How Lighting Affects Your Workers
If you’re a business owner—or even an employee of a company yourself—you might not think about how the overhead lighting affects what you do day-to-day. There’s so much to attend to already, from managing newer workers to correspondences with the higher-ups, suppliers, logistics experts, and the like. The fact of the matter is, though, that the light under which we spend our time has a deep impact on our on-the-job performance and how we think about our work environment.
Think about it: If they’re full-time, your workers spend at least 40 hours a week underneath your building’s commercial lighting system. For example, if that system is overly harsh, your employees might begin to associate your office with that exact grating harshness and may, on some level, start to dread coming into work. After all, who likes being greeted with glaring light first thing in the morning? On the flip side, if your commercial lighting system is inefficient—that is, if it’s dim or constantly flickering on and off—this can grate on the nerves just as much as an overly bright one. How frustrating would it be to try to get work done when you can’t even see half of the time? How sleepy would it make you if your work environment was just as dark as your bedroom?
Indeed, your lighting, be it made of LED light fixtures or older, less efficient fluorescent models, has a direct effect on your workers’ individual moods. As a business owner, you most likely care on some level about these moods—after all, it’s only human to care about others—but your lighting system’s effects are also greater and much more widespread than that. Lighting creates a specific ambiance. This ambiance, because it directly influences how your workers behave on an individual level, affects how your facility behaves as a whole.
● Lighting affects collective productivity | Have you ever noticed how we can catch yawns from other people? Many individuals also say that a lack of work ethic is contagious. We’ve all been there, be it our suffering from the so-called Senioritis in our high-school years or catching the office-wide itch to ditch the office early on Fridays as an adult. Collective laziness, should it take root among your employees, can be a hard thing to break them of, and its origins often can stem in part from poorly installed or maintained commercial lighting. For example, consider the overly harsh lighting we mentioned above. It’s a bit hard for your workers to feel motivated and produce their best work if they constantly have headaches from overlit surroundings. Similarly, workers are more prone to falling asleep or feeling the effects of drowsiness if left to themselves in darker rooms. By prioritizing worker comfort via smart commercial lighting fixtures, you also prioritize facility-wide productivity.
● Lighting affects collective company attitude | Promoting good feelings about what your facility does is essential for presenting a good image to your customers, but it’s also essential for fostering a positive work culture. We’ve already talked about the mood-inhibiting effects of poor lighting conditions—this is what happens when these poor moods spread among your employees. When it feels physically bad to come into work, it’s nearly impossible for your workers to feel good about what they’re doing and about the company as a whole. You can do all you want to tell your employees that the job they perform matters and that it improves the lives of others, but if they aren’t physically comfortable on a day-to-day basis on the job, these messages are unlikely to land. This sullenness about their work can result in a company-wide case of apathy, which is even harder to cure than laziness. Of course, there are many factors that can affect your workers’ opinions about what they do, and your lighting system is only one of them. Still, if you’re struggling to create a happy atmosphere inside your building, it pays to talk to a commercial lighting company for upgrades and consider if your lighting is, indeed, partially to blame for your employees’ low moods.
● Lighting affects your company image | Because lighting can have such a strong effect on your workers, it affects how said workers represent your company outside of the office or facility. Though we’d like to think our workers always speak positively about their jobs to those close to them, as employers, it’s hard or impossible to control what workers say once they leave for the day. Making their on-the-job experiences positive helps ensure that good word about your company gets around, and this can start with smart commercial lighting solutions.
Contact LED Wholesale Supply for Affordable, Innovative Wholesale Lighting
Our Lakeville office is ready and waiting to serve your business and improve your employees’ working experience. Give us a call now at 952-392-9117.