This may seem like a good time to make every sort of change to the office spaces you design or manage that you’ve ever anticipated, and that the budget allows.
For the most part people have been working away from the office for a while, giving us plenty of opportunities to re-design and re-do like mad, without concerns about disruptions to employee workdays. The situation practically demands that we seize this time to remake workplaces.
Resist! Certainly make any changes required to combat disease spread, but don’t make more modifications than those required. Your goal should be to ensure that the spaces workers return to seem familiar.
A space that’s familiar is predictable and predictability reduces employee stress. Employees returning to in-office work will be tense enough by returning to their commutes and all of the other aspects of daily living that used to boost their blood pressure even before they got to the office – and by hearing news reports indicating they should be stressed out about returning to the office – the spaces they encounter at work should be as similar to those they remember as possible.
Familiarity not only keeps stress levels in check but also boosts trust. In the post-pandemic world it seems unlikely that there’s a more important among-employee sentiment than trust in the boss, trust that those “in control” have control over the situations that present themselves and are acting in the best interests of all.
After a few months, when people have settled back into working at the office, workplaces can slowly begin to evolve, which has always been the best course of action.
We do indeed get bored if nothing ever changes in the spaces around us and boredom leads to a stressed disinterest that isn’t any manager’s goal.
Gradual change preserves predictability and tops-up trust while beating boredom. A continuing evolution is consistent with biophilic design and is what we see in the gardens that have brought us so much pleasure recently (in the BBC’s “Gardeners’ World” or live).
Workplaces should be designed so that spaces change-up some approximately every 3 months and continuing management practices should ideally lead to ongoing refreshes being made. A workplace that is un-dynamic is a dud.
Mother Nature has gotten the desired rate of change right (as she has so many other things) and at about the rate the seasons change in more temperate climates the designed environments people experience everywhere should shift some.
These changes are meant to be gradual adjustments. Dramatic differences require user focus which distracts from the tasks at hand and often leads to stress—and stress makes employee performance to their full potential impossible.
So what is a gradual shift? The color of the walls in the reception area might change slightly, while the furnishings remain the same. Maybe a new freestanding art piece gets added near the doorway of the employee cafeteria—or a few paintings rotate into and out of display every quarter. Plants of various types may come and go. Furniture may be slightly rearranged in the employee break area.
These changes require a will on the part of management, they have to OK that repainting, for example, but they also require that capabilities be built into the environment. Design must anticipate reasonable future changes. If there is no floor space near the entrance to the cafeteria, that sculpture can’t be added, for example.
Designing-in flexibility means designing-in opportunities for spaces to evolve at both a micro-scale (adding that art piece at the cafeteria door) and a macro-scale (opportunities to add another floor or wing as the company grows and expands).
Resist massive change now, but establish physical opportunities and processes to encourage gradual modifications later.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.