Since COVID-19 vaccines have started to be injected, conversations seem to have turned to post-pandemic life.
People have the same sorts of psychological firepower now that they did in 2019, so it’s hard to anticipate how future workplaces can or should be different from those that employees left, except in very obvious ways related to disease transmission. We’re still all driven by a desire to do our jobs well, have a reasonable level of control over our lives, and interact with other people when we choose to do so, for example, just as self-determination theory makes clear.
People’s desire to do their jobs well has lead them to make all sorts of modifications to their homes/home offices, while they’ve been compelled to work only there. Some workers have tried to eliminate distractions, incorporate mentally refreshing experiences, and take positive aesthetics steps in their home workplaces, for example. Predictably, some of these changes have produced the desired effects on professional performance and quality-of-life and others have not.
When employees return to the workplace, many will, no doubt, be quick to share information with colleagues and management about during-pandemic physical work environments that they feel boosted their performance.
The material shared can be very useful to workplace researchers and design practitioners if they take advantage of it.
Conditions that employees established in their homes, which they perceive as having enhanced their performance, are likely to have actually done so. Some of these changes could be generally applicable, beyond one person’s home to many, and sharing information about them can lead to a better understanding of what some employees actually do.
Employees who focus their back-to-work place-related conversations with colleagues on views of nature or art, etc., to help them restock their mental energy, may be more stressed by their workplace tasks than programming research indicated. If other workers respond positively to modifications made to spark tension free thinking, it will be clear that a need dealt with by one worker is relevant to others.
If another worker has moved their home workplace from a more isolated spot in their home to another that’s more centrally located, and co-workers applaud that move, it seems possible that whatever this set of colleagues is doing does not benefit much from distraction-low spaces.
Collecting information about how home workplaces evolved, and how desirable those evolutions seem to colleagues, can thus be useful—particularly if it is done before employees actually return to corporate offices, so the spaces that greet them when they return even more effectively serve their needs. Any such research logically has several phases, gathering data about work area evolutions and getting co-worker responses to those changes.
Understanding what people do at work can be a real challenge for designers. They often have only limited time with any user group and sometimes can only collect info via less than optimal tools, such as surveys. Determining what people did in their homes to do the best work they could will shed valuable light on what employees are rewarded for doing—and how future workplaces can most effectively align with their professional needs.
Sure, there are potential issues with collecting info from people about how their home workplaces have evolved. People without design training may not fully grasp all the ways that they could have potentially modified their home workplaces, just as those of us who are not tax accounts don’t know all the possible tax breaks available to us. So, since the design efforts of people without any design training is being researched, it’s important to get at the root of why a change was made, not necessarily the specific step taken. When a design team knows why a change was made, they can draw upon their training and experience to determine how work environments can support a particular way of thinking, or whatever is of interest.
Design researchers need to directly acknowledge when changes were made to environments to deal with situations that won’t continue when people return to corporate offices and when a change was made by someone who interacts with their world in a nonstandard way. For example, even if someone states that they worked better at home when they made sure that their workplace thermometer read 100 degrees F, it is not a good use of the design team’s energy to consider raising the temperatures throughout a building to that level, or even to ask the reporter’s colleagues about what they’d think about working in 105 degrees F (the peer-reviewed press indicates temperatures of 70 -72 degrees Fahrenheit with 40% to 70% humidity are best for brain functionality).
Learning about how people have customized their home work environments over time can provide meaningful insights into the work lives of user groups. Steps people take in their own homes to help themselves work well are not always beautiful, and often not even attractive, but those that persevere often endure because they have a perceived positive effect on worker performance, they work—and in this context, that’s enough reason to probe their potential usefulness among user groups generally
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com). Research Design Connections reports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. 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), Designology (Mango, 2019), 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.