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How Your Workplace Can Be Designed to Encourage Communication

Have you ever considered how communication impacts the efficiency, operation and success of your business? Creating an environment where your staff can communicate freely is a bigger deal than you think.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, a number of tech companies are actually encouraging workers to interact with their colleagues more and spend less time in front of their screens.

Better communication within your organisation means employees get the chance to gain a better understanding of the company, how it’s performing as well as the roles, responsibilities and skills of the colleagues around them. When staff learn more about the people they work with, they’re better equipped to utilise each other’s strengths, which in turn helps to boost productivity and improve the overall attitude in the office.

With this in mind, any business should be jumping at the change to encourage communication, and to do this, offices need to be designed accordingly.

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Dedicated Break Room

Too many of us fall into the habit of eating lunch at our work desks, causing communication and relationships in the workplace to suffer. By having a dedicated break room in the office, not only will your employees have a chance to completely detach from their work for a while, but they’ll also get to talk to their colleagues about things other than work, which in turn helps to build better and more solid relationships.

Building strong workplace relationships is vitally important. Statistics show that having a close friend in the office means an employee is seven times more likely to be engaged at work. They’re also likely to be healthier and produce higher-quality work.

Opened Planned Office

The days of having separate rooms for key members of staff is over for many organisations, as open plan offices expand more and more into our workplaces. Management is even being merged into the open planned office environment in many workplaces, which helps to make them more approachable and more in sync with their team. Doing this also helps management get a better understanding of the day to day needs and job tasks of their team.

By having all your staff working together in a single open room, communicating with each other becomes effortless. Having an open office where everyone can communicate freely also helps to generate team spirit, cooperation and promotes a good office culture.

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Remove Barriers and Partitions

Your staff will be more inclined to stick to themselves and avoid interaction if there’s a clear divide between themselves and their colleagues. Partitions and walled in cubicles are designed to help staff concentrate and to lessen any distractions from their work. While they may be effective in this way, these barriers can stifle teamwork and collaboration.

You can’t beat the convenience of being able to swing around in your chair to speak with a colleague you regularly work with face to face. By strategically laying out the desks within your office, you can easily create a space that has the perfect balance of openness and privacy.

Collaborative Workspaces

Having dedicated workspaces where staff can work collaboratively helps to strengthen meaningful relationships between employees which in turn makes them more likely to remain connected to their jobs. So not only will they work better, but having meaningful relationships at work also means your staff are more likely to remain in their job, thus boosting retention.

The collaborative space you create should be designed in a way to encourage your staff to work together either in a boardroom environment or a casual lounge room style meeting area, depending on the type of work you do. If possible, consider providing a variety of meeting spaces for your staff, giving them an opportunity to meet with each other in different environments to suit the type of conversation or work they need to collaborate on.

Creating a communication friendly space will ensure there is always a constant flow of conversation amongst your team. Whether it be brainstorming a new idea, sharing in each other’s successes and struggles or spreading knowledge amongst the team, having this space in your office will very quickly make a huge difference to the office culture in your workplace.

Create a Communication Friendly Workplace with Future Fitouts

Communication and teamwork should be a crucial workplace design consideration for your business. If this is something you’d like to incorporate into your fitout, give our team at Future Fitouts a call. As professional fitout project managers, we know all about how to design a space with impact to suit your specifications. Contact us today to find out more.