How Colour Can Transform a Workplace
Business owners tend to be pretty terrible designers. Unless, of course, their speciality is in design, they’ll most likely have to hire a contractor or a designer to get something done in the office. Something as innocent-sounding as choosing the colour of your walls and carpets can have a drastic effect on your ability to work. It goes without saying that the correct use of colour can transform your workplace, so here are a couple of things to keep in mind for when you next plan a workplace renovation or update.
Colour can be used to lift moods
Did you know there’s a lot of psychology behind colour? For example, red is a colour that promotes strength, warmth, excitement and energy. It also promotes negative emotions such as aggression, which is why it’s a difficult colour to use in the office. It’s a bold and bright colour that easily stands out, making it something strong that can’t easily be ignored. In the right places, a bright red colour can be used to stimulate people, but it can also make them weary if used incorrectly. Other useful colours to have in the office are violet and green. Violet promotes vision and luxury, while green gives people a sense of balance, harmony and rest. These colours can have a massive impact on how productive your workplace is, so be sure to hire a designer that understands these psychological concepts behind colour before you do any drastic work on your workplace.
Colours can also be used to affect your customers in subtle ways. Supermarkets actually use colour to influence shoppers as well. Bold colours and designs will make your eyes point to certain products, and highlighting parts of a store with different colours can draw different crowds to them. In short, colour is an incredibly powerful tool if used correctly, and it can also be devastating if used incorrectly.
Colour can improve productivity
We’ve already briefly mentioned that colour can be used to lift moods and improve employee morale, but there’s a more practical and less subtle way to use colour—by categorising things.
It’s no secret that our eyes are drawn to colours and we can relate things, but if you colour code things (whether it’s people, departments or even sections) then your workplace can actually be easier to navigate. For instance, Wonderwink Scrubs offer coloured workplace clothing for hospitals and healthcare facilities. These colours can be used to sort ranks, departments and even specialities. If you operate a restaurant, then colours can be used to easily sort different types of foods by their prices or types of meat. For instance, green could be used for vegetables and red could be used for meat. It makes operating your business simple and it gives your customers an easy way to sort between what they need.
As you can see, colour can be used in many different ways to transform the workplace and these are only a couple of suggestions. We encourage you to use these both as foundations for your own ideas so you can breathe some more colour into your workplace and improve it.