This post is also available in:
French
For the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about the benefits of smart spaces from the perspectives of both the employees and the owners. This week we’re going a little more personal. Ask yourself, have you ever experienced any of these issues in the office?
We talk about this a lot because it’s true, proper lighting is crucial in building a workspace. 68% of American workers complained about the lighting at their place of work. Clearly, this issue is a common one then, and it can have serious consequences.
Most of the time, the issue is either that the lights are too dim and fail to illuminate the room adequately, or they’re too harsh and overpower your eyes. In both cases, you strain your eyes while you try to focus on your work. Eye strain can cause headaches and be very discomforting, further interrupting your work. Not only that, but your eyes are a vital organ, and you should always try to take care of them. Having to strain your eyes for eight hours in poor lighting each day is not going to help, so that should be the first thing that you fix in your office.
LED lights that will completely illuminate your workspace are a good place to start. With the illumenai platform, you can customize the light temperature for each space. An office area may work better with soft lights, especially if they allow for natural lighting. A workshop can be assigned high intensity lighting to ensure that you can see exactly what you’re doing, and that you’re able to do it safely. But it doesn’t end here, there’s another issue caused by lighting…
Sleep! Your body follows its own internal clock known as the Circadian Rhythm. To put it in simple terms, this is how your body decides when you feel tired and should sleep, and when you should naturally wake up. The clock doesn’t work all on its own though, it requires external information to work. Temperature and lighting are the two main triggers.
How does this relate to office lighting? Well most lighting fixtures in offices are static, or do not change throughout the day. Yet sunlight is not fixed in place throughout the day, it’s dynamic and so light levels change as the day passes. With a smart system in control of the lights, we can mimic sunlight levels through the day. This method works quite well in maintaining your sleep cycle, and it will still provide proper lighting to the space.
But of course, lights aren’t the only issue in the office.
Offices can get very noisy. Even if there isn’t a particular noise annoying you, the cacophony of computer keys, idle chatter, and screeching printers can be a distraction. It all blends together into a singular noise, the song of the workplace. Unfortunately, the song is grating on the ear and keeps you from focusing on your work.
Instead of tuning out the noise like you would normally, how about replacing the bad noise with good noise? By generating white noise, a smart system can actively tune out the office noise for you. You’ve most likely heard white noise before, but that’s not the only kind of noise available. Pink noise, for example, is noise that uses more high frequencies. There’s also brown noise, which is very bassy and uses a lot of lower frequencies.
There’s also a few benefits to white noise, but we’ve covered them in our previous articles. Instead we would like to tell you about an experience from one of our employees with white noise from their time at university. When doing research for papers and preparing for projects, they would often get distracted. It took then a lot of time to focus in on their work, which led to stress over approaching deadlines. One day they were procrastinating on YouTube (as one does) and came across a white noise video. They found it so much easier to concentrate with the noise in the background, and now they still use it almost every day. Give it a try, we think you will be surprised by how much you like it.
Bad office design has bad effects on employee productivity, health and happiness. Lighting and noise in the space are also a big part of the design of an office, but we’re going to focus on the layout.
From a profit and efficiency driven perspective, the space needs to be filled so there is no wasted space. With people tracking and spatial analytics, you can do an educated redesign of your office space. This will help you to get the most out of the space you have, and could keep you in the same office space for longer, which would eliminate the high cost of relocation.
From the perspective of an employee, the space needs to be at least somewhat organized, and should be easy to travel through. If things are where they should be, then they will be easier to find when you need them. With a redesign and the asset tracking capabilities of the illumenai platform, you can ensure that your workplace is easy to get around in, and you’ll be able to find what you need in the office.
Do you have a burning question about smart spaces and what illumenai can offer to you? Please visit our website. We’ve got tons of details there, or you can contact us and start considering an upgrade to your office.
Remember, you can never be too informed, so why not give some of our other articles a read.
Comments are closed.