Optimize Your Cannabis Lab for Productivity and Collaboration

When you are designing or upgrading your cannabis laboratory, you’ll want to keep productivity and collaboration in mind. When your lab is productive, your company will produce better results and obtain more clients. Before you rush to the nearest laboratory supply company, consider some of the top tips to bolster productivity.

Pay Attention to Color

Have you ever noticed how shopping centers, retail stores, and restaurants utilize different colors in their designs? Colors have been proven to impact mood and emotions. Select lab colors that will give the desired effect.

Sharp and vivid colors: You’ll most likely see these in fast-food restaurants or other areas with high turnover. Reds are meant to enhance energy while yellows help people feel alert.

Bright colors: Reds, blues, and greens are used to help create focus.

Cool colors: Blues and greens are often used to promote creative thinking.

While you may not have a vast variety of color options when it comes to laboratory tables and lab cabinets, you can personalize each item in your lab to promote a good mood and make lab techs more efficient. 

Pay Attention to Posture

When employees use less exertion, and few motions to complete tasks helps increase productivity. Mostly, reducing the number of movements in regular routines keeps employees from becoming fatigued. When purchasing lab tables, chairs, and laboratory workbenches, look for the kind that adjusts. Look for floor mats that help relieve pain from standing for long periods. 

When considering where employees will sit or stand, it’s worth designing a lab with a mixture of both open and closed spaces. Having some proximity between researchers can contribute to collaboration. If possible, keep researchers on the same floor so that they are more likely to bump into each other outside of the lab. Chance encounters, even between disciplines, is a great way to promote positive work relationships and collaboration.

Pay Attention to Lighting

Proper lighting helps regulate your circadian rhythms. This regulation promotes more significant health and productivity. It has been shown that employees with access to natural light are less likely to call off and have higher rates of job satisfaction.

When possible, work to create natural views in the lab. Go for large windows that provide long views of the outside world. One of the significant health benefits of having outdoor views has to do with your eyes.

Because there are different distances available on which to focus, your eyes get exercise through dilating. This exercise reduces eye strain and allows employees to remain focused for more extended periods of time.

Pay Attention to Distractions

A great deal of work requires concentration. Excessive noise and other interruptions can take several minutes to overcome. Having multiple interruptions throughout the workday and cost hours of work.

Some labs have introduced white or pink noise into the working area, while others have designated quiet zones. If your lab space doesn’t have room for multiple zones, consider providing noise-canceling headphones to your employees.

While cannabis testing laboratory upgrades aren’t free, they can save money in the long run by creating a more productive and collaborative environment. If your budget doesn’t allow for any significant changes right away, consider implementing smaller steps to start the process.

A little bit of paint and reorganizing the room can make a huge difference. If you’re not sure how to convert your lab space into a more productive environment, consider working with a laboratory design specialist who can work with your specific needs.

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Important Design Considerations When Renovating Your Laboratory

How to Properly Clean and Disinfect Your Lab Benches

Easy Guide to Keep Your Laboratory Clean

Most people believe that cleaning is a simple matter of routine. That’s mostly true in casual environments like kitchens, garages, and offices, but when it comes to technical or scientific facilities like laboratories, cleaning and maintenance are far more important.

Contamination, for example, can ruin days or weeks of work, and accidents can ruin both equipment and experiments. Accidents can also put laboratory personnel in danger, especially considering the hazards that fill most laboratory storage.

Inspection

You can’t clean what you can’t see. Knowing where to look and how to detect potential sources of contamination is crucial in a lab setting. For example, given a choice between searching for contaminants in the sink or on lab furniture or a countertop, where would an experienced technician start? If they’ve spent any real-time in a lab, they’re going to start with the sink, because that is where equipment, containers, chemicals, and tools gather. That’s where dirt will also accumulate.

Structure

Any damage to lab cabinets or fixtures must be repaired at once. If dangerous chemicals leak into the interior structure of a sink, fixture, or piece of furniture, it can have numerous ramifications beyond the potential damage to an expensive piece of equipment. Certain chemicals can cause fire hazards. Others can dissolve protective surfaces and even corrode metal fixtures, creating electrical shorts or chemical leaks.

Believe it or not, many structural and mechanical problems begin as cleaning and inspection issues. Damage to a fixture or countertop is guaranteed to become a cleaning issue in short order. Always remember you can’t clean what you can’t see.

Schedule

One of the most successful organizations in the history of the human race is the British Royal Navy. They set the standards many navies are still trying to match. At the core of the Royal Navy’s secrets of success was a near-obsessive focus on putting cleanliness to a schedule. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it cut down on disease and food spoilage. It also improved morale among both officers and crew.

The same principles apply to any organization. Cleanliness has an organic effect on efficiency. Putting cleaning on a regular schedule guarantees the maximum benefit from preserving facilities, avoiding safety issues, and improving morale among everyone who uses the lab. The more frequent these activities become, the more noticeable they will become. After cleaning becomes a habit, it will have endless benefits.

Education

No principle survives a lack of education. A cleaning policy can improve the lab facility if it is communicated to everyone involved and becomes part of the standard training regimen. The good news is all of the facts regarding education are easily communicated and justified, so it should be relatively easy to get everyone on board from the beginning.

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source https://labtechsupplyco.com/easy-guide-to-keep-your-laboratory-clean/

How To Increase Storage and Efficiency With Your Lab Tables

The keys to efficiency are versatility and mobility. The design for any workspace should consider those two principles. When it comes to lab design, efficiency can be expanded to include storage solutions to create an optimized workspace.

Multiple Use Storage

Both floorplans and the lab tables they contain can take advantage of the multiple-use principle. For example, if a workbench can be used for two different workflows, then it bypasses the need to increase floor capacity and install two separate pieces of furniture.

When it is necessary to make maximum use of minimal resources, sometimes mastering a particular task isn’t as crucial as making provisions for both. This is true when pursuing any objective that requires versatility.

Bringing the Work to You

If lab personnel make continual use of storage space, making the storage solutions mobile may improve efficiency. If a piece of furniture has unique features that are in constant use, bringing it closer to personnel increases efficiency.

Setting up a space so lab workers don’t have to cross the room several times to retrieve and replace equipment does the same. Workers can be made mobile by optimizing open floor space and arranging workbenches strategically when permanent benches and fixtures cannot be portable.

Open Spaces

Good laboratory work requires a great deal of writing and documenting. Paper notebooks, mobile devices, and books often find their way to lab tables. And then those items end up damaged or destroyed by chemical spills because there isn’t enough space to fit everything on the workbench surface.

Efficiency requires space, and space can only be acquired if it is part of a design principle. Documents, equipment, and experiments can be damaged if there is too much crowding or clutter on the workbench surface.

Documentation

Imagine an entirely new lab worker walks into a facility. Which is the better option?

1. Requiring them to look for everything a first time and then relying on their memory to find it again
2. Labeling everything in the lab, so there is no question where items are stored.

If storage efficiency can be improved by mobility and versatility, it can be improved again by making it crystal clear where everything is by a glance.

The human brain is very good at two things:
1. Pattern recognition
2. Terrain mapping

Human beings see patterns in everything, and they can remember where important things are with seemingly infinite capacity. Setting up your workspace to take advantage of these two talents makes everything more efficient by design. It creates that mythical combination of efficiencies called “synergy.”

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source https://labtechsupplyco.com/how-to-increase-storage-and-efficiency-with-your-lab-tables/