Three Quality of Lifehacks for a Healthier & More Productive Workspace

By: Quality of Lifehacks
May 17, 2017 3:00 PM ET

Three Quality of Lifehacks for a Healthier & More Productive Workspace

If you work in an office building, how do you feel about your workspace? Do you find your workspace, whether it’s a cubicle, open workspace, or private office, to be cramped, dimly lit, or poorly ventilated? If so, research shows that this can impact your happiness, health and productivity.

With this in mind, here are three hacks to help improve your workspace:

1: Enhance your lighting – Employees rank lighting as an important factor that impacts their performance. Research has found that employees can perform better with higher illumination. So, if you find your workspace to be dimly lit, consider bringing in a small lamp to help better illuminate your workspace.

2: Bring in a personal fan/heater – Air quality and thermal comfort can greatly impact employee performance, satisfaction and well-being. In fact, the effect of indoor temperature has been shown to have close to a 40 percent impact on employee performance. Traditionally, office temperature is kept between 70 to 73 degrees for employee comfort.  However, everyone is different. So, if your workspace does not have a comfortable temperature and you do not have the ability to adjust the office thermostat, bring in a personal fan or heater (if allowed) to help manage the temperature of your workspace.

3: Use headphones – Noise is one of the leading causes of employees’ distraction. Further, one study showed that distractions could cut employee productivity as much as 40 percent and increased errors by 27 percent. To that end, if noise and distraction impact your work, consider using noise-cancelling headphones to cutback on noise and improve your concentration.

These are just a few tips to help improve your workspace. Other tips include bringing in plants, changing the color of your workspace, and using multiple monitors. Share in the comments section below your tips to create a healthier and more productive workspace.