Put your own touch on it and become more productive
Datum: 2024-06-19 08:24
There are offices of all sorts and the question is what kind that makes you most productive.
The opportunity to be able to influence how your workplace is set up matters a great deal if you are to believe a study from 2010 by Craig Knight and S. Alexander Haslam at the University of Exeter.
For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the “Done!” podcast:
Four kinds of trust
In one experiment they tested the productivity of people who were tasked to solve a handful of ordinary “office chores” during an hour in four different offices. The rooms differed from one another by being furnished according to different circumstances:
- The first office, which the researchers called “Lean”, lacked decoration altogether, and only had the things needed for the person to solve the task, which was a pen, a paper, and an empty desk.
- The second room, referred to as “Enriched”, was fully furnished with plants and decorative posters.
- In the third office, “Empowered”, the test-person was asked to arrange the furniture and decoration on his own using the same plants and posters as in “Enriched”.
- In the fourth room, “Disempowered”, the test-person was asked to arrange the decoration yet again, but after having done so, the room was rearranged once again and “corrected” to look exactly like the pre-decorated “Enriched”.
Does freer make you more efficient?
What version do you think resulted in the highest productivity? It turned out that in the fully decorated room “Enriched”, the productivity went up by 15% compared to in the clinical and stripped “Lean” room. Even more interesting (and probably expected?) was that the productivity went up another 15%, all the way to 30% above the “Lean” room when the test-persons were allowed to arrange the decoration themselves in the “Empowered” room.
And when the participants got their arrangement “corrected” in the “Disempowered” room, the productivity dropped to the same level as in the “Lean” room, even though the decorations were arranged in an identical way compared to how they were set up in the “Enriched” room (which had previously shown an increase in productivity).
So, it seems having influence over how our workplace is designed can make a big difference.
Do this
If you want to make use of what was shown in the study mentioned above and increase your ability to get more done with less effort, ponder for a while what changes you could make in your office environment to feel more comfortable there.
If you have not got a designated office or desk but are working activity-based and change place every day, is there something in your digital workspace that you can change and put your own touch to? It is, after all, the digital environment most of spend hours staring into.
When you design your environment, be careful not to decorate it with pictures and text that distracts or attracts your attention when you do not want it to. When you need to focus it is impractical to get distracted every time you lift your head.
Get more done easier
If you put your own touch to the environment you work in you will raise your productivity even more, if we are to believe what Knight and Haslam’s study suggests. With less effort you will get done what you have to do quicker, hence enabling you to spend more time and energy on what you would rather do.
What’s your way?
What design, furniture, decorations or other physical arrangements make you really enjoy your workplace? Describe it in an email to me, please.
(Perhaps you would enjoy working in a quiet meadow at the office?)
Want more like this?
If you want more tips on how to create good structure at work, there are many ways to get that from me - in podcasts, videos, books, talks and other formats.
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