Unlocking Productivity: Designing Office Spaces for Success in Cape Town
The office environment can be a catalyst for productivity or cause progress to grind to a halt. Whether your premises churns out winning or losing results depends to a large extent on your office design and layout.
Spaces that feel welcoming, inclusive, and well designed – with the needs of modern employees in mind – will always produce better results than old-fashioned oppressive environments. This is especially true in the post-pandemic era when comfort and wellness have become cornerstones of successful living.
As a business owner in search of the perfect Cape Town office space, you may not have thought too much about your interior design, but there are good reasons why it’s worth considering. Let’s take a look at some of the design elements that you can use to create a highly productive office environment that employees will love coming to every day.
The link between design and high productivity
Going into the office every day should be a pleasure, but if this was the case at every company there wouldn’t be thousands of social media posts (and even entire TV shows) mocking the dysfunctional aspects of badly designed offices.
Fortunately, you can avoid turning your business into a place that employees endure from 9 to 5 and delight them instead by ensuring that your office layout is intuitive and enjoyable to be in.
Everyone works differently, and it’s not practical to create a private office for every single member of your staff.
However, you can go a long way to achieving the feeling of customisation and comfort by dividing your office space into productivity zones according to the types of tasks that are done in each one and the personalities of your team.
- The number of seats per zone as well as the division between different areas will determine how well your teams can work together and focus on their tasks, and how comfortable they’ll feel in the overall environment.
- It’s a good idea to divide teams and assign office space based on activities. Quiet tasks that require intense focus should be a little way off from high social energy jobs like sales so that teams can work together effectively and productively without disturbing one another.
Achieving these types of divisions with flexibility in the age of remote working requires an innovative approach to seat allocations.
Modern offices have started using data to track how many employees visit the office each day and which desks they choose to use.
For many companies, the days of an assigned seat are over. With technology being used to manage seat bookings, and the use of facilities like meeting rooms and breakout spaces becoming standard practice, a customised office user experience is the new goal to aim for.
How buildings in Cape Town have designed their way to a better office experience
The Mother City has undergone a major urban renewal in recent years. One of the great outcomes from a Cape Town office rental point of view is the variety of modern buildings available in the CBD, Century City, and the southern suburbs- to name just a few.
The Courtyard in Century City is a serene and ultra modern office development that features open design and natural lighting to put team members in the perfect frame of mind for productivity. Views of the tree lined paths surrounding the building create a sense of harmony and unity with nature for an enhanced sense of well-being.
The CBD’s flagship Portside building offers commanding views of the Atlantic Ocean from its wide windows, giving executives and teams alike a sense that anything is possible as they chart their winning strategies. The building’s modern glass exterior and interior spaces featuring stone, steel, and wood form a beautiful contrast that puts the mind at ease while still creating the perfect setting for creative productivity.
No matter where you decide to base your office in Cape Town, there are ways to enhance your environment for optimal productivity. Here are some design ideas that every business can benefit from.
Enhancing your work environment for “designer productivity”
Achieving an office design that boosts productivity and makes the office a place where everyone wants to spend their time is definitely attainable – and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune.
Smart planning is the keystone to success when it comes to an office layout. Here are some tips to get you started.
- Analyse your teams and their requirements. The first step in this process is to run a regular headcount and identify areas in the office that are extremely popular with certain teams or employee types.
- People tend to seat themselves spontaneously in comfortable areas if there’s no fixed seating. These natural preferences may be more desirable than trying to impose specific desks to team members in a certain part of the room.
- Flexible designs. Movable chairs and desks as well as office partitions are a great way to reconfigure your floor space instantly depending on your needs. The flexibility that these installations provide is unmatched when compared with a fixed office layout which can be extremely expensive to change.
- Monitor building use and gather feedback. Using smart office technology like access control data to monitor user activity in your office is a great way to passively observe your employees reactions to building layout changes. It’s also a good idea to gather feedback at the management level and through surveys and questionnaires to understand the motivations behind their seating preferences.
Find your ideal Cape Town office rental with us
If you’re keen to boost your productivity this year with a new office layout, we may have the ideal premises for you in our portfolio.
The Commercial Space team has decades of experience helping businesses to find the perfect office space in the Mother City. Contact us today to get started.
