Collaborative workspaces come with a number of benefits that keep your workplace flowing smoothly. From increased productivity to the numerous advantages of group working, there’s a lot of good that can come out of creating collaborative workspaces in your business. That said, if your team doesn’t get on well, or people are prone to distraction, collaborative workspaces can quickly grate on employee morale.
Employee morale and wellbeing are closely connected to productivity. If an employee feels happier at work, they’re around 12% more productive, often increasing the speed with which they work and the quality of everything they create. Prioritizing employee happiness goes beyond just having a wellness scheme. Everything from team relationships to managing styles can impact employee morale.
In this article, we’ll turn to collaborative workspaces, discussing how they can influence employee morale and demonstrating how you can use these dynamic spaces to create a culture that boosts and sustains positive relationships between employees and their workspaces.
Let’s dive right in!
How Do Collaborative Workspaces Impact Employee Morale?
Collaborative workspaces are unique structures in an office where anyone can come together and work together. That doesn’t mean that these spaces are specifically for users that want to work on group projects. On the contrary, these workspaces can provide the perfect space for employees that simply want to get their work done while surrounded by others.
Distinguishing what sort of environment you want to create is an important first step to creating better collaborative spaces. For example, if your employees just want to get work done in a group, then they may end up getting distracted if other employees are coming to talk out loud and brainstorm for a project.
It can take over 23 minutes to recover from one small distraction at work, meaning your employees could rapidly become frustrated by these routine distractions. If your employees are routinely being distracted by others, then they could start to resent others in these shared spaces, creating a negative association with working in the office.
Alternatively, when used correctly, collaborative workspaces can foster the correct style of working for everyone, helping employees to engage with the work style that they prefer. According to Forbes, a happier employee could be as much as 20% more productive than an unhappy employee, with the space within which they are making all the difference.
Strategies to Use Collaborative Workspaces To Boost Employee Morale
Creating fantastic collaborative workspaces that boost employee morale, rather than hinder it, won’t happen overnight. While you can create a space based on best practices, it’s actually better to start with your employees and what they want. Once you know how people work and what they want to see in these spaces, you’ll be better equipt to deliver them.
Not every employee will have the same approach to work. Depending on personal satisfaction with the role, current pay, benefits, and life priorities, your employees will fall somewhere into the following graphic. While just under 30% of your team will be engaged, a much larger percentage of the workforce will fall into the middle section.
By focusing on improving collaborative workspaces, you’ll be able to boost employee morale and move your staff up into the blue category of productive workers. Let’s discuss three strategies you can use to boost morale by using collaborative workspaces.
Employee Feedback
The first step in creating collaborative workspaces that boost employee morale is discovering exactly what your employees are looking for. Send around some preliminary surveys that discuss what your employees would like to see in a collaborative space. Ask about how they would approach zoning the spaces, whether they want areas where people are free to talk and exchange ideas, or quieter zones for more focused work.
As your employees are going to be the people that actually experience these areas, they should be the ones that have a say about how the spaces actually look. Conducting surveys that include questions about working styles, expectations for these spaces, and how they want to work together with others will go a long way.
Collaborative Space Zoning
Once you’ve conducted your surveys and have a good idea of what your employees are expecting, you’re ready to design a collaborative workspace. Start with zoning up the space you have available depending on what your employees want. For example, if 50% of your employees want an open space for free communication, then make sure that half of your available space is made up of these collaborative and vocal spaces.
Adapt the space you have available to the needs and desires of your employees. Having a balance of these spaces available to you will ensure that people always have somewhere to work, no matter how they’re feeling.
Having spaces available that suit your employees for the tasks they want to conduct will mean that they always have available space, helping to boost morale in the workspace.
Separate Meeting Spaces
Another great way of facilitating deep work spaces within your collaborative workspaces is to use office work pods for meetings. Office phonebooths that accommodate either one, two, or several people will create a private meeting space for your employees.
Whenever you have a meeting, you’ll be able to go to these more private spaces to keep details confidential and your employees feeling satisfied. Equally, whenever anyone wants to shut themselves away from your collaborative spaces, they’ll be able to come into these office workbooths.
Final Thoughts
The average worker will spend well over 90,000 hours in their workspace over their careers. Luckily for the modern worker, as we discover more about the positive benefits of a happy workplace, businesses are investing in creating the best possible collaborative spaces for employees.
By focusing on creating flexible and dynamic collaborative spaces that support employees, you’ll be able to boost employee morale at work and lay the foundations for a productive office. Alongside inventive working structures and strategies, many businesses are turning to office pods by MEAVO.
Reach out to the team today to see exactly how our collaborative spaces can change the way your office works.