Don’t let ‘office life’ interfere with the productivity or efficiency of your business. Discover five top tips for a happy, productive, and healthy office.
Make time to be creative
Spending every moment of your professional life working on rigid tasks is a recipe for stress and unhappiness. Instead of focusing on ‘must-do’ tasks for your entire workday, build in a break for creative thinking.
Large companies like Google give their employees time to brainstorm and innovate every week. Take 15 minutes every day and brainstorm creative ways to improve your business.
Focus on keeping customers happy
Think about the crises you face at work, and try to pinpoint how many of these stemmed from issues with unhappy customers. Are the same problems repeating again and again?
By sending out surveys to assess your customers’ satisfaction, you can learn how to improve your service and avoid issues that will affect morale in your office.
Working from home? Keep a consistent schedule
Working from home offers a great deal of flexibility. But freedom can easily turn against you without a consistent schedule. Stay in control of your productivity by setting yourself a schedule for each day of the week.
Starting work at 9am might feel old fashioned, but it adds a sense of structure to your workday. It will help you meet your goals. But equally importantly, a scheduled end-point can help stop work taking over your life.
Use natural light to your advantage
Natural sunlight has huge health and productivity benefits, compared to artificially lit environments.
Make sure that your office is brightly lit using sunlight, whether from a window or a skylight. Artificial lighting should be a supplement, not a primary source of light in your office. But make sure all that natural light is not making your computer screen impossible to see!
And remember to take breaks outdoors when you can as well. As Alec Ryan says in the London Offices blog: “In the summer months, the outdoors is a great place for an informal meeting or simply for taking ten minutes outside the office.”
Use a proven office productivity system
Productivity systems like Getting Things Done and Pomodoro might feel like restrictions on your flexibility. In fact, they can be immensely effective when used properly at getting things done faster and therefore increasing your flexibility. Productivity systems can be used by an individual, or they can be equally effective at helping a team to synchronize and streamline their work efforts.
A hidden benefit of these productivity systems is the way they change the workflow. Productivity systems are particularly good at building in breaks and demarcating breaks from work time. Users can quickly develop good work habits that increase productivity and result in a happier office.