One thing is true of all real estate….once it is put in place and moved into, it’s really hard to change it. Taking a 5 year lease on space in a building for your business is typical, making material changes once you are in it is not.
However, continuous improvement is critical to maintaining your business’s edge and keeping your workforce sharp. Thing about the little things that you can do over time to keep things fresh inside the four walls of the office:
- Change the mood by adding hallway lights. Keep adding new lights to brighten up the place every now and then. As a bonus, most employees will be stimulated by trying to figure out what changed.
- Move people around. Sure, it’s not the easiest thing to do, but changing spots in a building keeps things fresh and brings people together that may not have had the chance before.
- Refresh the lobby, main conference rooms and breakrooms. Making the employee sanctuaries nicer (or just different) gives them something different from the day to day. Even if it’s just fresh paint or furniture.
- If your wireless isn’t effective everywhere in the building, upgrade it already. From phones to tablets to laptops, employees can work anywhere. Give them the ability to pickup and go somewhere else if that’s what gets their creative juices going.
On the point about moving people around: You say it’s not easy, and I would imagine a lot of that is inertia from the employees themselves. I mean, who wants to completely move offices/cubicles every few months? On the other hand, there probably are a fair portion of your workforce who would like to move. So is this something where you would take a survey, or just regularly ask if anyone wants to move and try to move only those people? Or would it be more autocratic than that?
It’s not something the should be done to an employee every few months, but more every year and a half or so. Look to the different departments and move groups of 4 to 8 people around near other groups that they may have synergies with. The trouble with letting people choose when they want to move is that it won’t usually align with business plans.