The appearance of your office is about much more than making it look nice. According to various experts, the layout and the overall visuals of your office tend to have an effect on the productivity of your team. Certain colors enhance focus, while others tend to boost one’s aggressiveness and initiative. Additionally, the appearance of your office space might have an effect on the overall mood of your staff members, as well as influence the image that your investors, partners and clients make of you. With this in mind, here are a few simple tricks that may help you out in this regard.
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Start with the exterior
They say that you can never get a chance to make a positive first impression. This is why the outside of the office needs to be as neat and well organized as possible. The appearance of the entrance doors is also extremely important, but so is its quality. You see, when it comes to security doors, you need to do your homework well and find the one that is guaranteed to protect your office from unwanted intruders.
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Proceed to the reception
One of the things you need to pay special attention to is your reception area. First, you need to make sure you pick the right person for the job. What you need is someone emphatic, welcoming and communicative. Next, you need to make sure that the visuals of the area are up to the task as well. You can start by choosing the right height of the reception desk since too high can seem intimidating. Another thing you could do is put a bowl with sweets or few promotional products as a token of appreciation for your visitors. One last thing – the logo of the company needs to be the first thing that a person coming into your office notices. Because of this, you need to choose the most prominent place for it.
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Cubicles are a bad idea
In the past, cubicles were the essential part of any office. Their advantage in vast open floor offices was that they provided a sense of privacy for everyone. Their downsides, however, are much more numerous. First of all, for those who already don’t know what they feel about their job, this cubicle can become no short of a prison. Next, it alienates you from the rest of your coworkers and therefore acts negatively towards any teambuilding efforts you may have in store for the future.
Aside from this, they visually diminish the size of the room, therefore creating a sense of claustrophobia that isn’t that easy to shake off. Most importantly, while cubicles give the impression of being sound-proof, this is not the case. This means that they encourage people to be much louder, which can be incredibly distracting.
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Keep the place neat
One more thing that deserves your full and undivided attention is the question of the neatness of the place. Not only does mess diminish the neatness of the place, but it also leaves a bad impression on any visitor. In other words, tolerating mess makes you look less professional. Aside from these psychological downsides of a messy workplace, there are some practical ones as well. For instance, clusters of cables scattered across the floor can pose a trip risk, while a layout of the office that is not planned well enough might make commute much more difficult.
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Choose the right colors
Finally, you need to choose the right color for your office, but this might not be as simple of a task as you initially though. You see, there is no color that universally boosts efficiency. Such a thing depends on the process that you want to enhance in the first place. For instance, your negotiators or sales team can benefit from red or orange, seeing how these colors tend to make them more aggressive and alert. On the other hand, blue and violet are great for your creative team, because they will help them focus. As for the color of the aforementioned reception area, something reassuring such as green might be a good idea.
As you can see, all you need to do in order to make your office more appealing usually doesn’t take more than few days of your work. All that is expected of you is an inexpensive painting project, a reliable cleaning company and a reorganization of your workspace. In turn, you get a significant boost in productivity. A win-win scenario – regardless of how you look at it.
