Custom Glass Walls: 5 Reasons to Add Light + Life to Your Design

Workplaces created with custom glass walls enhance employee health and wellbeing and boost productivity. Custom glass walls offer many advantages for creating workplace design with the employee in mind.

Research is showing the growing importance in employee mental health. When employees are happy and fulfilled at the office, it leads to increased employee engagement and individual performance.

Worldwide research is showing significant growth globally for glass walls over the next several years. Interior glass allows designers and architects to divide a room without sacrificing floor space and light diffusion. Sustainable glass wall solutions and glass partitions are ideal for creating comfortable and practical office working environments for employees.

Natural light changes how shapes, colours, patterns, textures, and people interact, and glass walls are one of the simplest ways to update an office or commercial space.

Cognitive Market Research shows that the market by application is also growing well into 2027 with increases nearing 30%.

Why is this market application gaining traction? Here are 5 key reasons.

5 Top Reasons to Design with Custom Glass Walls

Interior glass doors, walls, and partitions are common in modern offices. As the crises of the pandemic has settled, the current trend is shifting away from isolation back to more time spent in the workplace where staff members can collaborate, network, and benefit from natural light.

1. Light and Open Sight Lines for Productivity

Custom glass walls allow for natural light which has repeatedly shown to boost productivity. Sunlight plays a major role.

Research by Cornell University Professor Dr. Alan Hedge reinforces the connection of natural light and employee wellbeing. Dr. Hedge’s research study found that optimization of natural light in an office significantly improves health and wellness among workers. In this study, workers in daylight office environments reported a 51% drop in eyestrain, a 63% drop in headaches and a 56% reduction in drowsiness.

2. Impactful Office Design that is Modern 

Custom glass wall solutions enhance an office’s visual appeal, which impacts an environment. Glass walls immediately give a space a modern and elegant appearance, making it open and inviting for both clients and staff. Designing and creating office environments now includes curved glass walls and double glass features for STC requirements.

Glass partitions and walls allow for privacy but also offer sight lines to see what is taking place in the larger office environment when required. Glass office partitions reduce sound when compared to typical cubicles. This limits distractions and improves concentration.

3. Accomodates Modular, Flexible Workspaces 

Glass walls can improve office layouts which can be custom made or altered to better meet the demands of employees. Employees may require private workstations or require telephone booth style working areas.

Modular, adaptable, glass complements any office design. Any custom colour palette, piece of furniture, or motif can be used to enhance the glass walls. It can also protect investment as the glass will continue to function with your updated design for retrofits.

Modular office space boosts employee efficiency by using glass walls that have sliding doors or can remain open or closed like our Vista Telescopic Solution. Design and layout can be made according to employee needs.

4. Glass Wall Solutions are Sustainable Solutions

Architectural glass is better for the environment. Glass construction can result in lower construction expenses and reduce carbon footprint for businesses. Glass is also recyclable as are the accompanying supporting aluminium extrusions. Sustainable solutions that use aluminium extrusions offer engineers, architects, and designers attributes that are infinitely recyclable and meet the environmental demands of today’s commercial workplaces.

According to the Aluminium Extruders Council Environmental Product Declaration, aluminium extrusions are highly recyclable. Numerous extruders operate their own secondary smelting facilities in addition to purchasing billet from independent secondary smelters. The recycling rate for aluminum products has proven to be quite high with recycling rates of 90 – 95%, documented in high volume automotive and construction sectors.

In addition to aluminum extrusions, glass is also recyclable and more environmentally friendly than alternative building materials making it a greener choice. Architectural glass production uses less energy – from the mining of natural resources to the processing, manufacturing, transportation, and product delivery, than many other conventional building materials. Glass can reduce energy consumption and can be repeatedly re-used. Glass production also produces less waste as most waste can be remelted and used to produce new glass.

5. Boosts Employee Morale Long-Term

Glass walls in an office have been documented to boost morale. Allwork.Space reports that 78% of employees say that access to natural light and views improves their overall happiness and wellbeing.

A survey by an HR advisory firm found that employees crave something fundamental and essential to human needs: sunlight. In a research poll of 1,614 North American employees, the survey found that access to natural light and views of the outdoors are the number one attribute of the workplace environment – outranking perks like fitness centres and on-site childcare.

Employees said that access to natural light and views improves their overall happiness and wellbeing (78%), work satisfaction (73%), work performance (70%) and organizational commitment (54%). Over a third of employees feel that they don’t get enough natural light in their workspace.

47% of employees admit they feel tired or very tired from the absence of natural light or a window at their office, and 43% report feeling gloomy by the lack of light.

Understanding Solutions Available

There are many types of office partitions available in the market today. Understanding how solutions will be implemented is also key to the construction process as well as the workplace design and employees.

Despite other types of solid walls and dividers available, glass and aluminium partition solutions are more adaptable to rigid requirements associated with onsite construction. The key components being that the systems are customizable enabling a flexible more adaptable layout which we will examine in future blog articles.

To learn more about PC350 glass wall and door solutions please click here.