Smart lighting is commonly used in the home for reasons of pure convenience. However, did you know it can also be used in offices to increase team efficiency?
Speaking of smart lighting in your home, imagine waking up in the morning to sunrise hues coming on gradually to ease you into your day.
By the time you’re ready to get up, lights are on full
brightness so you can get going the right way, ideally accompanied by music as
your morning routine gets into full swing.
Smart Lighting In The Workplace
What about smart lighting in the workplace, though?
Normally, reducing electricity consumption is the driving motivator for most companies installing energy-efficient LEDs.
Once you get creative with intelligent lighting, you can
find many benefits beyond a skimpier power bill. Used judiciously, smart
lighting can enhance productivity and make teams even more efficient.
How can you achieve this?
Here are five simple ways you can make your office a more focused and productive place with effective use of smart lighting.
- Get Started With Natural Light
- Build In LEDs To Boost Overall Performance
- Programmable Lighting To Optimize Brightness Levels
- Use Different Colors For Different Areas
- Customize Lighting To Fit Your Workforce
Get Started With Natural Light
Before you think about upgrading the lighting, ask yourself if your office gets enough natural light.
A study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine showed that workers in offices with plenty of natural light enjoyed almost an hour more of sleep than those working in windowless offices.
If you’re designing a building from the ground up, this is
an area you should focus on. Use as much clear glass as possible. Consider
using glass panels for interior walls. Don’t overlook the effectiveness of
skylights either.
What if your office is already fully constructed?
Make the best of what you’ve got. Sometimes, simply shifting
furniture so it’s closer to a window can be worthwhile.
With people spending up to 90% of their time indoors,
exposure to as little as 15 minutes of natural light can release endorphins in
your brain that make you feel good. If you feel good, you’re likely to perform
better at work.
With natural light optimized, how else can you energize your
workers using technology, then?
Build In LEDs To Boost Overall Performance
A British study into Lighting, Well-being, and Performance at Work showed that lighting was one of several crucial factors helping to encourage both well-being and productivity.
If you can’t get enough natural light into your offices, LED
lights are an effective alternative.
Why use this type of lighting beyond energy-efficiency,
though?
Some benefits of LEDs in the workplace include:
- Reduced headaches and eye strain with LEDs compared to traditional fluorescent lighting
- Ability to create different lighting zones with smart LEDs so you can create separate working areas with lighting optimized
- Reading speed is improved by up to 5% under LED lights and accuracy increases, too. Both of these lead to enhanced efficiency and productivity
- LEDs are the closest you can get to natural sunlight and can help with mood, energy levels, and overall vitality. A healthy and happy workforce is a productive workforce
European and American studies have shown productivity increases of several percents with LED lighting in place. In a large enterprise, this adds up to seriously and favorably impact your bottom line.
How else can smart lighting be used to tweak team efficiency, then?
Programmable Lighting To Optimize Brightness Levels
On a simple level, automating lighting in the workplace
immediately saves time since staff won’t be constantly attempting to alter
brightness levels. Just like in your home, scheduling mundane operations is a
huge time-saver.
It’s only natural that people flag over the course of a day. After lunch, with food digesting and energy levels flagging, why not introduce a burst of brighter lighting to increase team efficiency?
Human-centric lighting (HCL) caters to the non-visual photoreceptors in the eye.
HCL emulates the natural progression of daylight predicated on your body’s circadian rhythms. Even if you don’t have enough natural light in the office, human-centric lighting is the next best thing.
Whatever set-up you choose, programmable brightness levels
tailored to the task at hand can bring about an increase in productivity.
You can get even more creative with colored lighting and see how it affects your team efficiency.
Use Different Colors For Different Areas
With most smart bulbs offering you up to 16 million colors, don’t be afraid to experiment, especially if it’s going to benefit your team efficiency.
The color of lighting has a strong correlation with mood and performance. While red light can be calming, blue light can help increase alertness and energy levels.
If your offices have different areas that are task-specific,
carve them up with different colored lights to suit. While you might want
bright white light for an important early morning meeting, your creative
department might benefit from a mix-up in coloring.
Customize Lighting To Fit Your Workforce
Finally, not all workspaces are created equal, so don’t be scared of customizing the lighting to fit. If you cater the lighting to your workplace, your team efficiency is guaranteed to increase.
While automating lighting is important, you should also
allow your employees the chance to override settings. Everyone is different and
even age brings about changes you should factor in. A 45-year-old, for example,
needs twice the amount of light to perform a comparable task than a 20-year-old
requires.
When you introduce smart lighting in the workplace, make
sure you start a dialogue with your workforce. Get their input on how things
are set up and implement feedback.
The crowning beauty of smart lighting, whether at home or
work, is the way you can create a completely personalized environment conducive
to increased productivity and efficiency.
Final Word
We hope you’ve seen now that lighting can help you and your team to get even more done by working smarter not harder. Here at Smarthome, we expect technology to increasingly penetrate the workplace over the coming years. The more you become accustomed to home automation, the more you expect these same conveniences at work.
From an employer’s standpoint, happy workers are more
productive and you can make small tweaks to get the most efficiency from your
team without worsening conditions.
Bookmark our blog and come back soon for more of the latest smart home news. We have a huge amount lined up over the holiday season including a detailed look at some of the incoming Amazon products due for launch. See you soon!
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Source: All Things Home Automation