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Optimize Your Work Environment With These Simple Tips

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Your workforce

The efficiency of your workloads depends heavily on the speed of your workforce, and how good they are at their jobs. Having work done fast is one thing, but having quality is another. Often quality work is hard to guarantee if the employees are under a lot of stress on a daily basis, and it can often be hard to focus. In this case, it’s important to make sure you’ve created a much more stress-free environment for everyone to work in. Many factors can go into creating this calm environment; you just have to know the people who work for you if you want the best results. Firstly, bringing everyone closer can help out a lot if you want to raise the moods.

Teamwork is an essential part of any workforce, as it determines how well everyone can work with one another. If you assign jobs that have to be done in teams, the quality and rate that they’re done at will depend on how much they all trust one another. There are many occasions where you should organize team building activities to strengthen the bond, as not only can it bring a more relaxed environment, but it can inspire more productivity. It gives people a reason to value their jobs more, especially if they can get along with their colleagues.

Team building isn’t the only method, investing in other ways to encourage teamwork can also help over time. Products like onsight connect – Librestream can help not only to allow teams to work together, but also help with their efficiency. Having a medium for everyone to work at the same level while being able to actively assess and learn from one another is an extremely effective tool, and is sure to improve individual productivity.

Your workplace

Your workplace also has an impact on how well everyone can get through their work. It’s important to make sure there’s nothing around to distract people while they’re fulfilling their job. Usually, an effective method would involve not allowing the use of phones or other devices that may cause distractions. Even with the simplest of tasks, losing focus can be as easy as receiving a text. It’s not because of the importance of said text, but the lack of motivation to do their job.

When it comes to making your office a better environment, you should focus on creating something that’s not too dull. While it’s not distracting, dull can often be depressing and demotivating, which is never good for efficiency. Creating your optimal work environment should involve light coloring, possibly some music, and not too many decorations. You shouldn’t have anything that’s likely to catch the eye or attention of your employees, but you also need to make sure you’re sparking creativity. Hence the use of music; which relies heavily on the demographics of your workforce.

Creating the ideal workplace can be difficult, especially if you’re looking at a pretty diverse group of employees. With that said, making sure you’re making a relaxing environment is the best you can do, along with enforcing employee synergy. It’s effective if everyone can get along, else you might need to think about finding new employees who will. As harsh as that sounds, you have to make sacrifices if you’re looking for efficiency.

Why Does Elon Musk Insist On Bamboo Flooring In His Car Plants?

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Tesla hopes that by the end of next year, it’ll be churning out more than half a million cars a year, a significant uptick from the current rate of about 100,000. And where will all of those cars be inspected? On a bamboo floor right at the end of the factory’s production line.

Why you might ask, would Tesla CEO Elon Musk insist on a bamboo floor to inspect cars? What is so special about the flooring? As always, Musk has his reasons. He believes that if you’re going to inspect a product for quality, then whatever is framing that product must also be beautiful and flawless. Bamboo flooring is, by most accounts, stunning. And so by using this flooring, Musk hopes that it will emphasize any defects in cars coming off the production line. It’s almost like the cars themselves have to graduate from an art masterclass before they’re allowed out onto the streets.

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article
Photo courtesy of Maurizio Pesce via Wikimedia Commons

What can this level of attention to detail teach other businesses? Why does something as apparently insignificant as a bamboo inspection floor mean so much to people like Musk?

It all comes down to the environment. Musk doesn’t see the elements of his company in isolation. There’s not an executive, a board, a marketing team, a production team or any other arbitrary group. Instead, the whole business environment is a living, breathing entity – and like other entities, it’s affected by its environment. Can you emulate this approach to environment in your business?

Cleanliness

Factories are supposed to be dirty places full of oil, dirt, and dust. But to talk a walk in Musk’s Fremont plant in California is to enter what seems like a clean room that just so happens to be making cars. Musk says that working environments need to be perfectly clean to ensure that no compromises are made on the product. A clean environment is an environment which employees unconsciously respect, whereas, in a dirty environment, they are more likely to make careless errors and accept second best.

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article
Photo courtesy of Maurizio Pesce via Wikimedia Commons

This is why professional commercial floor cleaning is such big business in offices up and down the land. Bosses realize that in order to get the best out of their team, they need to work in a spotless environment.

Stunning Lighting

Musk’s car factory is one of the largest buildings in the world by footprint. But despite that, it’s also one of the brightest. When the factory was first bought, it was a dark and dingy place. But since moving in, it’s become light and airy, thanks to the installation of hundreds of skylights and LED ceiling lamps.

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Article
Photo courtesy of Bill in SF via Wikimedia Commons

Why is this important? Well, it turns out that employees who are exposed to natural light are more productive than those who aren’t. If natural light isn’t possible in your offices for any reason, try supplementing it with naturally-coloured artificial lighting instead.

Allow Desk Customisation

Finally, allow desk customization. Research shows that employees who are able to make their desks a little more homely work harder and longer than those that aren’t.

The Apollo Attitude – When Failure is Not an Option

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It’s hard to beat the movie Apollo 13 for drama. Over 200,000 miles from Earth, in the vacuum of space, an explosion disabled a space capsule on its way to the Moon.

The mission was over. And it would have been reasonable to assume the astronauts’ lives were over, too. Yet three days later, the astronauts were standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Then there was the three-masted sailing ship Endurance, which left England in August 1914 under the command of Ernest Shackleton with twenty-eight men determined to cross Antarctica by sled.

The Endurance ended up trapped and crushed to splinters by ice floes. The men lived on the Antarctic ice for another two years.

Total survivors out of the original twenty-eight men? Twenty-eight.

What if you approached every challenge in your life and in your work as if you simply HAD to overcome it? I’ll tell you what – you would do it. You would find a way, and you would get it done.

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About the Author

Roxanne Emmerich’s Thank God It’s Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon bestseller. Roxanne is renowned for her ability to transform “ho-hum” workplaces into dynamic, results-oriented, “bring-it-on” cultures in a day. Listen to the free 60-second audio with teammates each Monday to clean up the craziness in your workplace and focus on getting massive results. Sign up today at www.ThankGoditsMonday.com.

The Ten Commandments of Workplace Motivation

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Unmotivated employees have rightly been called “the black holes of the business universe.” Fortunately, motivation is not something a person is born with or without. Applying these Ten Commandments can go a long way to helping existing employees find their motivation.

1. Commit with all thy heart so others might follow
Before you ask your employees to commit, you must be fully committed yourself. Throw your heart over the bar, make that complete commitment, and others will follow.

2. Call it tight on dysfunctional behaviors
Declare a zero-tolerance policy for dysfunctional behaviors. People saying one thing and meaning another, giving lip service, gossiping, backstabbing… Enlist a company-wide commitment to stop every one of these.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

Roxanne Emmerich’s Thank God It’s Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon bestseller. Roxanne is renowned for her ability to transform “ho-hum” workplaces into dynamic, results-oriented, “bring-it-on” cultures in a day. Listen to the free 60-second audio with teammates each Monday to clean up the craziness in your workplace and focus on getting massive results. Sign up today at www.ThankGoditsMonday.com.

Seven Secrets of a “Thank God It’s Monday” Workplace

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What accounts for the difference between “Oh Crap It’s Monday” and “Thank God It’s Monday”? It all boils down to seven habits that can change everything about the culture of your workplace:

1. Go beyond the job description
People aren’t hired because they can do the job. Most of those who DIDN’T get the job could have fulfilled the job description. People are hired because they demonstrate the ability to see what isn’t there but should be, and to make it happen. THAT’S job security. Saying “Nobody told me” or “It’s not in my job description” is a first class ticket to harmonize with the rest of the choir singing the same sad song in the unemployment line. Instead, if you see something that needs to get done, step up and make it happen! Think like a leader. Leadership is not a position – it’s a way of being.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

Roxanne Emmerich’s Thank God It’s Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon bestseller. Roxanne is renowned for her ability to transform “ho-hum” workplaces into dynamic, results-oriented, “bring-it-on” cultures in a day. Listen to the free 60-second audio with teammates each Monday to clean up the craziness in your workplace and focus on getting massive results. Sign up today at www.ThankGoditsMonday.com.