Rules to Better Offices

When the noise in an open plan office goes beyond appropriate levels, it can be annoying and stressful and thereby affects productivity. Here are a few tips to help reduce noise in your workplace.

1. Use headphones🎧, as per Do you use a headset?
2. Use a reasonable voice level or soft voice.
3. During the conversation, type the important points in to your Teams/private chat box to avoid unnecessary repetition and, at the same time, have those points written not just spoken. As per: Do you know you should write notes when an activity is going?
4. Should you anticipate a long call, move into a private room or booth if you can.
5. Ping very loud people politely/nicely, e.g., “Hey XXX, could you please use headphones?”.
6. Close your booth/pod door (if you have one) while you’re in calls.
7. If you are in a Teams meeting and someone enters the room, it's important to notify the meeting participants of their arrival.

• For example: "By the way team, Jack has now entered the boardroom".
• If that person forgets, tap the table to remind them to introduce you.

✅ Figure: Good Example - A quiet workspace, with headphones used for calls

Your body in an amazing machine. It constantly improves itself to get better at whatever you do most. Unfortunately for most of us, the thing we do most with our bodies is sit.

This causes your core to weaken as its no longer needed to hold you upright, and also causes your hip flexors to shorten, as your legs are always pushed out in front of you at about 90 degrees.

In today's fast-paced work environment, it's crucial to have an efficient and organized workspace. Offices can be busy environments, and it is important to have desks available for employees to start working quickly. They shouldn't need to spend time finding cables and adapters to connect their laptop to external displays and other peripherals.

To avoid this hassle and boost productivity, each desk should have a dock setup so employees can connect with a single cable. This also helps maintain a cleaner workspace and improves cable management.

Studies have shown that you can get up to a 30% increase in productivity by using more than one monitor when you work.

The way you and all members of your team present themselves is a crucial part of creating a good impression for your clients, particularly in their first encounters with you.

Manual light switches create friction. Someone has to remember which rooms need bright light, mood light, or darkness. Worse, the last person out might forget to turn everything off, so the office burns energy all night.

Do you know who is entering your premises, when, and how? Keys or key-cards can be expensive, they can be lost, and people can loan them to one another without any restriction.

Keys, we all have them. A key for the front door, a key for the garage, a key to the letterbox, and keys to your office… the list is often endless! How much time do you waste finding the correct key?

When it comes to creating custom designs or templates for office purposes, using a dedicated designer application can greatly enhance the quality and professionalism of your designs. While there are various designer applications available, it's important to choose the right one that aligns with your needs and skill level.

Did you know at SSW we always bring water to guests? 🥤💧

• No questions as everyone drinks water…
• And no offers of coffee as it could be a hassle…

When making an online purchase using the company account, remember to include your name in the postal details so that the item is correctly identified and given to you. Having it sent to the company unidentified or under the boss's name can lead to confusion and the package may end up in limbo.

It's important that staff feel appreciated, expand their horizons, and also that they celebrate each others' successes. A great way to do all of these is to give them an additional day of Annual Leave each year, and encourage them to use it to do something remarkable.

When a company has many different office locations, often people in one office aren't familiar with people in other offices due to a lack of interaction. This problem is particularly pronounced where you have offices that span multiple time zones or countries.

Software can't be built by a single developer anymore, there is always a team involved. Often, those teams consist of people in different geographies. Therefore, it's a social enterprise, and it's essential that teams made of people in different geographical locations can bond and work well together. These multinational teams must communicate and empathize with stakeholders from different cultural backgrounds.