It’s the sentence that’s on everyone’s lips: “I feel so burned out.” Many of the people uttering the phrase-of-the-moment are not just repeating what they’ve heard around the water cooler (which for many has become virtual). Their honest impression of their own mental condition is, really and truly, “burned out.”
To some extent design can help counter and even to some extent reverse burnout – but please don’t infer from this comment that a few environmental modifications can boost people all the way from not being in terribly good shape mental health-wise to pristine mental health – the sorts of changes in burnout we can hope to achieve via design boil down to somewhat lessening burnout severity, not eliminating it. Design is useful – but not magical.
As you face the bleary eyes of burned-out colleagues or clients for whom you’re developing new spaces consider the following “fixes”:
- Comfortable numbers of choices, say 4 to 6. An ABW with 4 or 5 different sorts of work areas can be useful when burnout is an issue. Too many choices can make us tense – we get concerned that we haven’t selected the right one, for example. But in general, as our autonomy goes up, so does our professional performance.
- Opportunities to personalize workspaces. The likelihood of burnout can be reduced when a person can personalize their work area – which means that they can modify it with items that belong to them and signal who they are as a person and what they feel good about when they ponder their lives. Personalizing requires assigned workspaces or if they’re not assigned, lockers where desktop items can be placed when desks are cleared at the end of the day. Personalization is really a form of control, but so important it warrants its own dot-point.
- Environmental clues that users read as “I’m valued.” For example, make sure, the hand sanitizer dispensers are stocked with the type of sanitizer that is getting all sorts of press as “killing all the bad stuff and none of the good.” If the design of workplaces aligns with what people need to accomplish to do their jobs well (if it allows them to concentrate when they need to focus, for example), a powerful signal is sent and received, that contributions being made are both recognized and respected. Environment-task fit has been directly linked to lower burnout levels. If users will receive positive signals from wonderful break areas where they can store and prepare the components of healthy lunches (and odds are they will), make sure that break areas support just that. To know exactly what to signal and how to do so, chats with users are necessary.
- Counter clutter. Provide storage spaces with solid fronts and sides to eliminate clutter.
- Support mental refreshment – via views of nature (still or moving) in art/photos/windows outdoors and water, for example. Very quietly played, pastoral soundscapes work here too. Mental refreshment is frequently discussed in this column, review previous issues for more on cognitive restoration.
There are other steps a concerned workplace designer or manager can take to keep burnout as low as possible among the people who will use the spaces being designed and/or managed– but making sure that the five conditions noted above are in place will help keep burnout from dominating the professional lives of employees.
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.