Can personal work storage really impact company profit? Feb 20, 2018| Experts There’s no shortage of research supporting the notion that a healthy, creative and productive workforce can boost the profits of a company but the recent Wellness Together study, commissioned by Bisley and six other companies, has taken a deeper look into what drives that output from an employee perspective. The research, which was carried out amongst 1000 full and part-time employees, looked at multiple aspects of mental and physical health in the workplace and revealed interesting points about what employees felt was important for their productivity and wellness. The physical environment featured heavily in responses, with employees reporting on the effects of lighting, temperature, personal space, facilities and storage on their wellbeing and creativity at work. As expected, the issue of personal storage was raised several times by employees who find themselves in increasingly mobile or communal workspaces. There was however some additional and interesting data that emerged on the strong correlation between personal storage and profitability. Personal storage generates 13% uplift to profitability The study revealed workplaces that provide employees with their own personal space to stow belongings saw a significant uplift in profitability of 13% - but why is that? When you refer back to the well-documented motivational theory of Maslow, the figure starts to make sense. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, ‘belongingness’ and ‘security’ are important motivational needs for humans but these can often be missed in the workplace – especially in one where employees move between workstations and locations more than at any other time in history. We are becoming a nomadic workforce and with that, several psychological needs are being neglected. Personal storage manages to plug the gap left by this new, agile working environment, by removing the many of the distractions that hamper productivity, and consequently the profits of a business. It’s therefore no surprise that senior management reported increased productivity as a result of personal storage. Employees that can influence their conditions are working for more profitable companies In environments where desks are shared or encroached on by others, or in offices where employees have no secure space to call their own, frustrations can easily build and sidetrack workers from the task at hand. Don’t underestimate the derailing influence of someone else’s paperwork on your desk! The study found that those that feel they have an influence over their comfort conditions are working for more profitable companies. With personal storage featuring in two of the five most important workplace facilities by employees, companies that overlook personal storage could not only be missing out on additional revenue and margins, they could be at risk from losing good staff too.
