We have all asked ourselves the question what aspects of the office workspace do staff feel have the greatest impact on their productivity?

Recent research in the UK by Barry Haynes of Sheffield Hallam University looks at how staff feel physical and behavioural aspects of office workspace impact on their ability to get work done.

The researcher has looked at over 1400 responses from staff from both a large local authority and a major private company. The questionnaire asks staff various questions on how comfort aspects of the office, the office layout and the behavioural aspects of interaction and distraction impact on their perceived productivity.

One of the key aspects of the research was to first determine how to measure staff productivity. Barry’s research found that there is no universally accepted way of measuring staff or organisational productivity and that the most successful way is let staff assess their own perceived productivity.

The key findings from the research are:

• Behavioural components of office workspace have a greater impact on staff productivity than the physical aspects

• The components of interaction and distraction have both the most positive and the most negative impact on productivity

• The physical workspace therefore needs to create the right balance of collaborative workspace and space for private individual work and this will be different for different types of organisations and staff activities

• Whilst the design of office layouts can greatly improve the effect of distraction and interaction there comes a point where future improvements can only be gained by staff knowing how to conduct themselves in the spaces created

Dow’s advice when contemplating how to create high performance workspace for your organisation is:

• Understand and communicate up front to staff the desired behavioural changes (eg we want to break down silos in the organisation by getting staff to communicate across work groups)

• Involve staff in an open and inclusive way in creating the workspace concept. Make sure you focus their attention on those aspects of the workspace that will support the desired behavioural changes. Properly engaged staff can help the designer understand the right balance between collaborative and private workspace for the new office.

• Make sure staff are involved in developing guidelines for using the workspace. Often the best way of doing this is to create a staff reps group and have them develop the guidelines. These can then be communicated to the organisation as OUR workplace guidelines not something a consultant has developed for them