Leadership and Management: Building a healthy workplaceJob environment is essential if we want to be successful on our own business. Besides having the necessary tools

to achieve the main goals, the workplace is an important ingredient we can’t overlook. Despite “effective

workplace communication is a key to cultivation of success and professionalism” (Canadian Centre for

Communication, 2003) there are another aspects less important in a first sight but high valued by our employees.

Perhaps it seems that is something strictly unnecessary, or something that we can do another different day but we

can image that can cause some damages on our staff - Anyhow we are extremely busy with our daily duties we can

think in deep about this little, little things. When this happens, when the physical environment becomes just a

mere aspect in our daily day which in fact, doesn't play any important role, it starts to affect on how our

employees interact or, for instance, carry out their task causing more severe damage than expected.

We can define the physical environment as an important aspect of the work that affect directly in the

interpersonal communication and the productivity of our employees. Moreover, the physical aspect of the

workplace or basically the main characteristics of a room have important consequences in our employees. This is

because aspects as lighting, ventilation or even acoustic environment can make some damage that affects our

productivity. Some recently research have found out that lighting and other factors like ergonomic furniture have

positive influence on employees health (Dilani, 2004; Milton, Glencross & Walters, 2000; Veitch & Newsham,

2000).

Not only this, another researches show that closed office floor allows to staff an important amount of privacy than

an open plan office. Working in a private space helps to be focused on the tasks without getting distracted with

any noise (Mwbex, 2010). So we can increase our productive and our staff motivation as well.

Knowing all this aspects it’s getting easier think in clear. We just need a few seconds, a few minutes to think in the

most objective way:

Is it our office comfortable? Are we doing well? Do we need to make some changes? and, which ones?

After our own quick analysis we need to dig deeply on it; make a routine questionnaire to our employees could

help us to know how they feel developing their job duties on the workplaces.

Don’t worry about doing it! You are not pushing people to answer you!

Create an impersonal questionnaire could be more productive, otherwise our employee could feel in some way

attack or just forced to do it and the results are not going to be real.

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