Design Workplace Engagement to Boost Productivity

Usually when people talk about workplace engagement, they usually talk in terms of human resources. They would assign different people with different personality types together in teams in the hopes that their personalities would somehow click.

That’s how a lot of team assignments are made. The whole point behind this of course, is to boost overall productivity. Why is productivity important?

Well, think of it this way. If your company is currently capable of producing 100 units and you charge customer $1000 per unit, the total revenue of the company is $100,000.

What if the management made some changes so that the same team get paid the same amount of money and work the same amount of hours, but end up producing 300 units? Everything else is the same even the cost per unit to the buyer. What will happen?

That’s right. The total revenues increase dramatically. This can mean the difference between profitability and failure. After all, profit can only be calculated for most businesses in terms of what remains after costs have been taken out of revenues.

Productivity plays a direct role on the revenues your organization can possibly produce. That’s how important productivity is. As I mentioned earlier, boosting productivity has always been viewed as some sort of human resources problem.

Well, believe it or not, according to psychological research, people’s physical space actually has a major role to play when it comes to their productivity. There is such a thing as a state of flow.

If you’re working on any kind of product, you will reach a point where it seems like everything seems to flow. No joke. This is not a theory. This happens.

It doesn’t really matter what it is. Maybe you’re writing a screenplay. Maybe you’re doing a complicated mathematical analysis. Maybe you’re writing a financial plan. Maybe you’re doing some accounting.

Whatever form it takes and whatever level of analysis or creativity your specific work requires, when you achieve a state of flow, you tap into your vast reserves of experience and things start to move so much faster and the quality of your work increases dramatically.

This is why a lot of creative people want to achieve a state of flow because things get so much easier and they’re able to produce more. The job of any worthwhile competent manager worth his/her salt would be to lose productivity.

The way to do this is to stimulate flow. How do you go about doing this? First of all, you need to look at the environment.

Are people operating in cramped quarters? Do they feel pressured and stressed based on their physical environment? That may be something you may want to work on.

Also, pay attention to the sensory inputs within that fixed interior space. Maybe there are all sorts of colors that are distracting. Maybe there are all sorts of music that get people to remember things that take their attention away from work.

Maybe there are all sorts of social media updates that they have access to. You just need to pay attention to the total amount of variables that you subject your employees to because these have a direct role in modulating their focus.

The bottom line with flow is that the more focused the employee is, the higher the chance that person will be more productive. If you were to achieve a fairly modest 5% productivity increase, it can pay off tremendously assuming that you have enough employees.

This can scale up very quickly. It may seem like a little, but guess what? A little bit adds up to a lot when scaled up across a huge number of people. One way to engage greater productivity into your workplace is to prevent clutter on a design level.

Maybe it’s the way the room is set up. Maybe it’s the way the interior space is cut up. Whatever the case may be, by simply tapping into the architecture of the specific geographic place, you can boost productivity by stimulating focus.