Enhancing Employee Wellbeing With Office Designs

It’s common for offices to feel energetic and demanding at the same time. Office layout and design, when considering your employees, can be restructured around enhancing productivity and efficiency in the workplace. For that kind of meaningful change, leaders should look no further than their office and consider how its everyday design can promote better wellbeing in employees. 

Employee Wellbeing Is The Number One Priority

Employee wellbeing, productivity, and efficiency are influenced by their environment just as much as the pressure they receive from different workflows. Whilst many managers will, typically, think of office design in clinical terms, planning an office to minimise distractions, increasingly more employers are organising workplaces around health goals.

“Workplace wellbeing” is the buzz phrase for thinking about the dynamics between work, health, and wellbeing. The significance of this trend is enough to attract attention from established charities – such as Mind.org. Even the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) acknowledges how critical wellbeing at work has become in recent years.

Studying office design, these three takeaways can be implemented into everyday workplaces to help employees feel healthier and happier at work.

Happiness Builds From Reception

On average, a building will have a potentially large volume of visitors to regulate, from clients to service workers and your employees. Therefore, having the most relevant services is critical – because it ensures that you optimise visitor management. Front of house describes the professionals who work, nearly invisibly, in reception, meeting and greeting your visitors on arrival. The security role they play is invaluable, but front of house helps maintain a careful image that your brand has worked hard to cultivate. As one of the earliest touchpoints with your business (outside of your website), reception is the moment employees start to build their momentum.

It’s more than a gateway into your office, just as much as reception does more than filter traffic for security. As a critical touchpoint early into an employee’s journey with an office, front of house is an opportunity to start building positive experiences. This is where reception services get the reputation for building up strong impressions.

Having a well-serviced reception is about building these experiences from the earliest interaction your employees have with the office. Nowadays, employees crave memorable, healthy connections that connect the dots between their personal lives and their professional careers.

Security, Safety And Satisfaction

When we talk about a building’s layers of security, you’re indicating to your employees how secure an office is from the outside world. Risk varieties are increasingly the norm, and employers should have the evolving landscape of threats online (and offline) on their radar. That’s because, whilst email phishing and socially engineered attacks are amongst the most common, risks are increasingly becoming sophisticated. This is where security becomes essential, helping to remove the burden of risks from employees.

Security defines a range of activities from basic visitor management to patrolling a facility and its car parks, ensuring that only authorised personnel have access to a site. The end goal is to help ensure that staff feel safe, comfortable and satisfied with the daily operation of an office. The best demonstration of this is through a coordinated security service that helps secure your employees both digitally and when they’re working from an office.

Office Hygiene

‘Hygiene’ is more than a cleaning service; it’s about the ongoing health of your office, ensuring that it supports the wellbeing of those who use it every day. The health and safety of office users are paramount to how a modern-day office operates.

Post-pandemic, and as the world reconciles with the role of public health, hygiene goals have risen as an urgent priority across many different sectors. When it comes to the office, the lingering sense of paranoia leftover from coronavirus has limited employee enthusiasm for returning to the office, because of hygiene scares. Proactive leaders can create healthy offices through cleaning schedules, but also better waste management and sustainability policies.

Design an experience that employees will remember by focussing on how your building can enhance their happiness and health. Even though it can be challenging to deliver on this promise for a better office, with the assistance of facilities management services you can get your office into shape.