Offices are finally adapting to people. Not vice versa.

„In the office, we gave people a ping-pong table, motivational quotes on the wall and fruit in the kitchen however it still doesn't work." Why isn't it enough to stack the best ingredients from other recipes and cook a great combination of office space for our business, where people will be excited? Why is the working environment so important for people? How does it affect their well-being and productivity? These are the questions I will try to answer in the following article.

Text: Ivo Hrdina/JuiceUP

According to last year’s surveys performed by British company 4 out of 5 employees are convinced that the workplace has a direct impact on their mental health. The topic of mental health of employees rightly receives more and more attention. Every one of us spends an average of 80k hours of work on our lives, and how we feel is essential not only for our performance, but without exaggeration for our entire company. Here are a few numbers from the UK to support this assertion: In 2017 over half a million employees were suffered from symptoms of excessive stress, anxiety or depression related to the performance of work in their jobs. The British economy lost 15.4 million pounds as a result of employee absence, and the cost of mental health care throughout UK amounted to 70 trillion pounds.

The can be sometimes simply too many motivational quotes on the wall

At the same time, according to Arlington Research, employees have a feeling that their employers do not invest enough in the work environment, 68% of employees would feel more appreciated if the employer made their offices prettier and more enjoyable. The fact that the work environment has a significant impact on the well-being of employees and thus also on their productivity is no longer in the category "whether it is true" but "how much it is true". If we love our work and feel good about it, it is highly probable that we are working as best we can.

Stress, anxiety or depression are more and more related to work

But how have an employer to decide properly on the ideal working environment and how to create an environment where people will be happy and therefore work well? The answer does not hide in the amount of ping pong tables in the office, motivational quotes on the wall or in the amount of fruits constantly available in the kitchen. The ideal staging environment does not come from any generally valid templates. This is always the first step in a thorough knowledge of the people who inhabit the offices and the subsequent projection of their needs into the office space.

One way of knowing the needs is to define common corporate values by all employees. Why it is so, is explained by Israeli psychologist Shalom H. Schwartz as follows: "When we think about our values, we think about what is really important to us in our lives." Having your business values defined is almost a standard today, and their graphic design often decorates your corporate meeting room or entrance reception. But do people really know what does each value mean? And do they know how each of these values will affect their everyday life?

Personal values can be the right start for thinking about employee needs

To illustrate the application of corporate values in the office environment, I will use an example of creating a Workspace strategy for one of our clients this year. The assignment was: We want to make the offices more pleasant for employees so that they feel better and therefore work better. We started by defining the values and needs of the people who occupy the offices in a common workshop. We quickly identified the core value of the client called “Cohesiveness” and in discussions we clarified exactly what it means in practice. We applied the value to the strategy up to the final space plan. In this case, the client was missing a "semi- private zone" for informal sitting and small business meetings, separated by a lamella "visual" wall. There were also some small details such as notice boards, descriptive surfaces and some design accessories.

Seemingly small solutions can make a significant difference in our offices. A ping-pong table or a quote on the wall can be such details. But we must know that these are the right details for our mosaic. When
arranging offices, we need to know the needs of our people and we need to make sure that the offices are fully suited to them.

This article was created and first published in brochure BNP Paribas Real Estate - Office Occupiers Trends