6 Common Office Lighting Mistakes to Avoid

Ensuring that you’ve installed the correct lighting in your office can make significant improvements in your workplace. From interior design to employee wellbeing, as such an essential aspect of workplace design, we’re surprised that not many companies get it right. Sadly, commercial lighting is often overlooked within office design, and the impact can be detrimental.

Often, businesses make the same mistakes with the lighting in their workplace. The impact it can have on your workforce is crucial; poor lighting in your workplace can potentially cause eye strain, fatigue, headaches, stress and even some otherwise preventable accidents at work. These are, however, easily avoidable mistakes, especially when you consult with professionals such as our interior fit out experts.

Throughout this article, you can learn some of the most common lighting mistakes companies across the UK are making in their office design. Following our advice below, we can instead help you to create an ideal work environment with sufficient lighting to boost productivity and support staff welfare.

1. Insufficient Lighting

One of the most common workplace lighting mistakes is not having enough of it – whether natural light or electrical lighting. Insufficient light in your workplace can impact your business in a number of ways:

• Decrease the productivity of your workforce
• Causes eye strain, headaches and fatigue 
• Increase the chances of accidents
• Causes discomfort to employees

Yet, with so many lighting options available (modular lighting being one of the most popular), there’s no excuse for poor lighting in your building. These issues must be addressed with designing an office space, and professional architects, designers and contractors should ensure that you have adequate lighting throughout. When done correctly, this can help you get the most from your employees, safeguard their wellbeing and boost general productivity.

2. Harsh Lighting

Another common mistake that businesses make in their offices is installing lights that are too harsh. Many offices use fluorescent lightbulbs within their suspended ceiling systems, however, these are often harsh and can increase glare and reflection. In addition, this type of lighting can also sometimes produce a humming noise that can be distracting for employees and create an uncomfortable work environment.

3. Inflexible Design

Forward-thinking businesses will want to incorporate a flexible lighting design in the workplace, one that can change as the business’s needs also change. One way to ensure flexibility with the lighting in your office is to install a suspended ceiling and position your light sources where they’re needed the most. This way, if you change the layout of your office design, you can also move the lights in this type of commercial ceiling easily and without causing too much disruption.

Ensuring that you create a flexible lighting design for your workplace can therefore help to reduce any expenses and unnecessary disruption later on, should you need to change the layout or functioning of your office space.

4. Inappropriate Colour Temperature

Another mistake that you’ll want to avoid when designing your office lighting is selecting an inappropriate colour temperature (also known as Correlated Colour Temperature or CCT) for the lights you use. The colour temperature is generally measured using the Kelvin scale and there are three common colour temperatures that many offices use. These are:

• 2700-3300K – Warm Light
• 3300-5300K – Cool Light
• 6500K – Daylight

Selecting an appropriate colour temperature for your workplace is key to keeping your employees comfortable and ensuring they have sufficient light to carry out their tasks. The best option for your office will depend on how open the space is and how much natural light your office gets throughout the day.

5. A Lack of Natural Light

We recommend ensuring your office space has plenty of natural light, as this can benefit your workforce in many ways. Natural light in an office space can increase your team’s energy levels, boost their productivity and stir creativity. It can also help your employees to sleep better at night, boost staff satisfaction and support their health.

To maximise the light in your workplace, ensure you utilise window light as much as possible – try not to block the daylight from flooding your office. If the design of your office incorporates partitions, you can use various types of glass partitions that will divide the space and allow natural light to flood the area.

6. Ignoring Energy Efficiency

When designing your workplace, you also want to ensure the lighting that you select has climate-positive qualities. By selecting energy-efficient lighting for your office, you can help reduce your energy usage and your energy bills, which is handy in times like these when energy prices are through the roof!

The most energy-efficient option available is LED lighting and, although these lights can cost more, they last longer, use less energy and can help to reduce the carbon footprint of your company.

Looking for more tips? Read our article on how to design a sustainable office.

Let There Be Light

Whether you need help with the fit out of a new office space or the design aspects of an existing workplace, we’re here to help. Contact one of our helpful and knowledgeable staff members who can answer any of your questions about the products and services we offer. Together, we can plan, design and build the perfect office space for your business.