The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction, or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

While customer happiness is key to a successful business, the secret to a happy customer may be a happy employee. A 2019 Glassdoor study found that an increase in employees’ ratings of their experience working at a company corresponded with an even bigger increase in customer satisfaction. This trend was especially clear in industries where employees interact with customers.

Employee happiness is also associated with productivity. According to Gallup, employee burnout can lead to $322 billion in turnover and lost productivity costs. Hence, it’s crucial to take care of your employees.

One major aspect that can contribute to worker happiness is a sense of well-being in one’s workspace. The design of an office—from air quality and lighting to fitness opportunities and comfortable chairs—has a big impact on how employees rate their overall happiness with a company.

Include natural lighting

Employees who work in naturally lit office environments reported 63 percent fewer headaches, 56 percent less drowsiness, and 51 percent less eyestrain, according to a 2017 Cornell study. It’s not always possible to add a skylight or more windows to the office, but there are small steps you can take on almost any budget.

If your office environment already has windows, remove nearby furniture, thick curtains, or other items that may be blocking the light.

If you’re short on windows, invest in full-spectrum lighting. Full-spectrum lighting mimics the light spectrum of natural light. Have fluorescent lighting? Consider purchasing fluorescent light covers, which change fluorescent or LED lighting into natural light.

Improve air quality

Many new and renovated buildings have poor air quality. Breathing poor-quality air for eight hours a day influences your employees. It can result in sick days, allergies, and lower cognition. When air quality is improved, the cognitive functioning of adults can increase significantly, according to a 2021 Harvard University study.

One affordable way to increase air quality at home or at the shared office is to offer HEPA air purifiers for employees. Air purifiers remove bacteria and germs from the air, leading to healthier and happy employees. Want more information on air purifiers?

Create outdoor workspaces

If your office building has access to a rooftop garden or outdoor space, use it! Encourage employees to have meetings outdoors, congregate outdoors, or just take breaks outdoors. Not only does it help break up the day, access to nature is also linked to reduced anxiety, according to a 2021 study.

If your office doesn’t have access to nature onsite, think about whether your work model allows your employees flexibility in where they work. Can they work in their own garden or a nearby park? Can you build in breaks in your employees’ days, so they have time to step outside for a breath of fresh air or a quick walk?

Create indoor natural spaces

If you can’t create an outdoor patio or rooftop garden, consider bringing the outdoors in. Studies have found increased happiness and productivity when natural elements are brought indoors. Natural elements can be as simple as adding potted plants to the office. Or, go bigger with living walls, indoor water features, or even a fish tank.

Encourage exercise on the job

It’s tough to sit at a desk all day. Researchers have linked sedentary behavior with stress, anxiety, and depression. On the flip side, active employees may be more productive and in a better mood.

Exercise can be incorporated into the workday in a few different ways. Offer employees under-desk exercise equipment, like under-desk treadmills, ellipticals, or bikes. Or raise the bar even higher, and offer weekly yoga, meditation, or other wellness classes in the office or through virtual platforms.

Make your employees comfortable

Outdated chairs, desks that don’t adjust, clunky keyboards—any of these can lead to employee discomfort, strain, and loss of productivity. Investing in ergonomic furniture keeps employees more alert, engaged, and productive.

One ergonomic option that has been linked directly to health and productivity at work is active workstations, such as standing, cycling, or treadmill workstations. Research shows that each of these types of workstations has different benefits, including decreasing boredom and improvement in simple processing tasks.

Employee wellness is key to a happy customer. These design tips can help improve not only the quality of your employee work experience but the quality of your customer experience as well.

Portions of this article originally appeared on the Quill website.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction, or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

Organizations grappling with the future of work need to reimagine how they design, plan, and manage space. One place they can turn for unique insights on this is the experience of colleges and universities. The reason is simple: employees’ relationship with the physical workplace is starting to look more like students’ relationship with a campus in important ways related to the role of shared spaces for working and meeting.

What lessons can offices take from higher education?

Colleges and universities don’t always get space right, but their successes and challenges provide useful insight for organizations looking to learn. The factors to consider for effective office design are varied — the quality and quantity of spaces, scheduling, research and analytics, and worker flexibility — yet all important.

Below are questions and observations about these factors to help guide the design, planning, and management of office and coworking spaces.

Scheduling 

• What will your policies and procedures be for booking space?
• What will the split be between first-come, first-served spaces versus reservable spaces?
• What mix of centrally available versus restricted spaces will you offer? The fewer restricted spaces there are, the more efficient your space utilization will be.
• For spaces that are drop-in, will there be any effort to make vacancy information available in real-time?
• Will scheduling be done centrally, self-service, or from some middle ground — e.g., a department can have one or two workers with authority to book spaces.
• By whom or what system will workflow and approvals be managed? Who will handle complaints? They’ll roll in, don’t worry!

Research and analytics 

• How will you measure supply versus demand? Will you resort to anecdotes and random observations? This has taken on added importance as the function of physical space is being reinvented.
• Are you measuring usage patterns of existing spaces or researching the kinds of spaces that would best support organizational effectiveness? Are you gathering feedback from the right individuals?
• Space that gets reserved is easier to assess than first-come, first-served space if the reservation system collects and organizes the data in a usable way. Reservation data aren’t perfect, but you might be surprised at the fascinating data dashboards that can be created from them.

Quality and Quantity of Facilities 

• Do you have an enterprise-wide workspace strategy or a more scattershot approach? Higher education flirts with an enterprise-wide approach at times. A formal and holistic approach is more likely to occur in concert with campus master planning, space utilization studies, or capital planning, as institutional leaders work with outside consultants to gauge usage patterns and plan for future needs. Outside of the planning process, siloes often re-emerge. The library pays attention to the library, staff in charge of student centers gauge those spaces, etc. If a campus has bridge-builders or systems thinkers that are allowed to have influence, then facility management has a better chance of being integrative. Part of the issue is higher education’s decentralized admin structure. Be careful of similar forces in your workplace.
• How will you balance convenience versus efficiency? Would you rather have a bit too much space or a higher risk of users not finding space? When is the cost of redundant space in multiple locations worth the reduced travel? What are your utilization targets?
• What is your plan for flexing your space supply in the short and medium term? Higher education makes heavy use of long hours, such as all-night study during exams. This doesn’t seem plausible in most other sectors. Higher ed. also pulls other spaces into service, such as dining halls, during demand spikes. On campuses, students can squat in classrooms which — even if it’s not a formal strategy — is clearly a popular one. When it’s nice out, outdoor spaces also absorb demand. Flexible furniture is another way to adjust your supply of rooms.
• If your spaces become more transient and public, have you considered safety and security measures, in terms of facility design and usage as well as awareness campaigns?

User flexibility  

Worker (or student) flexibility is an important piece of the facility puzzle. That is not a euphemism for having workers deal with the inconvenience. The sources of flexibility, in addition to individual adaptiveness, include the inherent flexibility of one’s job tasks and organizational policy regarding timing and location of work.

• Do you know your employees’ flexibility, can you increase their flexibility, and can you capitalize on their flexibility? Higher education yields one crystal clear lesson: While students have time constraints such as classes, outside work, and caregiving, otherwise they have extreme amounts of flexibility in when, where, and how they work. Professors have little concern with when or where homework and outside-of-class projects get done. This considerably eases the demand for shared space in every way. Projects that require highly specialized facilities are one exception, but that’s the exception that proves the rule in that the required physical presence is highly intentional. One factor that permits such distributed decision-making is that student academic work involves a variety of tasks, including reading, studying, and taking notes. If there are constraints that require students to be on campus at certain times – perhaps due to a short break between classes – they can choose the task that aligns with the physical conditions, they will inhabit.
• Do your team members need personalized spaces? Students generally do not. No framed pictures. No knickknacks. They travel light and use laptops and cloud storage. In the olden days, it was USB drives. Computing centers were part of the shared space mix previously but much less so at this point.

Portions of this article originally appeared on the Work Design Magazine website.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

Brainstorming has gained a foothold across a wide array of disciplines, industries, and work setups. However, many people have a limited view of the process, not realizing there’s more than one way to do it.

Broadly, brainstorming tasks an individual, or more commonly a group, with working toward a conclusion or solution for a problem by tossing different ideas into the ring. More succinctly, brainstorming is a creative idea-generating process.

Curious to learn how to elevate your next brainstorming session? Continue reading to discover the origins of this idea-generating method, plus techniques on how to lead or participate in a brainstorming session.

The benefits of brainstorming

The advantages of brainstorming go beyond just finding a solution to a problem. Structured yet spontaneous group collaboration can benefit workers in a variety of ways.

• It inspires creativity. Brainstorming can spark creativity when team members riff on and help shape each other’s ideas. In fact, research suggests that when two not-so-creative individuals work together on a creative problem, their cooperation with one another enhances creative performance.
• It can be used as a teaching-learning tool. Research shows that brainstorming is effective teaching—and learning—tool. Participants in one study found that brainstorming was a helpful technique for postgraduate medical biochemistry students to understand new concepts, even combatting the “drawbacks of traditional teaching.” 
• It fosters team building. According to a 2017 study, team members report higher levels of satisfaction not just in the act of brainstorming itself, but in the convergence stage (when they narrow down many ideas to a handful of the best ones).
• It provides a judgment-free environment for idea generation. Research suggests brainstorming session ideas tend to improve once everyone gets warmed up. Plus, working as a team can help employees feel more secure, supported, and willing to take more risks. 

Helpful guidelines for successful brainstorming sessions

One of the keys to an effective brainstorming session is to get everyone involved. But there are plenty of other components that contribute to great idea generation as well.

Before you host your next ideation session, take note of these helpful suggestions.

• Send out the problem(s) and expectations beforehand. Before you meet, consider sending everyone a brief description of the problem they’ll be brainstorming solutions for. On that same note, you can also prep everyone for a productive session by refreshing them on the goals of the brainstorming, plus the type of brainstorming the meeting will entail.
• Bring together a diverse group. We all have different perspectives and lived experiences. So why not take advantage of varying viewpoints and backgrounds? As dictated by your end goal, that can mean assembling individuals of differing ages, genders, or nationalities. Or, depending on what you brainstorm, it may be a good idea to invite colleagues from different departments, too. Once you have your team assembled, remind everyone to remain open to different experiences and ideas.
• Give people time to develop ideas alone. Some people prefer when they get to ideate on their own first. By making space for individual and group ideation, you can help participants focus, flesh out several completely different trains of thought, and benefit from getting all hands-on deck once you come together as a group to build on the initial ideas.
• Provide a place to draw or sketch. If you conduct an in-person brainstorming session, you may want to use a communal smartboard or dry-erase board so team members can sketch out ideas and have the flexibility to erase them. Alternatively, you can take a more old-school approach with a large easel pad.
• Allow everyone to chime in. Encourage everyone to voice their ideas—even if an idea isn’t fully developed yet. Equally as important, remind everyone to stay positive and supportive. Rather than knock down or dismiss an idea, treat every thought with equal respect.
• Record every idea. In the same vein, jotting down every idea demonstrates to the team that all viewpoints are welcome and valuable. Plus, you never know which ideas will make their way past the cutting room floor when it’s time to evaluate.

Proven brainstorming techniques

To spark creativity and enter your next brainstorming session with a plan, consider trying one of these proven idea-generating techniques.

• The 6-3-5 method. This brainstorming technique requires a team of six people. Each team member receives a sheet of paper with a three-by-six table and writes down three ideas across the top row. After three minutes, the participants pass the sheets of paper clockwise before writing down three more new ideas inspired by the existing row of ideas. The passing of the idea sheets continues five times until all the rows contain ideas.
• Mind mapping
  Though there are several distinct methods under the mind-mapping umbrella, this technique always starts with a graphical representation of information. Brainstormers organize ideas with a central image (a title or main idea) with subsequent ideas branching off and even more ideas stemming from the branches.
• Role storming. This brainstorming method is built on the premise of identity swapping. The goal is for team members to feel more comfortable and creative by stepping into someone else’s shoes and brainstorming as if they were the person assigned to them. Often, taking new roles and responsibilities (even hypothetically) can spur new ideas.
• Round robin. Though brainstorming was founded on teamwork, taking a round-robin approach allows people to come up with ideas without being directly influenced by another person in the room. To start, each team member writes down initial ideas on a card without discussing them with the group. And then, just like the 6-3-5 method (but minus the three-by-six table), everyone passes their idea card to the person next to them who will use those ideas as inspiration. In the end, a facilitator will eliminate any duplicate ideas before discussing and narrowing down the top contenders.
• Reverse brainstorming. Reverse brainstorming flips traditional brainstorm on its head. Rather than ideate solutions to a problem out of the gate, team members ideate ways they could cause or exacerbate that problem. Once the team brainstorms all the ways they could create the posed problem, they work together to reverse the ideas into potential solutions.

Conclusion

Brainstorming is not only a creative way to break up the workday, but it’s also an important strategic tool for companies to conjure up novel ideas and new approaches for conducting business. Keep these guidelines and techniques in mind to find what works best for you and your team. Just remember that each problem you bring to a brainstorming session may benefit from a different process.

Portions of this article originally appeared on the Quill website.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

Email clutter and perpetual access to messages are the norm for nearly everyone. Unfortunately, this unrelenting chaos invades work inboxes, too; it is not uncommon for work or business-important emails to fall by the wayside.  

According to Mailbird’s Email Overload Survey, 40% of workers receive roughly 61-100 emails every day, but only around 10% of them have any relevance to their workload.  

As a result, critical work-related emails can be hard to find. One third of workers surveyed said they need to spend three to five hours per week managing their email inboxes — 39% say they spend more than six hours per week managing emails.   

When workers must spend considerable time digging through their inboxes to find relevant emails, it becomes frustrating and time-wasting. Workers could undoubtedly spend six-plus hours each week doing more productive and meaningful activities.  

No escape from email stress 

It is evident from Mailbird’s research that part of the stress related to work emails comes from their perpetual accessibility through smartphones. 

Before the internet, emails and smartphones, time outside of work hours was typically a break from seeing work-related materials. It was customary to associate that time with intrinsically reducing stress levels.   

Things are much more complicated than that now because of constant access to emails on smartphones, which most people carry with them all day.  

For example, if a few hours go by without checking emails, most workers (71.1%) will not become stressed. However, that lowers to just half (51.6%) when workers ignore emails for a whole weekend; and a mere 15.6% when a week has passed with neglecting emails.  

In other words, there is a strong correlation between the duration of time workers do not look at their work-related emails and stress levels.  

This type of correlation is not unique to the age of modern technology. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy from the late 19th century suggests that it is an essential attribute of human nature to become uneased by such inactivity from work.  

Constant email access has amplified this correlation of stress and inactivity with work; 48.8% of workers rank missing out on critical work-related emails as the deepest concern in relation to stress from not checking emails. However, this problem is essentially tied to workers’ cluttered emails.  

Organize and eliminate to decrease stress 

Here are two strategies to cope with cluttered email inboxes and lower stress.  

1. Deleting work-related apps 

The first strategy worth considering is deleting all work-related materials from your phone and letting others at work know you’ve done so.  

“It is stressful to feel the need to check all the time.” Saying something like this will get others to understand and respect your choice in most workspaces; work-related emails are rarely important enough that they cannot wait until workers are in the office during work hours to see them.  

When you’ve established such a norm with yourself and your colleagues, the exterior standard of needing to check emails outside of work hours will likely have less of an influence and, therefore, will produce less stress.  

2. Managing email inbox size and inputs. 

In some workspaces, however, constant contact is non-negotiable. In these and all other cases, managing email inbox size and inputs is critical. However, spending several hours a week doing so is untenable and needs a viable and widely applicable alternative.   

Of the respondents in Mailbird’s report, 60% said that unsubscribing from unnecessary, irrelevant, or unread newsletters or email marketing campaigns helped them to manage inbox size successfully, whereas 49% say email filters are the favorite practices for email management.  

Getting at the sources of most incoming emails — social media, marketing campaigns, subscriptions, spam, industry news, etc. — and eliminating those that are unnecessary is crucial to managing email size.  

Determining which are necessary can be a challenge for many workers, as 73% say there is no formal sense of which emails are work-crucial and which are not. Consulting with managers and coworkers may help resolve ambiguities on priorities.  

Once that has been accomplished, deleting the excess may be time-consuming, and companies could consider investing in email cleaning software that can streamline this entire process, thus making it all the less stressful for workers.  

Portions of this article originally appeared on the AllWork Space website.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

To help you get organized, here are some simple but effective office products that can help you feel empowered to do your best work:

Labeled receptacles

Whether you work from home or in an office, you’ll inevitably accumulate trash. Rather than collect a growing pile of sticky notes, snack wrappers, disposable coffee cups, and paperwork you no longer need, set up a duo or trio of easy-to-access bins for trash and recycling. You’ll likely want separate bins for trash and recycling and may consider a shredder bin for more sensitive paper waste. If your bins aren’t already labeled (many recycling bins feature a recycling logo), you may want to choose different colored bins or add helpful labels. Once you set up your waste and recycling system, be mindful of when you need to empty each bin to prevent unsightly—and potentially pungent—overflow.

Message boards

Sure, most workers have smartphones with notetaking, reminder, and calendar apps already built in. But sometimes those vital reminders vanish into the ether as they flee from sight (and mind). Keep your most important messages—be they appointment reminders, workflow steps, positive affirmations, or anything in between—on display with a bulletin board or dry-erase board. You can even opt for a combination cork and whiteboard or choose a dry-erase board with a monthly calendar built right in. Update and clear your boards on a weekly or biweekly basis so they don’t turn into clutter zones.

Calendars and planners

If dry-erase calendars aren’t your cup of tea, a paper calendar can help you keep tabs on each workday while providing the benefits of handwriting your events and tasks. For instance, research shows handwriting activates larger networks of the brain than typing and may be a superior option for learning and information recall. If you’re not the desk calendar type, you can also choose a more compact day planner with the option to add page refills at the start of a new year.

Timer

A timer may not be the first item you think of regarding workplace organization. But when it comes to time management and meeting deadlines, timers can help you stay on task and take performance-boosting breaks at set intervals. Take, for instance, the Pomodoro technique. The idea is that by focusing on one task for a set period—and then completely taking the focus off that task during designated break periods—you’ll be much more productive and efficient. And while you could easily pull up a timer on your computer or phone, a handheld timer can help you concentrate even more by keeping digital distractions out of view.

Filing system

Depending on your line of work and how much paper you need to keep track of at any given time, you may be able to properly organize physical documents with a small, stackable desktop letter tray. Alternatively, you may need to invest in a filing cabinet to sort and secure important papers. Don’t forget to stock up on folders and labels to keep your files organized and easy to find. Once you settle on a filing system, consider which items you can scan (and then recycle the hard copies) and which ones you can shred.

Desk organizer

One of the most effective ways to clear productivity-hindering desktop clutter? Get yourself a desk organizer. If you have a desk drawer and a lot of supplies, you may opt for a drawer organizer for items you use once a week or once a month and a desktop organizer for daily-use items, including pens, pencils, scissors, hair ties, lip balm, reading glasses, your phone, and a phone charger. If you have multiple drawers in your desk, you may also be able to convert one into a charging station to free your desktop of unwieldy cords.

Conclusion

While these tools aren’t the be-all and end-all for office organization, investing in some tried-and-true decluttering supplies will be a helpful foundation to set you up for workplace success. One simple change—like hanging a whiteboard or sticking to a clearly labeled filing system—can help you get on track as you commit yourself to a more orderly workspace.

Portions of this article originally appeared on the Quill website.

The Sundance Company                                                                
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.6 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.