Office communication is vital to ensuring you have a happy workspace. Here are 4 tips on how you can improve your office communication with good space planning.
Have you ever wondered what makes a great team “great”? What makes a group of people succeed at a task or a mission? Strong communication! It lies at the heart of every good team. Think about it – if you don’t successfully communicate with your employees and ensure they know what’s expected of them, it can lead to errors, unhappiness, and a decline in productivity. Ultimately, when the team understands their mission, and owns their part in it, success is inevitable.
Good communication creates a well-informed, well-structured, and happy team and great space planning can help improve communication. Here are four simple space planning tips to encourage natural communication in your office space:
1. Create visibility
Communication is not easy in the workplace to begin with, you have conflicting personalities (like introverts and extroverts) and different communications styles, so adding a physical barrier only makes communication harder. Help encourage communication, sharing, and camaraderie by limiting divisions between areas as much as possible and replacing drywall with glass wall. Use low height furniture to group fixed work teams, so that they are still accessible and part of the larger organisation.
2. Create Accessibility
Another way to help improve communication between team is to make sure that each member has easy access to the people they work with regularly. So make sure everyone is available by putting them in close proximity to one another and ensuring they are sitting by people they get on well with. We recommend utilising an open plan workspace, it’s still the best way to create good communication organically.
Think it might be time for an office redesign? Take a look at our checklist to find out.
3. Encourage interaction
Silos are the enemy of communication in every office, in fact Forbes notes that “departmental silos are seen as a growing pain for most organisations of all sizes”. That’s why we always advise our clients to create collaboration work spaces where teams are encouraged to work together and share ideas. A well designed collaboration space will promote communication and give teams a space where they have to remove the silo mentality. Breakaway spaces also create a sociable environment where relaxed employees are open to learning and sharing.
4. Share
Your company culture has a big impact on the way your employees communicate. Strategically placed artwork displaying company goals, values, projects, and ideas will allow employees to feel included and a part of the bigger picture. This will create a sense of belonging while communicating company info.
At the end of the day, you want to always encourage good communication and keep your employees comfortable. Giving them an environment that encourages open and comfortable communication is a big step in helping your office open up and feel comfortable talking.
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