, it’s a good idea to talk to the people you work with so that you can figure out what exactly they want from their space, and sift through the ideas to find the ones that are easily doable. A security light outside the office, more recycling bins, more plants – these are all requests that you can easily grant that will make people even happier to be working at your company.