Work Rest Replenish Perform
The importance of break out areas in the workplace and how to best design these to meet our human needs of connecting with nature.
1 minute read
19th July, 2018 | Remarcable
Highly productive people do not work longer hours, they have no magic skills they merely know that to be on top form they need to take a break periodically to refresh. In fact thought leaders recommend that every 52 minutes you should take a 17 minute break to work effectively.
Providing your team with a well designed breakout space is essential to improve their productivity and wellbeing. Design considerations such as no clear line of sight to their desks, a subtle change in floor texture to make a subconscious differentiation all help with creating the perfect breakout atmosphere.
Your team most likely spend most of their working day in hard built up urban environments, they look out of the window & see brickwork, concrete they walk to work on tarmac pavements, travel to work in metal tubes. This is why your team's breakout space needs to be different, to use plants and natural elements with colours that contrast to the rest of your office to form an oasis of sorts. What do we do in our spare time to refresh ourselves? We escape to the country to nature, the fact our green areas are full of people whenever the sun comes out is testament to this.
To truly understand our customers we send pre-design questionnaires to all of our clients teams which include the question What do you need in your space to work effectively & what are you missing? the answers vary from kitten rooms to swimming pool bars but their function is universal. A better space to take a break, to replenish. Great leaders know that the well designed break out space is not the magic solution but merely a cog in the complex machinery of the happy engaged productive team. But that it is an essential, valuable cog & an underused asset in increasing their teams wellbeing, productivity and ultimately company profits. We would love to know your thoughts on this.