3 Ways to Improve Your Office for Productivity

If you’re a business owner, whether you have staff or you’re solo, you know you need a dedicated space to work. You also know that the space you’re in affects how effective you can actually be, and the same is true for your staff. 

October 4 is Improve the Office Day, so this week is a good one to kickstart better productivity in the workplace.

Improve productivity by creating space for each person to focus 

Open-plan offices only create noise and confusion. You can’t expect staff members (or yourself) to try to concentrate in an area where everyone is talking and typing and carrying out business. If your staff requires focus (for example, they need to deal with finances, spreadsheets, plans, or strategizing), they need a quiet space in order to concentrate.

It’s fine to have space for everyone to gather and share with each other too. A good break room is great for this, since it bolsters team communication and development. But no one should be expected to share space for work that requires focus and concentration.

And if you’re a business owner who works from a home office, the same goes for you too. Make sure you have a space dedicated to work – the IRS also requires this if you’re taking a home office deduction anyway. Make sure you have uninterrupted time at som point in your day. Don’t allow laundry or anything else to intrude on this space.

Make the necessary tools easy to access

I run into one of two problems pretty frequently when I’m helping clients break through a profit plateau. Either they don’t have enough organizational systems and processes, or they have too many. 

If your people have to open 15 folders to get to the work they do on a regular basis (whether those folders are digital or otherwise), your system is preventing them from being productive.

And if there’s no organized filing system, physical or digital, and it takes everyone forever to find things, that doesn’t help either. The quicker and more easily people can get to work (you included) the more you’ll be able to tackle in a given time frame. 

This is where having systems and processes from the beginning can be very helpful. Get started the right way. Instead of cluttering up your desktop with icons and/or documents, group them in ways that make sense for your business. 

Simplify wherever possible - use one notebook for all your notes instead of 3 different ones for different projects, for example. I recently made the switch to one all-purpose notebook myself and it makes things a lot easier!

Make space for focus time for everyone to experience a more productive workplace

This can be a little tougher if you have more staff and they’re all different sleep chronotypes, meaning that their time of day for focused, cognitively demanding work is different. Lions and bears get their best work done in the morning, while dolphins prefer the middle of the day and wolves are late afternoon or early evening.

But if you have a lot of morning people, for example, stop scheduling morning meetings. That’s the time they should be focused on work, not meetings and emails and admin. Don’t forget that you can schedule your emails, so you can write them any time you want but send them at a time that won’t interrupt them. Or give them the ability and the permission to simply disable all notifications during focus time.

Again, that includes you. As the founder/owner/CEO/boss/chief cook and bottle washer, you have knowledge work that you need to focus on. Whether it’s working on budgets or planning a marketing strategy or something else that demands your thinky brain. 

You may need to close your door and disable notifications too. You’ll get the most done when you do this thinky work at the time your brain is best able to handle it.

Recap (tl;dr)

Improving the office boosts morale and team development as well as productivity. Make sure everyone (including you) has both the time and space they need to do their focused work without distractions. Make the tools that are regularly needed easy to access, whether they’re physical or digital.

Not sure what the sleep chronotypes are in your office? How to arrange schedules to optimize your team’s effectiveness? I can help, so schedule a free consultation and we can talk.