Your employees spend hundreds of hours each year in your offices, slogging away and getting their tasks and jobs done. They do it for their livelihood and for career development, but they also stick around because they like what your business has to offer. Ensuring that your staff can work in a comfortable environment is essential; otherwise you are going to create a place that they do not feel they can work. Comfort is critical for happy employees, and if you’re not concerned with how comfortable they are, then you will end up having problems with employee retention. Happy employees stay in their jobs and want to do better for your benefit, so, with that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can ensure that your office is somewhere your staff want to be.
Shutterstock Licensed Photo – By Bojan Milinkov
The Right Furniture
As an employer, you should have done risk assessments for each member of staff as they joined your business. In these assessments, you’d have ensured that each member of staff had ergonomic chairs, desks at the right height and Kaeser air filters in the machines nearby. You want your team to be comfortable while they work, and the right furniture and air filters are going to ensure that you have the best possible quality work from your people.
Comfortable Temperatures
The air conditioning in the summer and the heaters in the winter are always a contentious issue. However, you can get opinions from the entire staff as to what their comfort levels are and come up with a happy medium. You can also make a little room in the budget for those who are too cold in the air conditioning can buy a fleece specific for work. The fairest option is the average desired temperature across the board, so make sure that you ask your staff first.
Keep A Good Filing System
You need your staff to be able to find what they need with ease. This means an excellently organized filing system is a must in your office. Your employees will thank you for it later when they can work way more efficiently than they previously could!
Allow Social Media
It doesn’t matter how offices were run in the days gone by; you need to ensure that you are running a fair one now. Social media is a big part of people’s lives, and so you need to make it so that you’re offering people the chance to have balance in their workplace. A part of that will be in providing people time on social media during working hours. You’ll have a less distracted employee base if they know that they’re allowed to look at Instagram throughout the day.
Your office should be a place your staff WANT to be, not somewhere that you dread being. Think about what would make your offices comfortable for YOU, and then employ some of the techniques for that with your current staff and office today.
