Lately, I’m hearing more people say “I could work here (or there)” – and the working they’re referring to is not necessarily their best work, it’s just getting stuff done.
It seems that we’ve gotten to a point where spending time to get tasks accomplished is the objective. It’s like we can’t remember, anymore, work situations in which we’ve excelled, where we really did, in human resource-type terms, work to our full potential, either alone or in teams.
It’s as if we’ve spent so much time working in our home offices (that’re “pretty much OK”) and at our kitchen table (where as long as the kids are somehow at school we can’t hear anyone else talking, at least) we’ve forgotten how good it can feel to work in a place that actually works for us, one that moves our satisfaction and performance meters from some sort of neutral readings to ones that are decidedly positive.
Just making-do for so long is consistent with current levels of workplace malaise, or “burnout;” to use the word that’s seemingly on everyone’s lips. When humans are pressed into emergency action they can and will rise to the occasion, working extraordinarily hard wherever they are and doing good work. That kind of supreme effort can only continue for a short period of time before we become so mentally exhausted that we’re burned out, which is good neither for us nor the people we work for.
The places where we were working in 2019 were not necessarily the places that we’d have the fondest memories of, performance-wise. For a considerable period of time, onsite workplaces have been being fine-tuned as places for group work, and, no matter what the human resources-type pundits tell us, not all of us have careers that require all that much collaboration.
But for many, where we worked onsite in 2019 did help us be successful because workplace designers and managers have indeed learned something over the years and they actually do care about getting it right – creating spaces where people do their best work and have positive life experiences while doing so.
These workplace designers and managers have learned, for example:
- Silent workplace messaging, via things even as subtle as whether or not the organization is using Purell hand sanitizer or some discount brand with unknown effectiveness, drives worker mood, morale and performance. Tacit messaging always needs to support organizational culture, “how things get done around here.”
- People need choices and some control over where they work—and control comes from the ability to select a seat for a particular task, just as it does from turning on or off a light or opening or closing the blinds to block on-screen glare. Control (particularly of work location) is often the more reasonable way to deal with variations in how users process sensory information.
- Where people work must support what people are being asked to do and whatever it is that is evaluated during their performance reviews. Because performance leads to money through performance reviews, people are very, very serious about whatever it requires—whether that’s the highest speed internet access to Zoom with clients or shielding around that Zoom area so client confidentiality is not violated (which would be a fast route to making current clients former clients).
- Minds get tired and opportunities to refresh both mentally and physically (and get a decent cup of coffee when necessary) need to be part of every office. These refreshment zones are often places where people can socialize with others, in their own group or with others, and build the social bonds that encourage people to “go the extra mile,” – to put in more effort when required.
- Biophilic design is a lot more than adding a plant—and for primordial reasons buried deep in our history as a species, people do achieve more, perform at a much higher level, when they’re in a biophilicly designed space.
- People value their own health and the opportunity to move. Most employees do want to live to retirement, after all.
Employee perceptions are what really matters here; they often prevail over actual reality. But employees are not fools who can be easily bamboozled, as conscientious designers and managers know.
The workplaces people are returning to in 2022 are not the same ones they left in 2019, nor should they be. For starters, there’ll likely be more hybrid work situations in many of our futures and blending home workplaces and onsite ones seamlessly, so that people perform well in both is best done in a nuanced, more sophisticated way, recognizing that each sort of work environment can be fine-tuned for the activities best done there.
Workplaces can make it more likely that we’ll perform to our full potential, both as individuals and teams, particularly if we recognize their potential contributions and don’t settle for less than is required.
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.