The evidence is in the academic/peer-reviewed press and the popular press and in our own life experiences: people need to have access to a retreat at the office, a place where they can be out of contact with others – during times by themselves, people do the work that’s essential for their mental and physical wellbeing. It’s a place where they make sense of recent events in their lives and prepare to move forward.
Retreating briefly from the world around us is vital for our mental and physical health. We all need a place to get away from the crush of our daily life occasionally, to be somewhere we can’t really see or hear other people. If we can pick out what others are up to, we can’t focus on what’s going on in our own minds; the fact that our brains developed to support what in our pre-history was life-sustaining attention to what others were doing sees to that. When we don’t have even brief periods of time away from others, we become very stressed and our brains start to work ineffectively. Retreating is not the same as finding a place to work without being distracted or refreshing cognitively after concentrating for longish periods of time. It is an even more fundamental brain operation than distraction-free working and cognitive restoration.
This article is not an argument for including nap pods everywhere, although cognitive performance and wellbeing are better after a refreshing snooze – and a nap pod can be a visual and acoustic retreat. It’s an argument for including spaces that are large enough for one or two people to sit in briefly, out of view of others and in acoustic isolation, in offices.
Designing retreat spaces into offices is practical. People will retreat, whether you design in spaces for it or not. If retreat spaces are incorporated into an environment consciously, users can retreat and return to whatever they’re getting paid to do more efficiently.
A retreat space does not have to be fancy, but it does need to separate us visually and acoustically from the office hubbub. A space just barely larger than a chair with a true door with heavily frosted glass is a fine retreat, for example. It’s actually stressful for people to be in a space that’s completely quiet, so the acoustic shielding in a retreat needs to prevent people on one side of the walls from deciphering the words being said on the other side of that wall but should never create that “I must be the last person on the planet”effect.
One of the at-work retreat spaces that has gotten a lot of attention in the last five years or so, in the academic and popular press, is the office bathroom. People are ducking into stalls to retreat.
A tangential matter: Bathroom stalls are moving beyond simply places of retreat. They are becoming places where people travel to work uninterrupted – even on laptops. This situation leads to the inevitable question: Should workplaces generally be designed so that people do not feel a need to work in the bathrooms, or should bathrooms be designed so that they are more efficient places to work, for example, via laptop work surfaces?
Another tangent: People “read” bathroom environments to get an idea about management’s true opinions about and respect for those they manage. With a lot of extra in-bathroom time, people have more time to decide if their employer is actually concerned about them and their wellbeing –an important argument for thoughtful, human-centered restroom design.
For our mental and physical wellbeing, all humans need to retreat from time-to-time. The people who use the spaces you develop and manage regularly try to find a haven at work, or they leave work to retreat (for example, to their cars in parking lots). Built-in at-work retreats mean employees can cognitively order their worlds, return expeditiously to work, and perform to their full potential.
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.