Office design and company culture: sending the right message
Most businesses want to create a company culture that empowers employees to do their best work, grow professionally and help the company grow too.
Does your office design align with these goals? Or are you sending mixed signals to current and potential employees?
Here are a few ways to better align your physical working environment with the company culture you’d like to create.
More choices and control
When employees are empowered to make choices about how they get work done, good things happen. Employees who are given a choice on when and where to work are more effective in focusing, collaborating and learning.
So, how can your office give employees more choices? One way is to provide different working environments for employees to choose from depending on what they need to get done. This king of office design, also called activity-based working, provides collaborative spaces, spaces for socializing and spaces for quiet focus. Having all of these components makes for a more balanced work environment – and creates more choices and control for employees.
Empowering employees to make choices about how and when they work is an important aspect of company culture. Enforcing strict rules or policies about work schedules or spaces can stifle creativity and create dissatisfaction.
In fact, employees who are given choices about their work environment ranked better in innovation, job performance, job satisfaction and workplace satisfaction than employees who are not afforded choices.
It’s also good for business. A study by Cornell University shows that small businesses who give employees these choices grew at 4 times the rate of employers that were more controlling.
Better experiences
An office that creates a positive employee experience is one that helps employees work efficiently without feeling soulless or disconnected from others. Creating a positive experience for employees can be as simple as hanging colorful artwork on the walls or as extensive as redesigning the office to include fancy amenities reminiscent of Silicon Valley.
Whatever your budget is for creating a better office experience, creating a balance between quiet focusing and coworker collaboration in your company culture will lead to the best returns in employee retention. Surveyed employees ranked balanced workplaces that emphasized both focus and collaboration more highly than unbalanced workplaces in these areas:
- Creating a climate of innovation
- Hiring creative thinkers
- Encouraging innovation
- Encouraging breakthrough ideas
- Having a clear strategy for innovation
More inclusivity
Every employee has different needs so making a workplace that is inviting and functional for every worker may be an impossible challenge. However, having a workplace that is welcoming of as many different kinds of workers as possible can help your business become more diverse and create a company culture of inclusivity.
Beyond the basic requirements of accessibility to comply with ADA regulations, there is a lot more your business can do to create an inclusive work environment. Inclusivity can relate to an employee’s age, working style, gender, cultural background and more.
Comfortable furniture that can accommodate people of different shapes, sizes and abilities is one key component that can go a long way towards employee retention. Employees should always be able to work in a way that doesn’t cause them pain or discomfort.
Thinking critically about the ways in which your office may be alienating certain groups can help you build a more diverse workplace.
If you are interested in learning more about building and retaining a workforce, check out some of our other blogs on these topics here.