Choosing the right colours for your home office

One of the benefits of working from home is having total freedom when it comes to designing your office.

You can choose whichever furnishings you fancy, and you’ve got complete control over your décor.

Today’s sponsored post from Calibre Furniture explains how your productivity can benefit from the right choice of colours for your home office:

When people are creating offices, their focus tends to fall on essential design features like chairs, desks and storage solutions. After all, as office furnishing specialist Calibre Furniture notes, the process of selecting these products can be a daunting one.

However, it’s not only your seating, workstation and other items that count. Choosing the colours for your home office is crucial too, and this post explores the reasons why.

Boost your mood.
You might not realise it, but the colours surrounding you in your workspace could be having a major impact on your mood. Research has suggested that office hues have the potential to lift or lower people’s spirits.

Testing the impact of colour on its workers, design firm Aquent painted its offices a different hue each week for six weeks. The company also got its workers to fill in questionnaires to test their reactions to the changes, and it passed these findings onto business psychology specialists Pearn Kandola for correlation and analysis.

The least well received colour was found to be grey, which tended to make workers feel down and demotivated. On the other hand, bolder hues like red helped to boost motivation.
So, if you tend to feel down in the dumps when you’re at your desk, perhaps it’s time to choose different colours for your home office.

Raise your productivity.
Another study, this time conducted by colour psychologist Dr David Lewis on behalf of Canon, suggested that different hues could increase or decrease productivity.

The expert got people to work through various tasks in ‘colour booths’ and found that when tested under their favourite shades, subjects were found to perform up to 10 per cent better at problem solving. Meanwhile, he identified blue as being the best colour for enhancing brain function.

If you struggle to concentrate when you’re at your workstation, or you find your problem solving skills aren’t quite up-to-scratch, you might want to consider donning your dungarees and getting your paint brushes out.

A savvy investment.
OK, so redecorating and refurnishing your home office will require a little time, effort and expenditure, but this should prove to be a worthwhile investment. After all, it could make your working days more pleasurable and it could even boost your productivity.

Photo credit: Greg Dillon, brand strategy consultant and founder of blog Strat-Talking.com. See the before and after pics of his home office at the bottom of the Spare Room Home Offices Gallery.