What to Consider When Designing Your Business Location for Employee Well-Being

Your business is compliant with the building codes in Ontario and you've installed everything you need to in order to comply with AODA regulations. Your building is safe, accessible and built to code. Awesome! But guess what? When it comes to your employees health and well-being, code compliance is not enough.

Why is it important to design for employee well-being? First off, designing for well-being is just good ethics. It's also good business too, especially when you think of interior design as a strategic business decision. When your business is focused on employee health, you'll experience increased workplace productivity and creativity in your staff, improved customer experiences, decreases in employees absences, and an improvement in staff turnover.

Now that you understand why it's important, let's talk about to implement it. Your business could be an office, a retail shop, a garage, a sales office, a lunch room, a gym, a waiting room, or a warehouse. It could be an industrial facility, a healthcare facility or a restaurant. Every business is different and every location has it's pros and cons. So how do you adjust for your unique situation?

First, you have to get clear on the purpose of the space. Designing the CEO's office is going to being different than designing a bathroom or a lunch room.

Then you need to understand mental health needs from an employee's perspective - connection to nature, connection to people, having a sense of purpose, being treated with dignity and respect, good nutrition, physical safety and security. These are universal and can be solved in any workplace regardless of what industry you're in.

When we're designing commercial projects, we're looking at the best ways to do that within that particular space. Our primary focus is on the people who work in the space every single day. so we look at traffic flow in different areas of the building, efficient use of space, ergonomics, lighting and electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) that could be impacting how people think, create and work.

Some of the other things to consider when designing your business for well-being are:

• colour choices for different spaces, knowing how different colours and tones affect mood
• textures and how they impact the way a space feels
• the position of the desks and workstations so everyone is set up for maximum productivity
• connection to nature, either through the way the windows are positioned, or by bringing in plants and greenery into the space

Here's a quick 60 second challenge for you. Take a look around your physical business location and see if you can identify what's going on in there that could be impacting your employees' health and well-being. Look at the layout, the lighting, the efficiency and flow of day to day work, as well as the look and feel of the space. Do these things make your space feel like a great place to be in every day? Do they foster a strong company culture, a sense of belonging for everyone? How do these things impact your own physical and mental well-being?

Our goal at Mindful Living Interiors is always going to be about designing spaces that improve the health and well-being of everyone living and working in them. Think about your own business and how your space could be impacting your employees and when you're ready to set your business up to support everyone in it, we're here to help.