Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Beyond Biology
Many of the workplace design related conversations currently taking place are focused on the biology of keeping people using offices from inadvertently killing each other via COVID-19 microbes. Designing offices to keep people alive is indeed very, very important; but offices can do so much more for us than help us fight off a pandemic. Especially now, when so many people returning to onsite work are emotionally fragile, it’s important to remember the different ways that workplaces serve the people in them and the organizations that manage them. In a classic article from 2007, Elsbach and Bechky outline three main functions of workplaces: instrumental, symbolic and aesthetic. Since 2007, new technologies for remote meeting and work have become available, but those technologies combined still cannot comprehensively replicate an onsite work experience. Instrumental functions, as outlined by Elsbach and Bechky, are the sorts of things that first come to mind for …
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