The research evidence is flowing into science-based publications – the sorts of workplaces developed in the last few years can indeed support people trying to work to their full potential.
Objective research, published in peer-reviewed journals, can take a while to materialize. First, a researcher has to notice a situation that they’d like to study and get a related investigation rolling; getting the required organizational/institutional approvals required to do that can take a lot of time. Whatever study is ultimately planned and OK’ed then needs to take place, and the data collected – whether it’s qualitative or quantitative – need to be analyzed.
In the most desirable scenarios, a team of professionals not affiliated with a study assesses its methods, statistical analyses, etc., before it is published; that process is known as “peer-review.” Finally, there can be lags of various durations between acceptance of a paper by a journal and its actual publication, but this gap is getting shorter as papers accepted for publication are now often available electronically in an “in press” state before official publication dates.
Sample recent workplace design-related studies include:
>Spivack and Milosevic have found that when people believe that they have more ability to determine where they’ll work, they’re more likely to select spaces that optimize their professional performance as well as their own wellbeing. This work indicates that giving people workplace options within a workplace, and outside it, can be a very good idea.
>Wohlers and another team of researchers have looked at worker experience in activity-based work environments. They’ve defined activity-based work environments as places where people can choose where they’ll work at any particular time. Providing places where people can do work requiring concentration alone and places where they can collaborate with others enhances job attitudes and employee vitality. Also, supplying a few more spaces for collaborative work than may technically be required is a particularly good idea. When people see a few open collaborative spaces they seem to get a special boost in job-related attitudes; those empty spaces can send the signal that if a task requires a space for group work, it will be available.
Spaces that recognize and respect employee needs, as professionals and human beings, are areas where those people will work to their full potential and have pleasant experiences, generally. Most people want to do their jobs well, and when the physical environments that surround them align with their mental and physical/tactical requirements, that becomes a lot more likely.
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.