Five Workspace Design Mistakes Affecting Employees' Productivity

Your office can look incredible and still work against you. When design decisions ignore how people actually work, the cost doesn’t show up as a single line item; it leaks out as interruptions, late starts, and rooms that sit empty while two people fight for a quiet spot.

Here are 5 workspace design mistakes that affect your employees' productivity:

1. Choosing style over functionality

High-performing workplaces aren’t defined by their moodboards; they’re defined by how well they support the work people actually do: deep focus, quick calls, project sprints. Large-scale studies such as Gensler Workplace Survey (conducted across 16.000 office workers from 15 countries and 10 industries) show that environments designed around activity needs (not just looks) correlate with better individual and team performance, while misalignment drags outcomes even when the space appears “premium.”

2. Underestimating acoustics

In open offices, intelligible speech is the enemy of concentration because when you can understand what someone is saying nearby, your brain can’t help but start decoding it, whether you want to or not. This steals the same mental resources you need for reading, writing, coding, or analysis.

Besides this, did you know that a study conducted by Science Direct states that it takes roughly 23 minutes on average for a worker to fully resume the original task after an interruption? Add this to the education, and we just got a productivity tax stalling our team's progress.

3. Ignoring natural light

Daylight isn’t just “nice ambience”; it’s linked to sleep quality, daytime functioning, and overall well-being in office workers. A controlled case study made by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information found that employees with greater daylight exposure at work slept longer and reported better quality of life. The effect shows up outside the office, but the starting point is architectural: how you allocate the perimeter, manage the sunlight, and supplement with electric light actually matters. So put people near the windows, not storage rooms.

4. Underestimate storage & utility spaces

A good floor plan falls apart once real life shows up: packages, samples, cables and gear, recycling, spare IT stuff. If these don’t have a dedicated space, they spread all over the hallways and onto desks. Then every time someone needs something, they waste a lot of time on something so small.

The fix is simple: store in a dedicated place what you actually use, put it next to the work that needs it, and label everything. Give mail, recycling, cleaning, and IT their own spots. When everything has a place, people stop wasting time looking for it.

5. Poor space planning 

Many of the previous mistakes come as a result of poor space planning. You get huge boardrooms that sit empty, long desk rows where people leave when they need to take calls, and hallways that cut right through meetings. Most people prefer small rooms for conversations and focus, and in most meetings, there are just a few people. Plan for more small rooms, clear paths, and quiet spots, not big spaces you rarely use.

The office that performs is the office that wins.

Prioritize functionality over branding so the employees' productivity increases, and the ROI will follow. Keep in mind that style is the final step, not the beginning. At Bright Spaces, we take into account all of these criteria, thanks to Intelligent 3D Space Planning, so you can visualize and interact with the future space through one sharable link to easily align the stakeholders and speed up decision making.