Lighting in the office: bright bulbs for bright minds

What is the right lighting in the office?

According to experts, the optimal workplace in terms of lighting would be in the open air, under a slowly passing, loose cloud cover. An ideal case that a new, still very expensive light tile system for office ceilings can recreate. The ceiling is hung with large-format LED screens that can simulate daylight on the one hand and can also transmit content on the other. Functional light is just as possible as imitating a slightly cloudy summer sky.

LED lighting in the workplace creates pleasant and well-thought-out office lighting. Not only offices can be ideally illuminated, but also clinics - wherever daylight is needed. The light intensity that these systems are capable of is actually considerable: they can currently provide 20,000 lux, which is roughly comparable to summer daylight. As with any technology that is still a long way from widespread use, the following applies here: these systems are still quite expensive for the end user. It is definitely cheaper at the moment to implement the principles of ideal work lighting with a little common sense and a little knowledge of physics and color theory.
Although in the following the focus is on the work on the Office chair In principle, the situation is not much different for crafts: the tailor should put his sewing machine in a good light, just as the carpenter should put his workbench in a good light. 

What do I have to pay attention to - what characterizes good lighting in the office?

Different values ​​apply to different places in the office: If a workstation is directly next to a window, there must be a brightness of 300 lux. The further it moves towards the middle of the room or against an interior wall, 500 to 1000 lux is required. Background: The illuminance “Lux” is calculated from the quotient of the luminous intensity of a point light source in “candela” and the square of the distance in meters. A “candela” is roughly the brightness emitted by a candle - measured in lux, a candle at a distance of two meters would have 0.25 lux. So you would need a pretty large candlestick to provide legally compliant lighting in an office.

Office workers find it much easier if they use modern technology instead.

In addition to natural daylight, ceiling lights produce pleasant indirect light. LED ceiling panels are also often used for the basic lighting of a room. Hidden LED strips and strips also give the room a pleasant ambience.
However, if you need more targeted light for manual processing of documents, a separate desk lamp can help. However, make sure that it does not blind you directly or through a reflection during use. Floor lamps or other mobile lighting devices can also be used for this. 

Prefer real plants over real ones Artificial plants, an additional plant lamp can be used. This provides your greenery with the necessary UV light and ensures a pleasant and modern room ambience.

Energy-saving LED lamps or fluorescent tubes with the light color “neutral white” or “daylight white” come closest to natural light. These lamps in conjunction with large windows that let in plenty of natural daylight, plus an individually adjustable desk lamp are the best combination. Another step that is intended to bring daylight into closed rooms is the OLED, the “organic light-emitting diode”. In contrast to its inorganic sister, the inorganic light-emitting diode (LED), it can be manufactured using thin-film technology. Every smartphone, tablet or modern flat screen owner already has such an OLED in their possession: They are used to illuminate screens. Because they only generate a small amount of heat, they can also be integrated into building materials as lighting, for example in wood or ceiling panels. 

A basic distinction is made between three light colors or color temperatures:

Warm white: The bronze-shimmering light is between 2,700 and 3,300 Kelvin and spreads a slightly dim light, which gives the room a cozy ambience. Please note that this is not a work light. Warm white light is more common in living rooms or bedrooms, where the atmosphere should be correspondingly relaxing. 

Neutral white: The slightly colder light starts at 3,300 Kelvin and goes up to 5,300 Kelvin. The neutral white light can be found primarily in bathrooms.

Daylight white: With a Kelvin value between 5,300 and 7,500, this light color appears rather bright and is primarily used in offices, kitchens and functional rooms where you sometimes carry out delicate activities.

The three color temperatures are also based on the lighting conditions during the day. At sunrise the lighting ratio is warm white, in the morning it is neutral white and at midday it is at a Kelvin value that corresponds to daylight white.

The mixture does it: As already mentioned, one of the most important principles is the mix of direct and indirect light. You can achieve this through the interaction of daylight and artificial light. If your office is already too dark, daylight lamps as ceiling panels can help simulate natural daylight.

Don't be blinded: It is also necessary to avoid glare and reflections so as not to put unnecessary strain on your eyes. Due to the limited visibility and the resulting poor posture, glare can even lead to skeletal diseases. Also a white one Desk This can be caused by bright midday sun. A stylish desk pad that can prevent glare is a good idea here. So make sure to illuminate your workplace evenly and avoid shadows.

Adjust the light intensity to your activities: Of course, it should be noted that not every activity requires direct lighting. If you work on a PC or laptop, light indirect lighting is sufficient to weaken the light-dark contrast and thus relieve your eyes.

Adjust the lighting according to your biorhythm: Did you know that our biorhythm adjusts to the time of day? Our sleep-wake rhythm is determined by a light-dark rhythm and depends on the season and sunrise and sunset. That's why there are many people who find it difficult to sleep when it's light outside. They usually get tired as soon as it gets dark. This happens because melatonin is produced in the body when brightness decreases. In contrast, we are awake and productive in the morning thanks to the serotonin and the stress hormone cortisol produced.

In summary: It's about the right interplay between natural and artificial as well as direct and indirect light. There is no magic formula for office lighting: the perception of light is and remains a personal matter - older employees need a little more light than young ones.

What influence does the lighting have?

The lighting in the office not only affects our physical and mental well-being, but also has a direct impact on our work itself. But poor lighting doesn't just affect our productivity. The further consequences are rapid fatigue, unproductivity and eye problems, and in the long term there is even a risk of poor eyesight or depression. You need to know that working on the computer in particular puts a lot of strain on the eyes. While you fixate on a fixed surface at a short distance over a long period of time, you have to constantly tense yourself and compensate for the difference between screen and ambient brightness. While the physical damage is obvious to everyone, a small example is needed for the mental aspect: Some people are more, others less, prone to gradually becoming sad in the winter months. According to common expert opinion, the reason is that the human body also falls into a kind of hibernation in order to save energy. The side effect is general depression, commonly known as winter depression. Following this logic, it cannot be healthy to spend eight or more hours a day in semi-darkness all year round.

The negative effects of poor lighting in the office have already become clear. In contrast, the right office lighting increases work performance immensely. Plenty of daylight and optional glare protection, in conjunction with direct and indirect artificial workplace lighting, relieves eye strain and promotes effective work and healthy posture. Ergonomic lighting not only increases the health of employees but also their satisfaction and concentration. In addition, a well thought-out lighting concept leads to a not insignificant cost reduction for the company. 

The effect of light on the human body has been clearly proven. Natural sunlight is the best light for people. This improves both concentration and attention, which inevitably leads to better work performance. Good lighting in the office not only improves motivation, but employees are also less likely to get sick. So it has a positive impact on the company overall.

Good light is also a question of furniture

The furniture and office equipment can also make a decisive difference in lighting colors: if a table surface is reflective, for example, even the lowest-reflective monitors or ceiling lights will not help. Daylight cannot completely illuminate darker rooms compared to bright rooms. Of course, that doesn't mean that our offices have to be sterile and bright and look like dentist's offices. Light colors and low-reflective surfaces can also include walls painted in pastel colors or light wood. A cut glass table in front of a light gray wall is also ideal for a modern office. So if you have good lighting at your workplace - whether at home or in the office - you have already done the majority of things right. But if you want to perfect the topic of “lighting”, you should also have a little idea about the effect of light colors.

It's not just when dealing with colleagues that different rules apply in lounges than in offices or conference rooms. The different colors of light have been proven to have different effects on the human organism. Your own intuition says a lot: no one would nail a xenon lamp to the ceiling of their living room in order to be able to see their living room clearly in the cold blue glow, but would tend to want to leave the room in a hurry. 

Just as warm light colors should be used in the living space at home, the lighting signals in the living room should also be discreetly set to “cozy”. In a break or creative room, a slightly orange light color would be ideal: orange stands for optimism and joy of life and promotes creative thinking or sociability. Blue light represents calm and promotes language skills and clear thinking - making it a good choice as a lighting temperature in the office. And red? Red stands for love, passion and anger, so it has no place in the office. As a light color used selectively, it increases vitality. But if you overdo it with the red light influence of office lighting, you will, as I said, become quite restless.

But it's not just the color of light and the technology used for office lighting that play a role. Taking the architecture into consideration also helps: Desks should be placed with the short side facing the window, i.e. “into the room”, so that daylight falls on the monitor from the left or right side. There shouldn't be one lamp hanging above the desk, but ideally two; one on the left, the other on the right above the worker.

Are there any regulations for lighting in the office?

Various legal regulations and standards must be met in companies. Among other things, DIN EN 12464-1 and the Occupational Safety and Health Act as well as the Workplace Ordinance (ArbStättV) provide information about this. For employers, legal requirements ensure at least the necessary basic requirements that they must meet in this regard for their employees, but for self-employed people, conditions are often still quite obscure. Also home office workers (see also the article Home office: At home in the office instead of in the office at home) are, so to speak, running into a problem that could be avoided with a few logical thoughts and steps: they strain their eyes in dim office light, have to struggle with poor posture because they avoid light reflections for practically eight hours a day - or tend to be restless because they have to use the cozy, warm light temperature that is usual for living rooms at their workplace office furniture insert. The lighting in the office is of course also regulated by law: The “Ordinance on safety and health protection when working on screen devices” and the “Ordinance on workplaces”, which can be viewed on the homepage of the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, provide information.