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The science of office design : Designing fun into workspace

Posted by Oliver Corrigan on Jun 6, 2014 12:36:00 PM
Oliver Corrigan
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Most of us spend an average of 99,117 hours of our lives in an office.
That is a lot of hours.

 

Though we have to admit, with the world now fully embossed in the global, the working landscape is changing. I mean, how can we ignore the fact that in 2012 around four million employees in the UK worked from home, a rise of 470,000 since 2007?

Whether you're clocking in from nine to five or battling with breakfast at your desk, school runs and the whirr of the washing machine in a home office, the design of your working environment and choosing the best offices has been proven to have a direct effect on the quality of your work.

Let's examine the evidence.

Alleviating the workplace crisis

Writing for The Guardian, Monica Parker, head of workplace consultancy at Morgan Lovell, believes we are going through a workplace crisis. Parker cites data from the Office for National Statistics that just under a fifth of Britons are suffering from anxiety. Heightening the stress is the blurring of the boundaries between work and life.

With the office becoming more of a home than a business, Parker stresses the importance of making an office more like a home. She uses Google's Mountain View headquarters as an example.

Google's headquarters

google office

With a real fireman's pole, a slide, a cattle walkway and much, much more, Google's headquarters in California takes the logic behind office gyms, employee massages and nap rooms, to new heights. And it's not just Google's California employees who are reaping the benefits of the company's premise that in order to attract the best talent, you have to have the most brag-worthy office in the world. Google's Dublin office is essentially a pub-style lounge (very apt considering it's in Dublin!).

According to a Google statement, the company strives to “maintain the open culture associated with startups, in which everyone is a hands-on contributor and feels comfortable sharing ideas and opinions.”

“Our offices and cafés are designed to encourage interactions between Googlers within and across teams, and to spark conversation about work as well as play,” states Google.

Our header image is actually taken fro the youtube offices. 

The hours

With the rise of flexible working and changing working patterns, culture is at last moving away from the nine-to-five structure that was first crusaded for by socialist Robert Owen in 1817. Owen believed workers deserved eight hours of work, play and rest, a pattern we have seemed to have been locked in for eternity. However throughout the 20th century it was proven that the fewer hours we worked for, productivity was increased. This is when, not only can flexible working patterns that deviate from the 9 – 5 can prove advantageous to employees, but also office design.

As data has proven, having an office that is designed for play as well as work can have a positive impact on creativity, collaboration, inspiration and ultimately productivity. Whether it's going home for a siesta, playing table tennis with a colleague or burning a few pounds in an office gym, taking 'time out' away from the desk logically puts us in better stead for a more productive session of work.

Hence the rise of office designs that encourage employees to relax away from their desks.

More subtle changes

Of course not every company can afford to install large touchscreen tablet tables for employees to pull up a set around like Microsoft, or an office hallway to look like the New York subway like Epic. For companies on tighter budgetary leashes, less radical changes can be made to the office designs that can still prove beneficial to the well-being and ultimately work production of employees.

As we wrote in a blog last year, subtler changes such as investing in high quality chairs, offering a '3rd' space that enables workers to get away from their desks, giving employees two monitors, and using natural materials, can help improve the quality of the working day, for both employees and the employer.

 

Have you got any experience of working in an innovative and fun office design which has helped you and colleagues 'push the boundaries' in terms of thinking more innovatively? Or perhaps you are tired of your office's drab maze of beige cubicles and pine for your boss to adopt a more 21stcentury mode of office design? Either way, we'd love to hear your experiences and thoughts. 

 

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