Office Design Tips

Many employers take their time to realise the fact that an effective office design is the most important thing to drive productivity. Designing your office to make it developer-friendly is no rocket science but one still needs to give it a painstaking thought. For the love of practicality, you might want to wrap it up as fast as you can but in the long run it can cost you more than you can imagine. If you are going to have those brilliant coders writingcodes for you all day along, you need to design an office space that tallies with their needs.

So how should you go about it? It’s simple! You might want to try putting their thinking cap on but if all that sounds a little too overwhelming, you need to relax. Here are 7 most simple, effective, hassle free way to design your office for the benefit of the coders.

We urge you to read on right till the end and then try them out in the real world. You can let us know what worked for you and what did not!

1. Keep things comfortable

If you possibly can! First give your office design a thorough thought! How do you want the look and feel to be? Are you an MNC or a tech start-up that can unleash the quirkiness and experiment with the décor? If you don’t need to keep things strictly corporate, then let loose a little bit. Employ humour (wall hangings with crazy quotes) and comfort (bean bags) in your office design and your coders will love it! Remember these smart techies are used to living and seeing life out of the box! Plus, highly intelligent people find routine very tiresome, so break free with your office design and be bold enough to experiment with creativity.

2. Organise your office well

While dealing with the office design for coders, remember that they need to focus. They need to constantly rack their brains and ponder deeply over programming problems. In that case, design your office in such a way where you keep the phone heavy groups like marketing and sales far away from the coders/developers team. But you may want to keep the hardware team close at hand for ease of communication. All this background planning should reflect in the efficacy with which you design your new office.

3. Equip for easy collaboration

Do you want to encourage pair programming? Or may be simply enhance communication in the workplace? Provide for comfortable workstations, one without the discomfort of bestriding a table leg! The workstations should be such that coders can easily join each other and work together. In fact, opt for laptops instead of desktops wherever possible to facilitate mobility.

4. A good desk chair

A good part of a programmer’s day is spent in front of the screen. The extended hours spent at their desks can really take a toll on their backs. In fact, everything from a stiff neck to a lower back can happen to a programmer if he is not supporting himself the right way. So if you are thinking office décor for coders make sure that you add quality chair your priority list. This will probably be one of the smartest investments that you will make.

5. Streamlining technology

This will make the lives of your coders much easier and you will see their gratitude reflect in their performance. Empower your programmers with IT solutions like Slack or Hipchat when they want to communicate, collaborate, supervise, send information or manage projects. You should also choose to automate wherever possible to enhance productivity levels. This will save so much time that you will surely thank us later!

6. Implement colour philosophy

Your programmer is a highly intelligent creature. The more brilliant he (or she) is, the more over-worked his brain will be. You can consciously make use of colour schemes in your office design to help your coders relax. You can use the same to inspire or motivate them and to increase their passion for their work. Make use of high wavelength colours like red and yellow to energize employees towards a goal. Low wavelength colours (blue, green etc.) will promote deep thinking, concentration and improved efficiency.

7. Whiteboards everywhere

For a mind that is constantly running, thinking, analysing; it requires a vent. Every wall should have a whiteboard where your coders and developers can scribble their idea out for the sake of others. Feeling a little out-of-the-box? You can also choose to cover every blank wall of your office with transparent, wipe clean paint and watch the genius minds at work. Even glass walls can work just fine, for all the scribble, sticky-note- purposes.

And let’s not forget free coffee! Did you know that the cafeteria could be an equally important part of your office? Keep your cafeteria centrally located and keep it spacious. Make sure it smells like coffee all the time! (Jokes apart, make your cafeteria teeming with snacks and allow sufficient sitting place). Wondering why? This is where, people come to take small breaks. It is also the place where communication happens and people interact with each other. Give your web developers the much needed vent to meet, interact and communicate with other teams in the office. This will help to maintain a positive work environment and make coordination easy.

So go on ahead! But also take your time to help us with a feedback. Let us know which are the tips that worked wonders for you and how you moulded them to suit your specific office designing needs. Feels like we have missed out a point or two? You can add those too, in the comment section!