How Can An Office Refurbishment Help To Curb Productivity Affecting Distractions?

If you’re looking for an office refurbishment for your Cambridge workplace, then we are able to put in place a totally bespoke design that not only looks at your aims, what you want to achieve and your business philosophy and branding, but also the needs and requirements of those who make your business tick. Your employees.

Distractions in the office, and dealing with them

Productivity levels in the office can be affected by a number of different aspects, some occurring more commonly than others. Here are some of the more common distractions:

• Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first; too much chatter in the office provides a major challenge in realising high productivity. Whilst conversations and collaboration is vital in creating relationships and helping with the work in hand, a balance needs to be found so non-work topics are kept to a minimum. There are a number of ways in which this can be curbed; the introduction of a breakout room or kitchen area provide a facility for employees to take their breaks or have their lunch in, allowing them to save up their non-work conversations for then. There may be people in the office who want to get away from the chatter and work in solitude; providing them with a quiet room or area to get on with their work, will help them to achieve their desired productivity levels.

• A well-defined kitchen area should be part of any office refurbishment in Cambridge. A kitchen doesn’t just provide a conversation station, of course, it’s main function is to cater for hungry employees. With work naturally being busy, it can be quite common for people to go the whole day without food, skipping lunch in order to finish the task at hand. Food is fuel; it allows us to function at our best and without a regular intake, we will feel sluggish, tired and distracted. This is why it’s important that employees are able to make time to take a break and refuel; a kitchen area doesn’t just provide them with this, it also gives them the perfect excuse to eat healthily, forgoing fast food options.

• The internet; has there ever been an invention in human history that is equal in its positive and negative points? We have all the information we could ever need at our fingertips, but a click here and a click there and 30 minutes later, we haven’t found what we set out to do and instead, have spent the last half-an-hour surfing haphazardly. Despite our best intentions, aimless surfing the web has a major impact on productivity; something like a breakout room with Wi-Fi facilities will give employees an opportunity to surf the web in their own time, whilst on their break, helping to cut down on the time spent doing it whilst ‘at work’.

• On a similar theme, constant text and online messages flying through phone-after-phone is another major distraction within the office. It isn’t just non-work messages either; much time can be wasted checking work e-mail inboxes and social media accounts; picking up on messages and considering a reply. A great way to cut down on the time spent on reading messages can be achieved firstly by rolling out a ‘no non-work mobile use’ policy within the work areas, whilst those work messages can be dealt with by setting aside a time during the day when all of the unread e-mails can be dealt with at once. By keeping on top of your work e-mails, you keep on top of work.

• Tea? Coffee? Light Refreshments? No matter your drink of choice, much distraction can stem from a single person asking everyone if they’d like a cup, then making it themselves. The trouble is that this takes such much time to do; so wouldn’t a couple of people making the tea in a quicker time not be better? Apparently, we lose over 20 minutes a day on making drinks in the British workplace and whilst it’s important to be able to cater for your employees, a balance must be found in which the brew workload can be shared, so more time can be saved (perhaps even spent on catching up on all of those e-mails!)