Improving Productivity Through Workplace Design
If there’s anything you’ve ever learned from Ray Kroc, it’s that there’s always room for improvement in efficiency. The way that your office works and the way that you design your office around efficiency. Workspaces on improvements are always required to increase productivity. The reason these are really important is because you want to be the person that brings out the new McDonald’s and I know that sounds corny, but ultimately when it comes down to it, if you’re running an inefficient design, you’re not going to be doing things anywhere near as quickly as you can. If you have to walk 10 steps to the printer instead of two steps to the printer or go up a flight of stairs to pick up a piece of paper and there are multiple problems with what I just said there. Why are you using paper? But unless you’re trying to get your steps up and you’re trying to be more efficient by exercising at work, you shouldn’t be traveling that far and it comes to all different aspects of the way that you set up your office.
Setting Up Your Office
We have our office set up in a reasonably efficient design. We do still have a printer and we go through about one ream of paper every decade. We’ve actually, not even kidding, we had our ream of paper that we loaded the print up when we first bought the printer in 2007. Office design is really important and automation is really important, and anyone that knows me knows that I ramble on about that for hours and hours because it is incredibly passionate to me, and a very, very strong subject. But making sure that you’ve got an efficient design in your office will mean that work gets done more efficiently and more effectively. That means that you can either have an increase in productivity or you can have a little bit more downtime for your staff for fun Friday drinks and things like that.
Reading Up
If you’re ever looking at ways to grow your business. The E-Myth is a fantastic way by Michael E. Gerber. It’s one of the first books that I read when I got into the business and it does describe a few of those different roles that you play in your business and how they work to increase your productivity. This can be used to increase the way that you do design your office, making sure that there is a balance of colour, of a balance of fun things to do. You want to make sure that when you go into an office it’s inviting, you don’t want to leave, you want to have it so like it’s the Google office when someone rocks up there, they’re so happy being at work, they have no interest going home. That’s up to you if you want to set up pods and have people sleep in your office or not, but you want to make sure it’s fun.
Install Some Fun Activities
A lot of the different environments that I’ve seen and I’ve gone in and helped out with have ping pong tables, pool tables, bar taps, all sorts of things. Myself, we swap between running from a small serviced office in Brisbane and the rest of the time we run out of the house and that’s because it’s a better, more cost-effective method. It’s more efficient. It’s in the design with the way that we’ve set our business up. So that I can go traveling for six months of the year if I want to and I can also make sure that I’m not combating traffic and putting out all that pollution. But from the home office, we have a putt-putt course and all that fun jazz, so we always had fun times to be able to relax and unwind and that in itself increases productivity.
Focus on Quality over Quantity
Anyone that’s ever done research on the Tomato Time will know how much more efficient you are having a 25 minute on, five minutes off schedule, and being able to really lock yourself in the zone. If you’re not sure of how efficient you are, how efficient you can become, it’s a really sensible idea to check out and get an IT audit to see how efficient your systems are. When it comes down to it, IT wasn’t the backbone of the industry 30 years ago, but nowadays it’s as important as electricity. No business runs without Because it has there and it’s sitting there doing its thing and every business has kind of been twisted into requiring its use. Most businesses don’t spend enough money or time on making sure they’ve got efficiently designed systems to make sure that they’re able to do the work they need to do. When I say systems, I’m not just talking about the hardware, I’m not just talking about the Cloud application, I’m talking about the way the users are using them. Sometimes people use the system’s wrong for years on end and that has no advantage to anyone. So yeah, let us know if you can, we can jump in and give you guys an IT audit and make your business more efficient.
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The Final Word
If we can’t find $2,000 worth of ways to make your business efficient, I’ll give you $2,000 ever and wins. If you’ve enjoyed this, jump across to iTunes and leave us some feedback and I’d love to hear how you’ve made your business more efficient and different tips that you could help us out with to spread the knowledge. Stay good.
