If you’re a business owner or you’re in charge of running an office, it’s likely that you want to improve productivity levels. Working in an office can be great, but there are plenty of reasons why your office may not be firing on all cylinders. Here are five easy ways to make your office more productive.
Encourage Regular Breaks
This might not be what you want to hear, but when employees take regular breaks and a full lunch hour, they get more work done.
Your staff will be happier if they’re allowed to stretch their legs for five minutes or have a quick chat with a colleague at the coffee machine, and studies have shown that happy staff are productive staff.
As well as encouraging people to make full use of their lunch hour, make them aware of time-management methods like the Pomodoro Technique. When people take lots of small breaks, their productivity tends to increase.
Install Convertible Desks
Desks that are easily changed from regular desks into standing desks are a fantastic way to improve productivity. In a recent study of call center staff, employees were 46% more efficient when their desks were replaced with sit-stand desks.
Standing desks can also reduce back and neck pain, so it’s a great way to keep employees in the office rather than out with injury.
Improve Your IT
Everybody knows how frustrating it is when a computer is taking a long time to finish a simple task. If your office network is slow, work will be slow too, and it can lead to slow file transfers and patchy phone connections. Individual delays may be minor, but they all add up and lead to a great deal of wasted time.
Fix your slow network by using a structured cabling service. By employing structured cabling, network speeds can be increased. An efficient cabling system also makes it easier to add, remove, or move users, so it’s a good investment into your company’s future.
Faster network speeds will reduce wasted time and prevent employees from becoming frustrated, improving productivity even further.
Avoid Unnecessary Meetings
How many times have you left a long meeting and thought to yourself, “That could have been an email”?
It’s all too common in office-based businesses to rely on face-to-face contact and lengthy meetings to get people up to speed, but in many cases, meetings are simply unnecessary.
Rather than booking an hour-long meeting, encourage your employees to use ten-minute catch-ups in break-out spaces when they need to talk in person. Or, even better, have them send an email with a project update.
If your employees spend less time in meetings, they’ll spend more time getting actual work done.
Improve Comfort
Nobody likes working in an office that has dim lighting, uncomfortable seating, and cold temperatures.
Reduce the power of the air conditioning and find a temperature that works for everyone; replace harsh overhead strip lights with floor-level lamps, or improve natural light by installing more windows; provide everyone with an ergonomic desk chair, and put couches in a common area for more comfortable breaks.
Small changes like these can make a huge difference to the productivity of your employees. Ask your staff what else they require, and give them what they want. You’ll soon see that it doesn’t take much to improve office efficiency.
