Every employer should want to create only the best working environment to enable team members to work productively. How it looks in the office can also affect how long your employees remain in their jobs. Unfortunately, there is no one single correct way to create an ideal environment. It depends on many factors: your brand, the corporate culture and the attitudes you work with. For illustration, we have selected the top five and then the five worst types of work environment according to Entrepreneur.com.
The 5 best types of work environment
Open and sceptical
In such an environment, the emphasis is on questioning and openness. If someone designs a marketing strategy, someone else asks why it should work better than its alternative. Such questions, even those of a sceptical nature, bring the debate to life and thus everyone moves the team forward. No one is reprimanded or ridiculed for their thoughts and ideas; everyone is considered equal.
Emphasising individuality
The individual environment offers work flexibility and adaptation to your own work style. This may be, for example, home office, which has recently become more popular with young people. And if this doesn't interfere with productivity, why not allow them the possibility? Some will welcome flexibility of working hours, others remodelling of the office furniture to suit their taste. Different people like and appreciate different things.
Open space
This is something that may seem automatic but it doesn't always work in some companies. Open space and offices without closed miniature cells help teamwork. Employees can discuss and share ideas, troubles and achievements together.
Honest communication
This type of environment prefers sincere feedback to all other forms of communication. Anyone with shortcomings who needs to improve is told so. This applies to both workers and bosses. It is all about communication: only that way do people learn to trust, listen and act on the advice given to them as part of their feedback.
As one
An environment that allows people to work individually but at the same time measures the achievements of the team as a whole. This environment usually sets team goals and allows employees to work in smaller groups. This will encourage cooperation as well as individual responsibility for the quality of the work done by the individual.
The 5 worst types of work environment
Nine to five
The "nine to five" environment refers to more than just working hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. This concept states rigidly that all work has to meet certain expectations. Too strict a schedule, a strict dress code and strict operating code limit the team's creativity and individuality.
Separately
This is the dark twin of an individual environment. Instead of individuals being allowing flexibility and encouraged to make changes, they are forced to shut themselves off and act as separate units. This destroys any chance of a joint team spirit, instead promoting isolation and envy.
Sink or swim
Either success or failure: nothing in between. This black-and-white view does not allow workers to learn from their own mistakes or recognise that, whatever their goal, their path towards it could be improved. Real life is not just black or white, nor should it be so in your office.
Repressive
In this environment you are constantly facing fines for bad behaviour. No rewards, only punishments. Any deviation from a specific line or a late submission automatically leads to some reprimand. On the other hand, exceptional performance is never rewarded or praised but simply taken for granted. Such an environment is motivated by fear and probably everyone senses this is not how it should be.
School
This type resembles a school classroom. Some workers are objectively better than others, bosses cannot be questioned, so employees must obey the word of "those upstairs". This leads to resistance, silencing of individual opinion and thus a decline in overall productivity.
You may recognise some of these types and see in them a similar environment to that in which you are currently working. As employers, keep in mind that the office needn't be perfect and may not meet certain expectations; nonetheless, it must provide employees with everything they need so as to feel motivated to do their work.
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