When you are new in the business, it seems as if every odd is against you. All your competitors have an already developed network of contacts, more money and a greater workforce. The only thing you can hope to outperform them at is average productivity. In other words, your smaller team needs to outperform their larger one and in this way show much better cost-effectiveness. Now, there is a little-known fact that a happy worker tends to be 12 percent more productive and a large portion of this is due to the adequate workspace. With this in mind, here are few tips on how a well-designed and well-managed office space could give you a significant boost in productivity.
1. Ideal Work Environment
The first thing you need to focus on in your office is optimizing it to be work friendly. First of all, you need to organize a layout so that different departments aren’t interfering with each other’s work. For instance, your sales department may be too loud and therefore distract those currently employed on more creative tasks.
Of course, there are other factors that influence productivity, aside from work alone. The amount of light and even temperature in the office can be equally as important. You see, according to a recent study, the ideal office temperature that inspires greater productivity is somewhere around 22 Celsius (71.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and it should be the manager’s job to keep it there.
2. Attracting Talent
Another thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that most startups have a hard time attracting and retaining talent. The reason behind this is a fact that they usually don’t have much to offer in term of pay or potential advancement. What they do have to offer are a chance to learn and a positive work environment. The latter can be achieved by managing your office in the best way possible. In other words, an adequate office design can make promising young employees completely fall in love with the place and therefore your startup.
3. Growth Planning
Next thing that every startup needs to have in mind is the potential for the future growth of their enterprise and the way in which their office could handle it. You see, your premises may be big enough at the moment, but once the workload increases, will you be able to hire new people or will you have to move to a larger office in order to do so? If you are more inclined towards the latter option, you need to have a plan of the move, long before you actually need to make one.
For example, if you are about to move your office from one end of Sydney to the other, you might need a temporary furniture storage to hold bulky items that can’t fit in the new office at the moment. Having everything planned out, can seriously reduce the downtime of your company and therefore give your productivity an additional boost.
4. Building an Office Culture
Finally, one thing that every new business needs, is some company culture and the easiest way to build it is by starting from office culture. One idea would be to choose a space with a dining room and in this way give your team a chance to eat together every day. A company that eats together, stays together. Additionally, you could also choose a place with a rooftop patio, which you could turn into a break room or a space for an occasional DIY party. As you can see, the architecture of the office you choose plays a major part in establishing any of these team building rituals.
In Conclusion
In the end, some startups find it quite hard to actually get an office on their moderate budget, which is why they prefer to handle things in the digital environment. Still, sooner or later most of them will be forced to get an office. Needless to say, seeing how much work is there to be done, sooner is always the option you should go with.
