Want Happy Employees? Build Personalized Workspaces

The Old Way - Cubicles as far as the eye can see. Not very inspiring.

We’ve all worked in at least one of those offices. Those drab, soulless aisles of cubicles that are uninspiring and even draining to the staff. They may be the norm but your business needs something exceptional.

Workspace design is rapidly climbing priority lists among today’s HR departments as workers are more empowered to choose and stay with employers based on the environment in which they work and its flexibility. It’s taken a few years, but businesses around the world are finding out that comfort at the office goes well beyond the concept of ergonomics.

Happiness and Productivity

Psychologists have recognized the empowerment of giving employees freedom to create personalized workspaces, and how incorporating a more human-centered environment can help your employees do their best work on a daily basis.

Craig Knight, a professor at the University of Exeter in the UK, is one of the leading psychologists in this field, utilizing science and studying human behavior to improve the performance of a business. Knight as found that by facilitating an office that allows employees to personalize their space, workers can be up to 25% more productive.

“When we can enrich our space we’re happier,” he said in an interview with the BBC. “And we work better when we’re happier.”

Personalize Space and a Sense of Pride

The benefits of a personalized workspace, according to Knight, is that when we are able to keep our personal items around us (photos of loved ones, artwork, trinkets, etc.) we feel more connected to the space, which often results in employees taking more pride in their work. So, while some companies have restricted their staff from creating this sense of identity in the office as a way of increasing productivity, this strategy often has the opposite result.

In a study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, three researchers wrote “Creating a place of one’s own in an otherwise public workspace environment should further contribute to individuals’ positive cognitive and affective states, resulting in enhanced mental resources, enabling better coping with the potentially debilitating interferences associated with low privacy.”

Importance of the Right Furniture in Open Office Layouts

With more and more studies coming out discussing the negative impact of the oh-so-trendy open office layout, it’s clear that office furnishing needs a more intuitive approach to maximize the performance of your staff. That’s why we’ve applied a simple, effective approach that garners positive results within a staff.

Whether you’re using a Solo Zone or one of our larger solutions, it is designed to seamlessly pivot between a focused, private environment, and one that fosters collaboration between co-workers. Flexibility, comfort, and functionality is at the forefront of all decisions we make and all designs we create.

Let your office furniture empower your team to perform at their very best with workplace designs from Caribou Office.