How To Make A Home Office More Productive

Millions of people work remotely, but if you are among them, do you have a working environment that helps you produce your best and most efficient work? If not, the good news is that a bespoke home office solution can help boost your productivity.

This is an important issue because, after the initial surge in home working prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies wanted their staff to return to the office. There were several arguments made for making staff do this:

• The view that working under the same roof and having in-person contact fosters a strong company culture
• Fairness and equality, as everyone will have access to office facilities, but not everyone has the same facilities for working remotely
• Greater productivity, or at least managers finding it easier to measure
• Reduced collaboration means less innovation
• Problems in maintaining a good work-life balance as lines get blurred

As Forbes suggested, there may have been other reasons, such as to justify the investment in office space or as a matter of ‘power play’ office dynamics, but the issue of productivity has been the most contested idea.

Why Do Some Bosses Think That Home Working Reduces Productivity?

On the one hand, there have been bosses who will argue that staff will invariably be less productive, often on the grounds that home working encourages people to be slack and lazy in a fashion that they wouldn’t get away with in the office.

Some will disagree strongly with this, but a more nuanced argument would be that productivity is simply harder to maintain because homes are not necessarily well-equipped to be productive working environments and that there can be many distractions.

If you currently work from home, you may need to acknowledge at least some truth in this. Even if you have a room set aside to operate as an office, it is not necessarily ideal.

Therefore, a bespoke conversion to make it into a more work-friendly environment could be exactly what you need to ensure maximum efficiency. Whether this helps you thrive in your own business or simply keeps your boss happy, such an investment could pay dividends.

To consider how your home office could be designed to help you be more productive, it is first worth considering what research has found about working from home since it first became a mainstream thing in 2020.

Does The Evidence Show Home Workers Can Be More Productive?

A Gallup study in the US, first carried out in 2020 and then updated early last year with further findings from research in 2024, came up with some interesting revelations, some of which were unexpected:

• Collaboration, not proximity, was the key driver of productivity
• Productivity tended to get better when people worked from home, with people often willing to do more to get a job done successfully
• Access to the right remote tools (such as shared documents and platforms) is one of the keys to productivity

A Work Insiders study of the findings of multiple surveys provided similar findings, including that remote workers are up to 40 per cent more productive than those in offices.

Therefore, two central take-home conclusions that can be drawn from this are that remote working is surely here to stay as it does not offer a disadvantage to productivity, while the factors that determine productivity levels are numerous and not all based on location.

However, this does not mean you should ignore any shortcomings in your current home workspace. If you are one of the 13 million who work exclusively from home, or 24 million who work remotely for some of the time, this needs to be considered.

How Can A Bespoke Home Office Become An Optimal Work Environment?

Because the grand ‘return to office’ never happened in many companies and won’t now, you are less likely to be investing in a home office that you might stop using if you change jobs, which strengthens the case for investing in a beautiful and user-friendly workspace.

Such considerations include:

• Comfort
• Aesthetic attractiveness
• Temperature and light controls
• The promotion of health and wellbeing

The first two may not easily feed into statistics, but they matter. You want comfortable furnishings and an environment you enjoy being in, because nobody does their best work in a cold, dull or uncomfortable place (apart from sewer workers and professional cavers).

Indeed, if this is a place you will spend hours in every day, you need it to be pleasant because otherwise you may find you are constantly wishing you were somewhere else. The principle is the same as trying to make a company office more aesthetically pleasing.

A bespoke office can be the best way to achieve this aim. This will feature a design that fits perfectly with the shape and size of the room, helping to ensure you are sitting in the optimal position where, for example, you can have everything you need close at hand.

For example, having shelves in the bespoke design can ensure you have the storage space that you need, just where you need it, while at the same time, we can design the office so that wires and cables are not strewn across the room, posing a trip hazard.

Temperature and light controls are another significant consideration. If you have been struggling with the heat of the recent hot spell and the bright light of the sun as the longest day approaches, these need to be considered too.

It is not a case of creating somewhere that is cold and away from the light, because this will be a very grim place in the autumn and winter. But you can take steps such as having blinds included, or materials that absorb light instead of reflecting it too brightly.

Can A Bespoke Home Office Make You Healthier?

The promotion of health and wellbeing may also seem like a nebulous concept, but the furnishings and designs can help in tangible ways.

For example, while many of the ways you can improve a home office involve installing the right work equipment and keeping it clean and tidy, items like a standing desk can be very effective.

It means you can get more exercise by being on your feet instead of sitting and it breaks up the day. This can also help your concentration, helping you be more productive as well as healthier.

With so many years of experience in designing beautiful, bespoke rooms, we can take a room that is currently improvised as an office and transform it into something beautiful, practical and user-friendly, giving you a space you will truly love to work in.