Office Equipment Tips: How Individual Should it Be?
First, the bare figures: Of the workers who work in an office in developed countries, only about a third inhabit a single office. Significantly more employees (25 percent) share their office with another colleague and the majority of around 40 percent work in a multi-person or open-plan office.
One would think that it is relatively uniform: uniform sizes, unitary furniture, ideas of unity, but it’s far from it! An American study by researchers from Eastern Kentucky University found that nearly 90 percent of workers personalize their offices through family photos, books, coffee cups, and other personal belongings.
This usually has two simple reasons:
Coziness
For many, the decor is primarily intended as extra comfort. Surrounded by familiar things, workers feel a bit more at home and therefore more comfortable. The desire for individual furnishing and decoration of the workplace is consequently also a desire to feel at home in the office.
Makes
Personal objects document claim and reputation – consciously or unconsciously. Diligence, loyalty, creativity, organizational talent, success – all these are abstract and generally difficult to measure quantities. The size of the desk or monitor, the height of the chair back or the pictures on the wall – they not only reveal a lot about the office occupant. They are also an expression of one’s own (perceived) status as stated by office furniture liquidators Houston.
Anyone who finds these silly judges prematurely. For a long time, scientific studies have indicated that this personal design of office furniture also makes economic sense or however:
Individual Offices Make You More Productive
Anyone who is allowed to customize their workplace can work up to 30 percent more efficiently than their colleagues, who have to work in modern, but unified offices.
This was the finding of scientists from Chung-Ang University in Seoul when they surveyed about 400 office workers in American companies. They found a strong positive relationship between the level of autonomy that the workforce had in customizing their offices and the degree of productivity.
The favorable freedoms included both the option to arrange their own office furniture and to change the appearance of the four walls altogether.
In turn, research by author Eric Sundström concludes that employees who have an individually designed workplace take on more responsibility at work.
