The concept of work environment has changed significantly in the past couple of years, especially after the breakout of Covid-19, where remote work is the new normal these days. Moreover, employers have started to realize that having a percent of their employees work from home does not just save them money as remote workers are more efficient than employees who go to the workplace every day. Employees’ privacy is another factor that affects their productivity, as the more an employee feels that their privacy is protected and respected, the more they become productive. Do you want more privacy at your workplace? Read on as below are a few solutions that would allow you to have more privacy at your workplace.
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Soft Music
Playing soft music at your office helps employees think more clearly and have more mental privacy even though there is a hustle and bustle around them. Hearing phone conversations and the chats of your fellow employees in the cubicles next to you can be very annoying and distract your thoughts from focusing on the tasks at hand. However, soft music works like magic in providing employees with an increased sense of privacy, concentration, and focus.
Personal Space
To provide your employees with more privacy, you need to respect their personal space, in other words, the physical space which surrounds a person. Moreover, during the pandemic, maintaining the rules of social distancing by keeping employees physically distant from each other is a great idea to respect the employees’ personal space. If you have each employee spend their working hours in an office pod, you will lower the risk of employees contracting the virus, make them more comfortable, and productive. Having a personal space makes them feel valued as well. Furthermore, it will also save time wasted on small talk and other distractions that can negatively affect your work quality.
Information Protection
Any type of business involves dealing with a lot of data and information. Having more privacy at a workplace entitles protecting this information and data. This can be done by installing efficient antiviruses on the employees’ laptops, educating them on security procedures, and using physical privacy tools like privacy filters, as a few examples of protective measures.
Clean Desk Policy
To protect your privacy at work, always lock your laptop or computer screen when you are not at the office. Moreover, at the end of the employees’ shifts, they need to have their devices logged off. Bear in mind that these precautions should be taken religiously by remote workers because if they are working at a coffee shop, for example, anyone can take a picture of their opened laptop screens in less than a second with the important information on it. For this reason, employees should adopt a clean-desk policy all the time.
More Distance
If having office pods is not possible in your company, you can add more space between desks or cubicles in a way that there are minimum distractions or noise that can be heard coming from the cubicle next to you. This way, your phone calls won’t be heard by everyone in the office, your laptop screen will not be seen by employees sitting at desks right next to you, and you will be able to focus on tasks at hand better.
High Wall Workstations
Providing employees with high wall workstations or tall cubicles is another way that can be applied to allow them more privacy while they are doing their work. They come in different shapes and sizes that fit the size of any office. They can keep the noise away to help employees have some quiet time focusing at work and finishing tasks on time.
While teamwork and being sociable at work are required for a healthy working environment, having some privacy is also needed to finish work on time and become more productive. Moreover, sometimes, you need to take a private phone, and having everyone in the office around you listening to every single word you say can make you extremely uncomfortable. Nowadays, offices are packed with cubicles and many employees in a single unit, which makes the luxury of privacy unattainable. However, there are some solutions that can allow employees more privacy at their workplace, and that includes switching to office pods and high wall workstations and cubicles, playing soft music to help employees clear their minds and organize their thoughts, making more distance between desks in the same office, and applying clean desk policy, providing employees with the right digital solutions to protect their data and information. Remember, providing employees with more privacy will increase their productivity and facilitate innovation.
