Organizing your workspace: to optimize team performance

Good teamwork depends on a good work environment

Designer offices are one thing but having a functional and pleasant workplace is essential, considering the time people spend there. An optimally designed workspace has significant benefits, including in terms of productivity. To be efficient, it needs careful forward planning! Why, how and when to set up your workspace? How can our template help? With our template, you don’t need to be a logistics mastermind to start work on a workspace setup or reorganization project!

Why set up a new workspace?

Workspace layout is key to working conditions, with a number of challenges involved. Improving the comfort and atmosphere actually has a direct effect on team work and communication. Working as a team in a pleasant and comfortable environment increases performance and interaction. A well designed workspace can therefore definitely boost team productivity.

Team members will feel more comfortable, focused, relaxed and happy in a well-designed workspace. This is exactly the mindset that managers seek to promote in a team!

The layout and interior decoration of a person’s home are often the key to their tastes and personality. And the same applies to workspaces! A company’s or organization’s identity and culture are also conveyed via their premises. On a daily basis, teams are immersed in this corporate culture through the design of their work environment. Architecture and design are important, and workspaces are designed for people. It affects their level of commitment in their work.

Depending on your line of business, the layout and decoration of your workspace will more or less affect your team’s creativity. Some colors are more stimulating than others, for instance.

Seven tips to optimize your workspace

• Allow enough space: people must be able to move around easily to facilitate the flow of information, and communication is key to performance. It may seem obvious, but it’s important to bear in mind that everyone needs to have access to a workstation.  The premises must have enough room for everyone to feel at home. Lack of space causes discomfort and hinders concentration.
• Allow a place for everything: essential for a tidy work environment! A visually clear and tidy space helps people to think clearly. For example, provide enough coat hangers and storage space for the whole team, according to your line of business. You won’t waste time looking for a folder or a tool!
• Choose ergonomic furniture: making sure that every team member is comfortably seated is the key to everything! Comfort should prevail over design. If you can have both, all the better! The well-being of your teams comes first. Good seating is essential to prevent back pain, often called the “disease of the 21st century”.
• Include quiet corners: open plan offices? Yes, why not, but not 100%! If you opt for open plan offices, include small enclosed areas for meetings and confidential conversations. It’s also important to have quiet corners where you can hold small group sync sessions, or make calls or take part in videoconferencing workshops or interact with other team members working from home. Or simply cut yourself off from the rest of the team and work alone in peace and quiet.
• Use a modular layout: make sure that the workspace layout is not permanent, and that it can easily be reorganized if necessary. Team distribution is increasingly changeable, depending on the days or weeks, with people working in the office and others working from home or remotely. Being able to adapt the site layout to the team in an instant is a great advantage and increases performance! For instance, furniture on casters is easy to move around.
• Don’t forget the lighting, and make sure it’s the right type! It may not seem important, but lighting is essential to well-being on a daily basis. Always pay attention to poor lighting, especially in the winter months, when the days are shorter and it’s still dark when you arrive at the office and already dark when you leave! We need daylight, to keep the spirits up and to avoid seasonal-affective disorders. Make sure that your office design provides as much natural light as possible, paying attention to how screens are positioned, to avoid glare and reflection. You can also choose different types of light bulbs. Preferably use light bulbs that simulate natural sunlight, which is more relaxing. (Don’t forget to be eco-responsible and opt for low-energy models, and raise your team’s awareness of the importance of turning off lights and other energy-intensive appliances, or install dimmers or lighting control systems to reduce energy costs.)
• Don’t forget the relaxation areas: Your teams need to take breaks and relax for their well-being and performance. A workspace should have a dedicated relaxation area where people can take a break whenever they need it. Why not opt for hybrid areas, designed for both working and relaxation, depending on the time of day and the team using them? That’s perfectly possible! Klaxoon’s premises are there to prove it.

When to set up your workspace?

While the most obvious reason for setting up a workspace is when you move into new premises, due to office relocation or opening a new business, other circumstances can also prompt a change:

• Increase in the workforce following a recruitment drive, for example
• New distribution of resources with part of the workforce working from home
• In-house reorganization
• New contracts and markets
• New processes
• New office equipment
• Corporate image overhaul: new name, change of corporate identity, etc.
• An unprecedented situation requiring an overhaul of the workspace and layout, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, with the enforcement of strict distancing protocols, etc.

All these changes call for the workspace layout to be redesigned. None of the above apply to your team? Then why not simply feel like a change, and go for it! Reorganizing the workspace will give the team a new impetus, starting with the project itself, as everyone can get involved. Finally, optimizing the workspace can help to naturally reorganize processes, improving certain elements together, improving communication, etc. It can benefit the whole team, and it won’t necessarily be a long, drawn-out process that will hold back your projects, especially if you use Klaxoon’s template for your reorganization.

How will the “Organizing your workspace” template help?

• Think your project through, plan the layout, try it out, start again…The template is available on Board, Klaxoon’s digital whiteboard, with unlimited space and options via a comprehensive toolbox and palette. Shapes, colors, text, pictures, etc. You can visualize your project, creating as many plans and trialling as many different layouts as you want, without wasting time.
• Follow the guide! The “Organizing your workspace” template features ready-to-use areas and tools to set out your plans and everything is clearly explained in the comprehensive user instructions. This applies to all our templates and methods in our Template Library, which is expanding week by week.
• Work at your own pace: all changes made to the Board are saved automatically. You can work stepwise and go back to the Board whenever you like, stepping back and taking a fresh look at the layout you designed the day before. Also, several people can work on the project at different times, whenever it’s convenient.
• Work on the layout as a team: Board is a collaborative tool, which means that everyone can share their ideas at the same time. The screen can be synced even remotely, with some people working from home. Klaxoon’s digital whiteboard also has a built-in videoconferencing tool, Live. That’s all you need.
• Build on your collective strengths. A collaborative tool is more stimulating and gets the ideas flowing from all those involved. It also means that decisions can be taken together, thanks to the Questions tool, which lets participants interact easily and vote on Poll questions.

The “Organizing your workspace” template is ultimately about improving team performance, thanks to forward planning and working together hand in hand. Working as a team to work better as a team: we’ve come full circle!