Having a clean and hygienic office environment is key, not only to your employees health and wellbeing, but also to the impression that it gives to your clients and potential customers. In order to achieve this you can use the services of a Contract Cleaning Cheltenham company such as Big Green Cleaning who can clean your work environment on a daily or weekly basis.
One other way that you can improve your work atmosphere is to consider having plants in the office. There are lots of benefits of plants in indoor spaces and these include some of the following:
- Aesthetics – having some greenery in your work space helps to improve its aesthetics, both for visitors and for employees. This can then improve your employees sense of wellbeing and your visitors impressions of your company.
- Air quality – we all know that plants take in carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen as a part of their respiratory process – photosynthesis. But a study that was undertaken by NASA looked at additional chemicals that plants absorbed from the atmosphere.
- Noise – plants can be used as natural noise barriers and they work particularly well in high noise environments such as call centres. When put around the edges of rooms and in corners that can help with absorbing sounds.
- Wellbeing – plants can help improve overall staff wellbeing, reduce instances of sickness and can increase productivity and employee morale.
How greenery helps staff wellbeing
Clean surfaces matter, but plants add something cleaning cannot. Scientists use the word biophilia for our natural wish to feel connected to nature, and most offices offer very little of it.
Research has linked workplace plants with lower anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue, and other studies have found higher productivity and better wellbeing scores where plants are present. Design matters to recruitment too, with around a third of people saying a workplace’s environment affects whether they would want to work there.
Plants improve the air as well. They release oxygen through photosynthesis, and NASA research in the 1980s found that some plants remove chemicals such as benzene, trichloroethylene and formaldehyde. Later studies suggest indoor plants can lower carbon dioxide levels, especially in offices without air conditioning. Plants also absorb background noise, so chatter in an open-plan space is less distracting. Living walls are particularly good at this.