In a February 9 article in the New York Times, Liz Alderman writes about the stressful lives of many European “permatemps,” people who are stuck working a seemingly endless series of temporary jobs (“’Feeling ‘Pressure All the Time on Europe’s Treadmill of Temporary Work,” www.nytimes.com).
Alderman uses case studies to introduce the life experiences of permatemps:
“While the region’s economy is finally recovering, more than half of all new jobs created in the European Union since 2010 have been through temporary contracts. This is the legacy of a painful financial crisis that has left employers wary of hiring permanent workers in a tenuous economy where growth is still weak. Under European labor laws, permanent workers are usually more difficult to lay off and require more costly benefit packages, making temporary contracts appealing…Temporary work has become widespread in the United States, too, where the explosion of the so-called gig economy has made job-hopping the new norm for a growing pool of young workers. But the situation is verging on the extreme in Europe…Perhaps no group has felt the sting of the economic fallout more sharply than Millennials.”
Permatemps may never come into the offices of any of their employers, but if they do, workplace design should be used to reduce their at-work tension levels, to the extent possible. De-stressing permatemps is likely to improve the professional performance of both the permatemps and their coworkers.
When many users will be new, it’s particularly important that spaces and the things in them are straightforward to use and operate in common sense ways. That means that printers should be located in the middle of work areas (properly shielded, of course) and not in distant and difficult to find bays, and that faucets in break rooms can be operated without tutorials, for example.
Needless to say, if a permatemp may work in several offices for a single company, things will flow more smoothly if all of those offices are designed in similar ways. Ways of working, physical and electronic, need to be standardized between locations and employers, if at all possible. For example, if one conference room reservation system predominates in an area or an industry, it should be selected for use in new workplaces being developed; people often don’t have the time to focus on and learn new ways of doing basic work tasks, such as reserving a conference room.
To directly combat the high stress levels experienced by people without permanent jobs, comfortably calm work environments should be designed. That means lots of green leafy plants, natural light and materials (particularly wood with visible grain), and unsaturated, light colors, for starters. Also, designing in lots of opportunities for cognitive restoration are a good idea. They’ll help permatemps replenish the stocks of mental energy they’ve depleted doing focused work. Fish tanks and nature views are great for restocking cognitive resources, when they can be designed in. When they can’t, realistic nature images, still and on video, are viable options, for example.
Since permatemps have so little power over their professional lives, it’s particularly important that they have some control over the places where they work. Mood and performance will get big boosts if they can choose from among a carefully curated set of preset light levels and on-site work area options, for example.
Signaling to permatemps that their work is valued is similarly, a great idea – for example, by providing them with places to work where they can concentrate, if their work requires focus, or that use finishes and furnishings the user culture has positive associations to (which can be identified via user research).
Being a permatemp is tough. Workplace design can make the lives of permatemps a little bit more pleasant, which has positive repercussions for the wellbeing of the permatemps as well as the organizations that employ them, at least for a while.
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.