In the workplace, interior lighting can affect the health and well-being of your workers so it is important to have the highest use of your lighting design. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a disorder that effects the emotional well-being off employees.
Research has shown more intense light can make employees more active and alert which overall has made employees work more efficient boosting their performance. Research has also shown that natural light from more windows can make employees more creative and vigilant.
Lighting can also be a contributing factor to the attendance of employees. One study found that an office with better more natural and intense lighting resulted in less employees taking sick days off work. Intense lighting can make employees physically healthier and mentally with employees more energetic in the workplace in turn wanting to be at work.
Increasingly in modern offices the well-being of their staff is important to consider if a manager wants their workers to be working at the maximum efficiently as they can. Managers can simply change a few things now that will make a huge difference.
How Lighting Can Change Your Employees State of Mind
Just the lighting colour and natural light intensity can put employees into the state of mind corresponding to the work they are doing.
Without taking action to increase staff well-being staff could:
Make more mistakes and errors
Take more sick days
Produce poor quality of work
Be less productive
One huge effect of staff being unhappy in the workplace will be a lower approval rating by staff to other potential staff members searching for jobs. Over time there will be a lack of staff applying for jobs so a lower variety of workers with potential to work well in this job.
One other effect is staff will not want enjoy their work environment so will be more inclined to leave which will require your company to hire more staff for a company that already has bad word-of-mouth reviews. Over time this may put the company into a state of requiring more workers than the company has applications. If there are less staff and the current staff a company is hiring aren’t very productive overall the productivity of the company goes down lowering the profits made.
How different colours affect your mood:
Red:
Courage, warmth and strength
Aggression and strain
Blue:
Efficiency, communication and calmness
Coldness and unfriendliness
Yellow:
Optimistic, confident and creative
Fear, depressed and anxious
Green:
Refreshed
Boredom and blandness
Violet:
Attention to detail, spiritual and truthful
Mentally closed and inferiority
Orange:
Comfort, fun and passionate
Immature and frustrated
Pink:
Love and warmth
Mentally closed and physically weak
Grey:
Neutral
Depression, lack of energy and confidence
Black:
Sophistication, secure and efficiency
Nastiness
White:
Hygienic and efficiency
Unfriendly
Brown:
Reliably, Serious and Supportive
Lack of humour and sophistication