How Your Workplace Environment Impacts Your Focus, Productivity & Joy - And How to Improve It

Episode 82: How Your Workplace Environment Impacts Your Focus, Productivity & Joy - And How to Improve It

In this episode, Holly Hibbard - Executive Leadership Coach & Corporate Relationship Consultant - shares with you...

• how the design and layout of your workspace can significantly impact your focus and productivity levels, enhancing overall work performance. (Enhancing Workplace Productivity)
• the psychological effects of different types of workspaces - whether remote or in-office - and how they can either motivate or drain your energy. (Psychology of Work Environment)
• strategies for personalizing your work area, cultivating a positive team culture, and implementing small changes that can lead to major boosts in motivation and job satisfaction. (Practical Tips for Improvement)

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Transcript

Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to The Holly Hibbard Show.
If you are new here, special warm welcome to you.
I am your host, Holly Hibbard.
Today, I'm going to chat at you about your workplace environment.
So whether you work in an office, you have colleagues that are near you, you're more or you're more isolated in that same office, or you work from home or a remote location, I wanna dive into with you how your workplace environment impacts your focus, productivity, and, wait for it, your joy and how to improve your environment.
I think these three things I just mentioned, your focus, productivity, and your joy, your level of contentment with your work, so often the component of your environment is overlooked.
It's something that people are more focused on.
Why are you not focusing and how can I make you focus better?
Or how can I help you focus better?
What is going on with your productivity if it takes a dip or your focus if it's not working out?
If your productiveness, your efficiency is just not there, people tend to focus on you, the person.
Or if there seems to be a lack of fulfillment or contentment with your work and your role, people might wonder, well, what is up with you that your level of joy is not where it could be?
Well, your environment, your surroundings, during your work hours plays a big part in this.
So in this episode, I wanted to, you know, do a little bit of a deep dig deep dive here with how your environment is going to structure your day or create chaos around you, both the structure and the chaos that you notice outright and more so the subtlety of what is happening or not happening around you that is a detriment to you.
So we'll be blending with this episode some workplace psychology, practical strategies because, you know, I'm a fan of taking action on it, and real world examples.
So let's get started with a little bit of an intro because maybe you've noticed that you've ever walked into a space and you have felt either energized by it or completely drained by it.
And I know that right now as my family is moving to our new home over the next month, I am back and forth between my current office space and my new office space that I am designing, and this is a question that I ask myself often as I'm deciding what that new space is going to be like.
Does my new space energize me or does it drain me?
And I also noticed some changes over a year ago when I moved from my previous apartment, prior to when my husband and I got married into the home now where we all are.
It's not just me, myself, and I, but there's this is a family home, a family life.
It's a very busy place.
So I have noticed over the last couple of years how that environment absolutely impacts my productivity, but also my focus and my creativity level, which as a person, as an executive coach and a and a corporate relationship consultant, I need to be able to pay attention to what my clients have to say, yes, but also my ability to generate ideas or come up with thought provoking solution generating questions to ask them, my environment has a lot to do with that.
And with this, if you've walked into a space and you feel drained, it's time for a change because that environment, again, plays a huge role in your focus, your productivity, and your level of fulfillment or joy.
This matters because your space is going to affect your ability also to stay motivated.
Maybe it impacts your ability to not only collaborate and be with other people, but can you do so effectively?
Because just because you have, let's say, a cubicle space next to the other members of your team, that doesn't necessarily mean that that space is designed for all of you to be together and communicate effectively and feel like you are one uniform, movement of people going toward the same result.
So inspiration comes from all of these things.
It's not just a vanity metric of what literally the office looks like around you.
And it isn't just about you and your willingness to focus and be more productive and get organized and stay scheduled.
So I'm going to cover in this episode how your environment impacts your work, the differences between, I've mentioned a little bit already, your shared office spaces versus a work from home situation.
Some of you who work from home and have a lot of peace and quiet during your work hours and some of you, like me, have a family situation that overlaps.
And I'll also work with you here on practical ways to enhance your workspace for peak productivity in your day to day and also joy, so that you like it.
Right?
Because I wanna make sure that we are improving upon, not just pointing out something that may be a detriment, but let's get some solutions in place.
Alright.
Your environment affects your productivity and your mindset.
Your brain, whether you know it or not, is constantly responding to your surroundings.
Your surroundings have what's called a visual clutter.
Visual clutter.
So this is everything from the noise level, presence of other people, the lighting, all of those things impact your energy levels.
And fun fact, when I was a relationship coach, I talked not just corporate relationship, but like dating and marriage and things like that.
I used to teach couples all the time about the hunter and the gatherer dynamic because people, typically men, have a hunter mentality where they can only they focus on one thing at a time.
It's a it's something that they are innately born with typically.
Right?
This is a gen a massive generalization.
And women, being the gatherers, are wired to have that visual clutter.
Or not even clutter, but the gatherers had to pay attention in prehistoric times to everything in their surroundings.
Every detail, the time of day, the lighting.
So as I'm mentioning these things about your environment, the amount of visual clutter, the noise, the lighting, the people around you, I want you to also think that the way you respond to those items may be very different than it is for your colleagues or your coworkers or the people that you cohabitate with.
And it may be because of differences between cavewoman and caveman, prehistoric DNA, right, as I described, or it could just be how much our brain focuses on those things.
So please know that it's not just because you notice things to a certain extent and it impacts you in your environment to a certain extent that it will equally have an impact on your colleagues.
It may not.
It may have more of an impact.
So generally, again, studies show that workplace design affects your focus, your stress levels, and your ability to remain engaged in the job that you are there to do.
So key factors that influence your performance are the physical space itself.
So I mentioned the lighting, but also things like the cleanliness of the space and the organization.
It doesn't need to be a pristine environment.
Right?
But I'm saying if you were to walk into an office space and you have 2 adjoining cubicles or offices and you poke your head into each one and one of them has a desk that is covered with stacks of papers and books and trinkets, and you just see so much.
It's hard to tell what's happening.
But then the next office you walk into, you can actually see the top of the desk.
It's not that the desk is empty, but it looks like there is some level of organization or practical flow of the items that are sitting there that probably support that person in staying on schedule, staying on task.
So organization does matter in how you function, but also in the way that others perceive your ability to produce and get stuff done.
The other impact that, other things that influence your performance in your environment, the social component of it.
Team dynamics, the energy also of those around you.
So if you are a person that works among colleagues and you all get along or for the most part, you get along and you enjoy each other company, that's a really positive team team dynamic.
And while that can be a good thing when it is time to collaborate, it also, if firm boundaries are not in place, can lend to people getting off task for the sake of socializing or for the sake of, taking on projects or doing projects out of order that simply just don't need to be done just yet because it's what they enjoy doing more so and with each other.
Also, I'm sure you all have had a colleague or a coworker or a boss in your life whose energy was awful.
This is also referred to as toxic energy.
These are people who they seem to come off as negative or downtrodden or frustrated.
Oh my goodness.
80, 85 percent of the time or more.
These are people who are seeing the glass half empty the majority of the time and tend to focus more on the problem and put their energy on talking about the problem, rehashing the problem, finding someone to blame for the problem.
Then they spend their energy or time on looking for a solution and finding a solution where one definitely exists, but maybe they just don't know about it yet.
So those types of dynamics can drive you and motivate you in your productivity, but they also can be a deterrent as well.
Even if you choose to distance yourself from toxic coworkers or people that you are around, it's really difficult to escape it altogether because those attitudes permeate the environment and there's, yeah, there's really no way to get around it and that's up to leadership, and the ownership and management to decide if that's the kind of, culture that they want to tolerate and be okay with.
We'll do another episode on that another time because I know that's so important.
Lastly, your mental and your emotional atmosphere, whether you feel you're under a lot of pressure, there's really high expectations that are either set by you or other people, your level of motivation, both intrinsically for yourself and extrinsically by incentives that are shown outside of you, those are gonna influence your performance.
Okay?
Now, if you wanna optimize your office workplace for productivity and collaboration, I have 3 tips for you to go ahead and do.
Number 1, to optimize your office workplace, minimize distractions without isolating yourself.
So little bit of a fine line here, but you can do this.
So an example would be to use noise cancelling headphones or play soft instrumental music into your headphones or if you have an office that's semi private to block out distractions in an open office.
I am a fan of, oh, my goodness.
YouTube has so many channels that are coffee shop, lofi, jazz music, and, a lot of them have productivity timers on them on YouTube channels.
So I'm a fan of those either in my headphones or not.
Even just working from home, I find that blocking out through my ears, in this case, sensory around me helps me to stay focused and minimize those distractions.
But in an office setting, you may not want to isolate yourself by going to a completely different office area or, you know, space in the office to work or you maybe don't wanna remove yourself entirely from the situation.
So there are ways to turn off some of your senses and that will help you to minimize your distractions, but still stay part of the team.
Also, you can set focus hours.
So focus hours are times where you limit your socializing, but you still stay available when needed.
So focus hours could look like setting 2 hours in your morning and 2 hours in your afternoon where you and everyone who has access to your calendar understands that those are the times that you do are choosing not to be interrupted wherever possible and that a boundary has been set very clearly on what would warrant somebody interrupting you during that time.
If somebody wants to chat with you about who's going to play in the Super Bowl, the focus hours is not the time to do it.
Right?
But if they have, received a phone call back from somebody and the person is holding on the line and waiting for an answer and they need that quick answer from you, then maybe that is something that absolutely they can interrupt your focus hour for.
So again, you'll stay available, but it will also help you to minimize distractions by placing a boundary with those outside of you and also putting it on your calendar, so you know this is my designated time to stay on top of things.
Thing number 2 that you can do to optimize your office workplace for productivity is improve your physical space for mental clarity.
So I just mentioned the 100 and the Gatherers a moment ago, the visual clutter, whatever.
Here are some ways to do this.
Keep your desk clutter free.
So for example, if you have pens and pencils and highlighters and whatever, just having a container that they all go in or better yet, a spot in a drawer that they go in, to store the things that you're not using at the moment, it makes a big difference on your ability to focus.
So having a place to store unnecessary papers, use organizers or a filing system, if you are not good at that, find your favorite co worker colleague type a personality friend and ask them to help you, because there are people like me who love doing this stuff.
We love it.
We enjoy it.
We get a kick out of creating filing systems.
Next, you want to adjust your lighting.
When I was a high school teacher and a middle school teacher, I had fluorescent lights and I taught science, so we did not have windows in my classroom.
And that felt pretty daunting day in and day out to not see any sunlight the entire day.
So when I had to, I would use the fluorescent lights.
Oftentimes, the fluorescent overhead lighting, I would turn half of them off and then I would have lamps around my classroom.
I actually just went to file some paperwork at our new, city town hall that we're moving to here a couple days ago, and this is exactly what they did in that office space.
Everybody had their own desk cubicle area, but they also had turned off half of the fluorescence overhead, and each person had their own set of lamps or preferred warmer lighting at their desk because it was less harsh on their eyes.
So warm lighting, natural light through windows is ideal, but if you're like me or you were like these people I saw in this office last week, warm lighting will really help.
Also, bring personal touches to your workspace.
So that could look like a photo.
It could look like plants.
It could simply be a small item that inspires you.
It doesn't have to look like Hobby Lobby and motivational signs everywhere.
Unless you love that, then absolutely use it.
But sometimes just having a little bit of nature, like a house plant on your desk can make a big difference, to create that mental clarity for you in your physical workspace.
And the 3rd tip for optimizing your office workplace is foster a positive team culture in the office.
Now this one is a little tricky because if you are someone who works from home, you might not feel like you have a team to collaborate with.
So in that case, it's up to you to find one either remotely.
This in the world of neurodivergence and ADHD is called body doubling, which means, let's say, I have those focus hours for 2 hours.
I go get my coworker and and through Zoom, through an email, we decide that these 2 hours, we're both going to sign in to Zoom or some other video system, and we are going to hold each other accountable by having our focus hours at the same time.
We're not gonna chitchat.
We're only doing our work, but it is like having somebody there.
So if you wanna take a 10 minute break, you 2 can work that out together.
If you are a solopreneur, someone that works entirely on your own, this is a great tip for the body doubling tip can work really well for you.
Using online communities, Facebook groups, school, s k o o l.
There's so many different ways, for you to go and find people who are just like you and would love to have a teammate.
Now for those of you that are in an office space with other people, having quick check ins for collaboration can be a really great way to ensure that everybody is on time and are not, like, with the time and focused, without feeling like we're micromanaging each other or checking up on each other.
So saying, alright.
Everybody, we're gonna go work on this and, let's grab a coffee at 10:30.
Alright.
Coffee at 10:30 will be our break.
Let's see how far we get from now until then.
And then it's everybody has an upcoming break which eases the mind a little bit because you know that there will be a time to pause and stop coming up pretty soon.
Another thing you can do to, foster that positive team culture is make an effort to engage with your coworkers in a positive way.
Now, I'm laughing a little bit at this because I want you to engage with your coworkers and talk to your coworkers and get to know them.
I am an introvert, believe it or not.
I rejuvenate my energy by time alone, but I am an outgoing introvert.
I like to connect with other people.
So when it comes to chitchat, I don't like being interrupted when I'm in the little focusing on something.
But if it is a set collaborative time, I enjoy a conversation.
And not only that, I enjoy real conversations where we can skip small talk, like, oh my gosh, do you believe how cold it is outside the day?
Or, you know, talking about whatever, weather, sport, whatever you choose.
Okay?
So don't feel like you only have to do small talk, and if you are a leader in these organizations, this is something that you can foster amongst the people in your company, which is ways to communicate and things to share about.
So, for example, at my husband's office, they have, you know, a TV monitor and, they had last summer, they had asked everybody in the office, a lot of people, to send in photos of them with their pet.
And then they had it on scroll, all summer long of the person who worked there, what their role was, and then their pet's name and a sentence or a fun fact about their pet.
And it was cute because I visited the office a couple times that summer, for meetings and whatnot.
And I'm like, oh, that's so sweet, because you get to see inside people's lives beyond the obvious.
Some people don't know how to have a conversation beyond small talk and maybe you do.
Offering people help is also a great way to do it.
Sometimes I ask people, what do you need?
Or how can I help?
And I make it a question.
What do you need?
How can I help?
Because otherwise, if I say something like, let me know if you need anything, most people will not let you know.
But if you ask them, what do you need?
Or what can I get for you?
Or how can I help you?
It's a question they can answer.
And if they don't know, they can say, I don't know, but thank you.
Lastly, for this, positive team culture, you get to pay attention to the energy that you bring to the space.
Your attitude is going to impact the space as much as the physical environment and the things that are on your desk or on the walls or the noise level in the office.
So really make sure to do your best to boost your emotional intelligence, become more mindful over time, become attentive to over time how you are showing up in your communication, in your body language, and how you handle your emotions or don't handle your emotions, because all those things together create the energy that you give off and radiate even on on days and moments where you're not even talking.
People feel it.
Okay?
So if you wanna optimize your space, work from home, situation, really similar.
Having a dedicated workspace is really important and then you do the same criteria that I just mentioned.
Make sure that you have a space that you're sitting, not only a separate space, but something that you can keep organized, tidy, that when you go into that space, it signals to your brain, I'm in work mode right now.
So listen, I like working from my couch every now and then, but I'll limit it.
I will limit that.
I really try to bring the professionalism to my work space in my home as much as possible.
Other things you can do from home is, again, set those boundaries to protect your focus.
Have a do not disturb sign or set working hours or focus hours and let the people you live with know what they are.
Don't make them guess.
Limit your distractions also by putting your phone in airplane mode or better yet, put your phone in another room during those deep focus or deep work sessions.
And you can enhance your environment for motivation when you're working on your own by keeping the space neat, like I said, adjusting your lighting.
If you haven't had a change up in your home office environment or decor or decor in a while, I highly recommend it.
Sometimes just adding new elements to your space like, a new scent or a vision board or motivational quote or something a little more comfy, a different chair to sit in, that can change your entire mindset and make you more productive and efficient.
And also when you work from home and if you work in the office, this is a good one as well.
To enhance your motivation, you wanna move your body every single hour.
Even if it's, a bathroom break, get up and stretch, walk down the hall, refill your water bottle, you know, or if you have a standing desk.
One, I'm jealous.
I will soon though.
I'm getting one soon.
Have a standing desk, use it.
Okay?
Or just find a place where you can set up a laptop and stand up while you're working.
It'll just keep your brain awake and remembering that you are on it right now.
So the emotional and mental energy of your space, again, you wanna make sure all of this feels supportive and not draining for you.
So if you feel like your space is blah or if you ask yourself, does your space help you focus or make you feel scattered?
If you're feeling scattered, it is time for a change because research shows that simply adding something like plants to your workspace can increase your productivity by 15%.
So all these little suggestions I've given you today, these are small tweaks that have a massive impact.
Don't think you have to do all of them at one time.
And remember, I know that not all of us had the same work environment, so not everyone's going to be able to do all of the things that I said.
But remember, the small changes will have a big result.
So take a small action, experiment with workspace changes, see how they affect your focus or your mood for a week.
And then you can always go back to what it was before if it's not working.
And if it is working, ask yourself again, what is one more thing I can do to make my work environment more inspiring.
Alright?
So that is your assignment until the next episode.
Remember that your environment shapes at how you work, how you feel, how you collaborate, or if you do at all, and give one of these adjustments to your workspace a try.
Let me know on the comments what thing you are going to change in your office this week and why.
Do you want it to motivate you, inspire you, help you focus, help you to get along better with the people around you?
Drop me a comment.
I can't wait to hear from you.
And, that's all I have for today.
So until next time, I will talk to you next time.