Author Archives: vlm
Designing Workspaces for Inclusion
For businesses thinking about designing workspaces for inclusion, Bellia is on the forefront for making the transition seamless. With workplaces being redesigned and re-imagined, Bellia continues to incorporate your corporate goals into a workplace design that will best suit your company.
You may not realize it, but workspace design can speak as its own language, conveying information about culture, norms, and commitment to well-being. Some people understand the language and make their way around the space without much difficulty or stress. These employees can locate other people and the resources they need to work effectively. This is called the “legibility” of the workspace. Legible spaces include a floorplan that can be easily navigated and understood by all. When a space is “illegible”, the space can unintentionally reduce inclusion and equity for some groups. Illegible space sends a subtle message that says, “You can use this space, but it really isn’t for you”, which can lead to potentially damaging higher stress levels for some groups.
Tips to Designing Workspaces for Inclusion
No work area can be completely perfect, but it’s important to consider as many needs as possible with a collaborative design process that brings employees in as consultants on making a good space great.
Using universal or inclusive design concepts can help everyone contribute fully and thrive. Some of these include:
- Providing choice in spaces and tools
- Eliminating unnecessary complexity and manipulation of items in the workspace
- Arranging tools, reference materials, and information based on importance
- Using pictorial, verbal, or tactile presentation of essential information
- Providing a variety of techniques or devices used by people with sensory limitations
- Arranging elements to eliminate physical hazards and barriers
- Providing warnings of potential hazards and failsafe features
- Ensuring tools can be used efficiently and comfortably with minimum repetitive actions and physical effort
- Providing a clear line of sight to important elements and keeping tools within reach of any seated or standing user
- Providing adequate space for assistive devices or personal assistance
It’s important to maintain the same sense of cultural inclusiveness and personal worth people would get from remote workers’ office environment. Some things that can help people feel like they belong while working remotely include:
• Ensuring everyone has the technology they need to collaborate and keep in touch
• Subsidizing home office furniture
• Setting norms among colleagues to have regularly occurring virtual touch-base meetings or check-ins
• Scheduling time for casual conversation and catching up
To learn more about the benefits of designing workspaces for inclusion, click here.
Returning to Work After the Pandemic
Businesses are doing their best to stay prepared as they plan for employees returning to work after the pandemic. Part of that preparation involves creating a space for employees that makes them feel comfortable while still productive. At Bellia we are used to being a reliable helping hand for businesses that aims to build a better work environment. With new studies and data from HAWORTH, we’ve been able to combine the safety measures needed with desired productivity for an optimum workspace design.
For almost 50 years, it’s been our mission to deliver workspaces that you and your staff will be proud of, and that will increase workplace satisfaction, productivity, and ultimately your success. Our focus has always been on functionality, productivity, and team satisfaction. As we all adjustment to the ongoing circumstances, our friends at Haworth have been able to identify three critical areas of focus to help navigate the return to the workplace in a COVID-19 environment:
(1) Employee Well-Being
Supporting people’s physical and psychological health to build confidence and enhance performance.
(2) Organizational Culture
Understanding and preserving your culture to empower your workforce and leverage your space in new ways.
(3) Transforming the Floorplate
Addressing facility requirements, density, and exposure while mitigating risk.
Bellia creates organic spaces that help you balance the needs of your people and space as we navigate returning to the workplace. Part of that organic blueprint is creating a solution that ensures people perform their best, supports your culture, and leverages existing products, enabling you to reconfigure with ease and reduced cost.
There’s a balance to remote work for safety purposes and in-person congregations. Living in the digital age has allowed many organizations to embrace remote work and the alternate ways of meeting that pandemic forced upon all of us. At Bellia, we believe remote work guidelines should balance personal interaction and collaboration—both virtually and physically.
Through all these changes, we want to keep the different culture variables of your workplace intact: Collaborate, Create, Control, and Compete. Returning to work in the new normal will involve careful consideration for each of these for C’s.
Collaborative culture involves a collective understanding that the changes will not be easy, but the transition is for the best. Creating this culture involves doing new things like embracing alternative ways to get work done.
Control culture involves doing things right, with a sense of security, and creating a system that seamlessly bridges different work settings.
Compete culture will have everyone doing the new things now, adjusting to the new standards with those struggling to identify where they lack and adapting to change.
To learn more about how our collaboration with Haworth is helping businesses adjust as they plan returning to work after the pandemic, download our free guide.
Factors That Kill Employee Focus
Working with HAWORTH, you can learn about the factors that kill employee focus and prepare to plan against them. As leaders in the office design and furniture industry, we stay on top of trends and are aware of the latest innovations. While we are sourcing products for your space, we are not just taking into account the overall design and aesthetics, but also the needs of the client and how the pieces we choose will help them achieve their business goals.
Your work environment could suffer from the question of “why can’t we focus at work”. It can be a difficult hurdle to clear. Knowing the ways that focus work is task- and person-specific can help you create a workplace—its culture, policies, and various workspaces—to meet all the ways employees need to work, including focus work.
The experts at HAWORTH, tested how visual and auditory distractions and interference affected tasks requiring sustained attention. They found when people were exposed to visual and auditory distractions or interference, their work performance declined.
The three culprits of work focus are:
Distractions- When unexpected off-task information captures our attention.
Interference- When off-task information gets confused with task information.
Disruptions- When a distraction or interference pulls us off a task entirely to start a new task.
Solutions Against Factors That Kill Employee Focus
- Work on a single task until completion
- Walls work best for more deliberate tasks. Next best is a panel at least 50” high for seated positions. For more automated tasks, adjusting your orientation to face a direction that minimizes visual activity is helpful.
- Ensure spaces have adequate signal-to-noise ratio through appropriate background sound levels.
Contact us today to learn more about improving work focus for your employees. A happy space makes for a happy place.
Create a Workspace to Help Employees Thrive in a Time of Coronavirus
Employers worldwide are faced with protecting their employees’ health in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we implement solutions like staggered schedules, remote working, and redesigning floor plates to put more space between people, there’s an important question to ask: Are we adapting to simply survive or are we adapting to thrive?
To learn how to acclimate to the new normal go to Haworth.com.
Workplace Culture in a Time of Coronavirus
People are slowly returning to the workplace since the COVID-19 pandemic set in, but with that comes many changes within the workspace. One thing that employers can preserve is the culture within the space. Not only can they protect it, they need to nurture it. What we’ve discovered is that the “new normal” in the workplace depends on an organization’s culture.
Read more about that at Haworth.com.
Return to the Workplace
The global pandemic has impacted many businesses leaving employers faced with many questions and decisions like:
What will the return to the workplace look like?
What short and long-term workplace changes will need to be implemented before employees return to the office?
What will be the new “normal”?
While we don’t have all of the answers, the team at Haworth has been developing solutions to answer some of those questions. Read more about it here.
Workplace Change: What Every Leader Needs to Know
Employees can experience shock when entering new work environments due to how humans respond to change. In a recent article, Ann Harten, Vice President of Global Human Resources at Haworth, explains how Haworth has developed a human-centric approach to workplace change.
Read more about it at Haworth.com
Workspaces that Inspire Corporate Culture
Meet the team that creates workspaces that inspire corporate culture. Bellia is a trendsetting office furniture dealer focused on matching your space with the best interior design to breed better business. For 40 years, we have brought expert corporate design services to medical offices, corporate offices, car dealerships, schools, colleges and government buildings.
Whether you are relocating, changing your brand image, or updating your space, we are here to inspire you. We will work with you to help you maximize productivity, increase employee morale (and retention), or even reduce human resource claims. As designers and furniture providers, we take pride and responsibility in elevating the success of your business.
Through our service, we want to create work spaces for corporate culture that invites inspiration and passion. One of the most valuable tools to reinforce culture and drive business strategy is workplace design. Culture serves as a catalyst for engagement, collaboration, and innovation. We believe the power of blending corporate culture and the right brand with individuals requires spaces that reflect their personal expression in a corporate environment. Our process looks at your space as a problem solving project, to eliminate as much unneeded aura to the work areas as possible. We do this to stray away from the trappings of creating a “nice look” with no substance, with a strategy to breed tangible results.
Our team will help introduce and design concepts to the work area including:
- Dedicated team spaces insulated by physical barriers allow strategic, high-focus group work to be done.
- Set ups for social interaction, inspirational “group restore spaces” with “elements of nature” invite people in and help ideas flow.
- Spaces that allow individuals to externalize ideas help them lock in information; physical barriers block distractions, allowing users to concentrate on their work.
- Accessible, informal spaces with daylight views offer individuals the ability to restore, while providing connections to others and information.
For the team that creates workspaces that inspire corporate culture, call on us to get started!
Corporate
Today’s corporate office furniture and the entire corporate office environment plays a crucial role in affecting employee behavior and performance. Privacy, interaction, flexibility and mobility can have their place just about anywhere in a work environment. The work space has become an extension of employee’s human nature, a representation of their desires to excel; a place with the comfort of home away from home to accommodate flexible and extended hours. It is with these factors in mind that Bellia redefines work space so that everyone experiences both personal and professional success.
Making Your Corporate Headquarters Attractive to Employees
NJ American Water Headquarters
Thermo Fisher Scientific
STP Investment Services Office Space
Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau
LaScala Birra
Pipeline Philly
Anapol Weiss
HFM Investments
Excel Micro
Gentilini Chevy
Government
Bellia understands GSA approved furniture. Understanding the complex and time sensitive procurement process involved in providing workspace service and products to government is something that comes easy to Bellia. The company holds a GSA packaged office contract, PA and NJ states contracts, in addition to US Communities, Middlesex, and Costars contracts. Bellia is highly experienced in serving government agencies at every level and in every way:
- Complying with security regulations
- Meeting documentation procedures
- Addressing storage challenges
- Accommodating and aging workspace and workforce
- Competing for funding
