Profitably Healthy Companies: Principles of Organizational Growth and Development

JEREMY BENTHAM DOES not get much coverage in these modern times. Those who have heard of him today know him for one of two reasons. First, his final wishes were to be taxidermized and put on permanent display at the University College London and be wheeled out for parties should his friends miss him. He has sat at the college for the past two hundred years. Second, the idea of an “all-seeing” panopticon occupied his attention for three decades.¹ Bentham imagined a circular, donut-shaped prison with a glass encased guard station in the middle. The outer circular building contained the prison cells that were the thickness of the structure. Windows on the outside of the ring allowed natural light to enter. The inner windows were designed so that guards could see into the cells, but the prisoners could not see out. Therefore, the prisoners would never know if they were being watched. If you think about Apple’s new-ish headquarters as a prison with an observation tower in the middle, you would have an idea of the design concept Bentham contemplated (see figure 6.1 for Bentham’s conception). As oppressive-sounding as this construction seems, Bentham’s idea was far superior to the alternatives at the time.² It was never built.

Bentham believed that the concept of the panopticon could be applied in any theater in which surveillance was necessary to positively affect behavior. Because people did not know whether they were being watched, they would self-monitor and behave in normative ways. Thus, institutional design could be used to enforce the internalization of values and positively affect behavior change. As it happens, Bentham co-opted the idea for the panopticon from his younger brother, Samuel, who was commissioned by a Russian prince to build a factory. Samuel designed the factory in a circular configuration so that owners could keep an eye on the serfs. In turn, the brother had stolen this idea from a Parisian Military School where the design enabled the masters of the school to surveille the bedchambers of students.³

The idea of building supervision into factory design was a prologue to scientific management as the Industrial Revolution advanced. As industry became more mechanized and inputs and outputs more easily quantified, management’s desire for precision grew—a desire, we might add, that has not entirely vanished from the 21st century business landscape as evidenced by the intensity of measurement in Amazon’s distribution centers.4 The workplace became increasingly quota and count focused, and compliance with standards and fulfillment of productivity goals required more intense observations of employees. Furthermore, business owners and management consultants, such as Josiah Wedgewood and Frederick Taylor, recommended austere work environments in which effort was economically focused on the tasks at hand.⁵

Although companies incrementally added productivity enhancements to the workplace, such as job specialization, interchangeable parts, and assembly lines, by the 1920s and 1930s, businesses began to think more expansively about productivity, including the ambient conditions in which work was performed. Thus, the Committee of Industrial Lighting sponsored a series of studies at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois. The sensible thesis of the studies was that the physical working condition of illumination would affect worker productivity. Despite the questionable quality of the experiments, the dominant conclusion at the time was that observed productivity gains were attributable to supervisory attention and concern, and not to lighting.⁶ In hindsight, it is difficult to disentangle the provision of adequate lighting from a concern for workers. We once consulted to the distribution centers of a major supermarket chain where lighting intensities were reduced to save on costs: Employees interpreted their low-light conditions as a disregard for their welfare. A recent study confirms these employee sentiments: A survey of healthcare professionals across ten hospitals showed that the relationship between the quality of the physical environment and job satisfaction and organizational commitment was mediated by feelings of support—those who believed they worked in better working environments felt more valued by management.⁷

Nevertheless, at the time of Hawthorne, the study results invigorated the burgeoning human relations movement despite what some believe was greater experimenter allegiance to a social cause than empirical fact—allegations that were not just confined to Hawthorne but to other seminal findings of yore when a priori principles seemed to trump observations.⁸ The results, however, were sharply inconsistent with intuitions and roundly contradict present-day findings that show that the quality of the work environment affects employee health, well-being, and performance. In fact, estimates of lost productivity because of poor environmental working conditions are as high as $160 billion annually in the United States.⁹

Indeed, it is hard to find studies that do not support the commonsense linkage between the quality of the work environment and employee satisfaction and performance. Even so, organization development (OD) has not, as a discipline, been overly concerned with the physical environment.10 Although OD practitioners have periodically echoed calls for the physical environment to be included within its content domain aside such mainstays as job characteristics, organizational features, and other entrenched socioemotional factors in the workplace, environmental conditions have remained mostly neglected within OD quarters despite having comparable significance to employee health and satisfaction.¹¹ The yeoman’s work of workplace design has been done by architects, facilities managers, and real estate agents despite the evident implications of the physical environment to motivation and basic human needs—not only for comfort but also psychological needs for autonomy, privacy, aesthetic experiences, and such, making workplace design an imperative for managerial attention.¹² Indeed, companies that can complement their products or places beyond the pedestrian and merely useful through profound experiences will find more loyal followings.¹³ Given the factual relations between physical design factors and workplace satisfaction, decision-making, behavior, and health, the remainder of this chapter explores the myriad ways these influences occur.¹⁴

The basic dimensions of environmental indoor quality include thermal comfort, air quality, lighting, acoustic quality, ergonomic features of furnishings, and the general cleanliness and maintenance of the office/shop floor. The U.S. Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) system specifically rates indoor environments on several of these dimensions. Studies show that corporate adherence to indoor environmental standards substantially improves labor productivity. One study found that employees in green-certified buildings scored 26.4 percent higher on tests that assessed cognitive functioning across nine domains, including strategic thinking.¹⁵ Although this and other studies on environmentally friendly workplaces have found enormous effects on cognition and labor productivity,¹⁶ we are reluctant to tie all influences to environmental factors. Companies that transform their workplaces into becoming more environmentally hospitable tend to be adept at planning, monitoring, and assessing. Therefore, some of the observed results may be due to the general competencies of the organizations that undertake and succeed at change.

If you reflect on your personal ability to optimally function when features of environmental quality are suboptimal, you will realize what the research results consistently find. Discomfort is heightened and employee satisfaction and performance decline. A prevailing explanation regarding the effects of poor environmental quality on performance is that aversive environments are stressors that tax our bodily systems and redirect attention and cognitive resources away from work tasks.17 The connection between environmental comfort and stress is more than theory because air, thermal, lighting, crowding, and noise quality have been associated with lower levels of both self-reported and physiological measures of stress.¹⁸ And stress is expensive. By one estimate, workplace stress accounts for a $190 million annual price tag in access costs and 120,000 deaths.¹⁹

Anything that disturbs working memory and cognitive resources has the potential to disrupt employee performance. Our ability to perform largely concerns our ability to process and retain critical information in working memory. The reservoir of information that we can hold, store, encode, and retrieve for later usage is finite. Therefore, performance will be impaired to the degree that the work environment diverts mental processes away from core tasks. It has been shown that even simple cognitive and perceptual motor tasks are performed more accurately when simple partitions that permit greater focus are erected between workers.²⁰ Environmental conditions also may reduce people’s ability to inhibit their emotions. For example, the temperature-aggression hypothesis has long-standing support in the social sciences that shows that aggression and crime increase with the temperature in both laboratory and in vivo settings.²¹ Researchers have offered several different explanations for these effects, but it is plausible that the heat depletes people’s reservoirs for self-control and yield the findings observed.

Therefore, the built environment can be thought of as a potential competitor for scarce mental and emotional resources that can either enable or undermine learning and task performance. These environments can be supportive of coping behaviors, personal replenishment, and performance, or they can be nonsupportive.²² These influences do not have to be conspicuously large and consciously noticeable. Thus, background noise and speech can impair performance even though an employee may not be objectively aware of the sounds. For example, the “irrelevant speech effect” refers to a phenomenon in which memory and meaning-making are adversely affected by incoherent or amorphous background sounds.23 The same results have been found with visible posters and drawings that may imperceptively take up mental space and crowd out more task-relevant matters from working memory.²⁴ In this regard, studies show that memory retrieval improves when people avert their gaze from their surroundings. Of particular note, even the presence of others in one’s immediate work area has been found to redirect attentional focus and impair performance.²⁵

The effects of poor working conditions are evidenced by a collection of resulting symptoms known as sick building syndrome. Symptoms include difficulties in concentration, fatigue, irritability, and headaches.²⁶ Thus, employees prefer window exposures and natural lighting, well-ventilated spaces and fresh air, temperature controls to accommodate personal preferences, and acoustical comfort in which noises, such as voices, echoes, and the clock-clack of office gadgets, are tempered through soundproof paneling, soft furnishings, and satisfying layouts. The fashionable architectural maneuver of removing ceilings to expose piping and concrete slabs amplifies sounds. Therefore, design decisions can have profound effects on performance. A study by Lamb and Kwok found that one environmental stressor reduces performance by 2.4 percent. The addition of a second stressor reduces performance by 5.4 percent and the addition of a third stressor reduces performance by almost 15 percent. Therefore, poor environmental conditions syphon personal resources and employee energy away from work activities and disrupt performance.²⁷

In view of these consistent and long-standing findings on the effects of environmental quality on employee performance, it is a little surprising that the open office gained as much traction as it did with some devotees still touting its efficacy. Indeed, even today, with evidence mounting against the functionality of open offices, about two-thirds of the workforce continues to work in areas best described as “open.” Surveys routinely reveal that employees do not like open offices and physically and emotionally respond poorly to them. They find them to be visually, socially, and acoustically disruptive.²⁸ In so many words, a good number of employees also see the open office as a modern-age panopticon where staff sit like wounded animals in an open field subject to the predatory gazes of bosses. Although, as it happens, bosses do not like the situation either, preferring quieter, private spaces to think and reflect.²⁹

The basic idea behind open offices seemed good. Work was becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and partitions presented barriers to cross-functional dialogue and collaboration among employees. Therefore, the open office was partly viewed as a remedy to what was ailing organizational quality and efficiency, namely, operational isolation. Furthermore, companies noticed that these benefits could be achieved at lower facility costs. Open versus “closed” (cellular) offices can accommodate the same number of employees at a lower cost per square foot. Thus, the trend in open offices is reflected in the declines in space per employee, from 400 square feet in 1985 to 150 square feet in 2020.30 This would not be the first time in the history of design that cost savings won out over people’s preferences. Following the Second World War, self-anointed visionaries such as Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s hero in the Fountainhead, delivered what the British people decidedly did not want: cheap concrete flats versus small homes with gardens.³¹ Nonetheless, studies show that architectural cost savings in the workplace may be short-lived, as they are offset over time by deterioration in job satisfaction and employee well-being.³²

The respectable thesis behind the rise of open offices was prompted by the notion that people who are closer to one another are more likely to talk. This relationship is illustrated by the Allen curve (see figure 6.2), which illustrates that as the distance between workspaces decrease, communications increase.33 Although this relationship is generally true, this is not the case in the workplace. One study found that open spaces led to a decline in face-to-face interactions by 70 percent as people retreated to private areas for thought-invigorating places of solitude.³⁴ Indeed, the fear of disturbing others undermines the sociality and communications the open design was supposed to facilitate.

A famous perception psychologist, James Gibson, argued that our environments are as much social constructions as they are physical constructions, and designers must understand both to understand what a place affords or what it will be used for.³⁵ According to Gibson, we do not perceive qualities per se, but what the situation, or an object, affords. Our observations are contextualized and, like the visual illusion depicted in figure 6.3, what we “see” is influenced by the circumstances in which objects appear. Thus, the proverbial water cooler is a place that affords fresh water to people, but situated in the right space, it also affords a place to convene and talk. Thus, while it is true that proximity breeds communication (and conversely, distance and physical terrain, such as steps, discourage interaction), it does not do so in a theater, in the library, or in the workplace—because the social meanings in those places forbid it.

Sometimes we do not see what a place might afford. We are sure when people put in water fountains, they were not initially thinking that they would become places like the Okavango Delta where an abundance of African wildlife converge. Once you do know what a space can be used for, it is possible to design for it. Let’s say we are executives and we have an open-door policy. An office on the top floor of a forty-four-story building will not afford many impromptu encounters, if that is what we really want. Offices on the ground floor will. The layout and surroundings are communication devices that partially dictate the uses to which a place can be put.36 And, these uses can be positive or negative. We can understand the precept of broken windows in this way.³⁷ The broken windows designate which actions are permissible and which are not. The social disorder and lack of oversight and care convey the permissibility of rule-breaking or afford an opportunity for crime. For example, a series of six controlled field experiments showed that graffiti and littering increased the incidents of other counternormative behaviors, such as theft, because the legitimacy of rules in the environment was tenuous.³⁸ Similarly, messy common rooms increase the incidence of littering by approximately 40 percent compared with neat common rooms. Norms are broken where they already have been broken.³⁹

Thus, the implied uses of open spaces for work have not resoundingly facilitated the kinds of conversations organizations had hoped for. Yet, as with most things, there are exceptions. People communicate about many things and one thing that people in proximity share in the workplace is know-how and expertise. Indeed, seating employees next to star performers pulls up those employees’ performances, and newcomers who are situated near teammates are quick to assume the work habits of the group, such as meeting deadlines.⁴⁰ Employees help each other to evaluate options and solve problems when they arise.

Nevertheless, by and large, not only have open spaces largely failed to achieve their intended objectives but also have interfered with personal well-being and productivity. Open offices are attended by feelings of crowdedness, excessive noise, lack of temperature controls, and, for women, the distracting, omnipresent gaze of men. Many of these negative effects are accentuated when areas for retreat into privacy and quiet are insufficient.⁴¹

Still, it would be a mistake to dispense with the open office altogether. Not every study shows that they impair performance. This is because not every office is a pure example of open or closed. Rather, organizations increasingly use hybrid forms of open and closed spaces. Some of these designs opt for open offices with private retreats, such as meeting rooms and quiet areas scattered throughout the premises for social and business gatherings. Thus, when American Airlines opened their new headquarters, it included more than one thousand private meeting spaces. Additionally, designers continue to sketch in quiet areas such as libraries to provide the solace employees need for deep thought and performance.42

Conversely, offices can be designed with personal office areas and various common and specialty spaces. In general, there is an increasing desire for multiuse, multispace environments. Organizational environments now expressly contain different features and layouts for different purposes. For example, the design for Johnson and Johnson’s new offices in Bogotá, Colombia, divided space into functional areas, including “open collaborative,” “open focus,” “privacy areas,” and “team dens.”⁴³ After all, we have many different reasons to communicate and some venues are more or less relevant for each. We explain, ask questions, evaluate, make proposals, collaborate, and demonstrate, and the physicality of spaces will vary in how well they fulfill communicative aims. Lilly’s redesign of their 475,000-square-foot headquarters is another case in point of the transitions occurring in the physical work environment (see box 6.1).⁴⁴

Box 6.1
Lilly Transforms Its Workspace

Lilly had a typical farm cube for its 3,300-member workforce. Surveys showed rampant dissatisfaction with the design because of impediments in informational exchanges, decision making, myriad distractions, and lost productivity. The company reconfigured the space, increasing the amount of shared and temporary space and decreasing the per worker footprint. The new spaces were task specific with quiet rooms for work that requires concentration, cafes and team rooms for collaboration, and small havens for private conversations. The changes resulted in roughly two times the employee satisfaction at half the cost per employee. Better yet, the estimated hours lost because of noise, drop-by visitors, and waiting for feedback and approvals substantially declined.

Despite the growth of open, designer workplaces, a strong argument still can be made for the inclusion of personal offices. Indeed, employees’ self-reports clearly associate personal space with satisfaction with their environments and frequently select open-space seating as their least preferred option. The reasons behind this satisfaction with personal office space are manifold. First, employees like to personalize their spaces. Surveys reveal that 70 percent to 90 percent of employees want to decorate their spaces with sundry photos, memorabilia, and tchotchkes and this, in turn, fosters a homey feel of psychological comfort and security.⁴⁵ Like furnishing our homes, we use our spaces to tell others, and ourselves, who we are and aspire to be. Indeed, some companies encourage this homey feel further by having throw rugs on the floor and hiring retiree couples to make the coffee, bake in the kitchen, and tend to employees’ children should they need to be at the workplace.46 Understandably, then, one controlled study of offices showed that people who were empowered to decorate their offices exhibited higher levels of well-being and commitment to the organization, and were more productive (i.e., time to complete assigned task and number of errors) compared with controls.⁴⁷

Second, an office provides a powerful cue that work is to be done. In contrast to unassigned work areas (e.g., hotel lobby, booth in corporate cafeteria, couch in the game room), a reserved area for work is a powerful signal that work should be done there. For example, one study using virtual reality technology investigated people’s attention and concentration on a cognitive performance task when working in a characteristic office environment versus a Tuscan garden.⁴⁸ The results showed that those who were engaged in a typical workplace demonstrated greater attentional focus and better concentration. We infer that people who can accomplish more during a day will feel more fulfilled and satisfied with their jobs as well.

Third, people become attached to places to which they have an emotional connection. These connections to place have a name: topophilia—in reference to a situated space, these are places that have personal meaning and social and material significance.⁴⁹ Recall Sheldon’s ineffable attachment to his favorite spot on the couch in the television series The Big Bang Theory. As many theorists have noted, a space becomes a place when it is endowed with value and takes on meaning, and these meanings are produced through a sense of identity and psychological ownership, need fulfillment, social bonds, and feelings of attachment. These are the things that make leaving a place so hard and throwing out the familiar so difficult. A place rests on a framework that we belong, provides the features we need to flourish, and offers safety and security.50 The more people feel at home—feel that they are in the right place—the more content they will be and the less likely they are to switch brands whether hotel, retailer, restaurant, or place of work. “Atmosphere-dominant” companies realize this. For people to feel rooted, companies have to provide the proper ground.

Companies remain reluctant to invest in private offices, however. Cost is one reason, as we have noted. But this reluctance also stems from other pervasive trends in the workplace such as the increased use of telecommuting—a trend that likely will persist given organizations’ increased experiences with remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. This trend was well underway before the Covid-19 pandemic as the number of telecommuters doubled in the United Kingdom over a ten-year period, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, 2018; a survey by the International Workplace Group, 2018, indicated that 70 percent of professionals telecommuted at least one day per week in the United States.⁵¹ The pandemic will permanently enlarge these percentages.

Psychologically, employers’ judicious use of telecommuting has been a godsend for employees who have greater flexibility to contend with responsibilities at home and work.⁵² Still, as people retreated to their homes during the swell of Covid-19, telecommuting will continue to be a lively topic of discussion. Some major employers such as IBM, Yahoo!, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America already have voiced their opposition to telecommuting, whereas companies like music-streamer Spotify, financial processor Square, text-messager Twitter, and software tools developer GitLab are 100 percent remote.⁵³ Indeed, the experiences of many start-ups have been mostly positive with a pure telecommunications existence that relies on collaboration platforms, such as Teams and Zoom; internal communications through Slack or Skype for Business; and workplace apps, such as Notion and Gather.⁵⁴ These trends undoubtedly pair with many readers’ experiences whose nomadic grown children work for a company, say, headquartered in London but who are embarked on journeys from Berlin to Hong Kong to Sydney.

Looking ahead, the future likely will be a hybrid that integrates a smaller corporate physical presence with more intensive online interactions. The big question will repeat itself: “To what degree does this hybrid model elevate or blunt performance?” The question is deceptively complex and lacks an easy answer. The literature on the effects of telecommuting on performance finds evidence both for and against the practice. Like most research, the answer is, “It all depends.” The answer hinges on the context and frequency of the practice (e.g., current locations of employees), the amount of trust and goodwill among management and employees, and the quality of the telecommuting software. For example, the more communications seem nonmediated by technology and emulate face-to-face encounters, the more effective they are in facilitating discussion, generating ideas, and fostering performance.55

The architectural implications of the out-of-office trend is that even when people need a dedicated work space, they need it less than half the time. In fact, about two-thirds of people say they work remotely at least a portion of the time.⁵⁶ Therefore, much of corporate seating either has become nonterritorial or buffet style along a table. Some companies have open seating; people are free to sit where they want within a given area and, accordingly, are provided with lockers to store personal possessions. In this “hot seating,” we may have come full circle from the cringeworthy, soul-deadening corporate landscape portrayed in the now-classic Office Space to the complete dehumanization of the workplace through anonymous seating arrangements. At least, that is the way employees see it. The Economist has likened unassigned seating to the cult British TV show, The Prisoner, where the protagonist is referenced by number only. In the same article, the writer mentions a study that found that it takes people an average of eighteen minutes to find a seat in the morning.57 Consequently, people have inched their way to the office at earlier and earlier times to be sure they get their preferred place. Thus, companies that deploy these practices may think these arrangements will lead to more comingling among employees, but in reality, it heightens anxieties, consumes time without producing any greater collegiality, and produces more negative attitudes toward work and the workplace.⁵⁸ People like familiarity and routines and will find a spot that best suits them. Your own experiences surely will verify this. When repeat meetings are held, where do people sit? In the same seats they sat in last time, and the time before that. Thus, even in the absence of assigned seating, people will gravitate to those spots that have become “theirs.” In an attempt to alleviate the uncertainties and confusion pertaining to hot seats, many companies have begun to regionalize seating arrangements into neighborhoods or teams, at least at specified times of the day. This somewhat reduces the decision space and allows those who need to work together to do so.

In general, whereas the workplace of the past tended to be conceptualized in purely functional ways, it has become increasingly clear that building out spaces with due regard for broader human concerns will produce superior results. These human concerns, or needs, are hierarchically stacked with physical comfort and health at the foundation. Higher-order needs include functional supports that enable jobs to be performed well, followed by psychosocial needs, such as privacy, growth, and creativity, inclusion, and such. A helpful way to think about contemporary workplace design is to conceive of it as part of a complex along with organizational structure, job design, and information flows/technology that, together, attempts to support the needs of people as they execute their duties. That is, the work environment is a fundamental part of a sociotechnical system in which goals are pursued in humane ways. The affective and aesthetic quality of the workplace is as important as the work being done. As such, issues such as time for thinking, innovation, teamwork, collaboration, job rotation, job challenges, and such cannot be divorced from where the work is performed. The “where” is as vital as the “what,” “how,” and “why.”

By most accounts, the physical environment could use some work. Only about one in four employees say they work in an optimal environment. Nevertheless, companies have become more attuned to the potential incapacitating effects of the some-150 musculoskeletal disorders that can afflict people and have responded with specialty shoes, chairs, computer stations, and desks to counteract the debilitating effects of longer-term nerve and muscular injuries resulting from repetitive motions, positioning, lifting, and such through ergonomic interventions and judicious job design.59 Additionally, health-related interventions have extended well past the ergonomically sensible apparatuses and work designs to include a bevy of health-promotion options. These changes include standing, sit-stand, and walking desks; healthy food choices; health clinics; recreational and workout facilities; health-related instruction; and walking and bicycle paths. They also have infused environments with more “green” options, such as potted plants and living walls, garden cafes, and hydration stations to let the outdoors in. Additionally, companies have become more thoughtful about the build-out of specialized spaces for, say, creative endeavors. Like Edison’s Invention Factory, creative spaces such as fab-labs, makerspaces, and living labs are collaborative areas with shared resources and clear and open lines of communication where innovative ideas can flourish.⁶⁰ Researchers have compiled a lengthy list of environmental attributes that may contribute to creativity.⁶¹ These typically include spaces for idea generation; whimsical displays and experimentation; interesting patterns, textures, and shapes; a limited stable of soothing colors; ample work space; projections of thoughts through technologies; and favorable environmental factors, such as natural light and materials, fresh air, and clean, cold water.⁶² Stimulating environmental features inspire innovative thinking. Indeed, cue-rich, aesthetically pleasing environments have been shown to be sources of inspiration and imaginative thinking. Simply working in a pleasant versus ugly room affects people’s energy levels and sense of well-being.⁶³

One corporate trend that is refreshingly catching on is the inclusion of nature into architectural design. Renowned biologist E. O. Wilson coined the term biophilia to denote the relationship between people and nature, which he believes to be a natural one.⁶⁴ Nature can include the real thing or analogs. Analogs of nature include artworks of landscapes, nature photographs, nature sounds, and nature-themed wallpapers and murals. They also can include simulated environments that denote nature, such as textured floors of natural stone and wooden building materials, biodynamic lighting that mirrors natural light or, as at Google, organically patterned carpet. The real things include plants, water features, gardens, fish tanks, fireplaces/fire pits, courtyards, adjacent parks, and office window views/natural lighting. Expedia built its new-ish Seattle headquarters with the idea of biophilia firmly in mind. For example, sliding glass doors can be opened to create indoor breezeways and the company’s forty-acre park-like grounds contain trails that are WiFi-wired for outdoor meetings and training sessions; in fact, employees can work even as the weather cools by nearby fire pits.65 At Samsung’s new headquarters in San Jose, California, every third floor of the ten-floor office building has outdoor spaces. Some terraces are designed for quiet reflection and thought, and some have built-in activities such as putting greens. Similarly, Amazon’s main campus has living walls with more than two hundred plant species and its East coast headquarters in the greater Washington DC area will have a neighboring park with local fauna, flowers, and waterfalls.⁶⁶

The value of nature in the workplace was first recognized in the 1950s as part of the German Bürolandshaft (office landscaping) movement. In concert with those times, the provision of plants in the workplace primarily was a humanizing force to combat alienating industrial wastelands. Research has proven, however, that exposure to nature has substantial physiological and health-affirming benefits.⁶⁷ For example, studies in hospitals showed that patients with window views of nature recover faster and have shorter postoperative stays, and patients in rooms furnished with plants and flowers need fewer postoperative pain killers and have lower physiological markers of stress than those in more starkly furnished rooms.⁶⁸ Employees with window exposures to nature experience corresponding positive effects of reduced stress, greater feelings of well-being, and higher productivity.⁶⁹

A two-year longitudinal diary study in Britain found that people who spent two hours or more per week engaged in outdoor activities reported better health and sense of well-being than those who did not.⁷⁰ The same results are found with much shorter timelines (e.g., eight weeks).⁷¹ This conforms to other research that indicates that people who take forty-five to fifty-minute walks through nature perform better on creativity and working memory tasks than controls.⁷² Thus, companies like bicycle producer and distributor, QBP, have the right idea. They encourage lunchtime walks and walking meetings through the adjacent nature preserve and bicycle meetings on the quiet surrounding streets. Hartig has called these nourishing naturalistic getaways “booster breaks” that lift a person’s spirit and vigor.73 Furthermore, walking together also seems to mitigate interpersonal conflict and to promote interpersonal warmth and rapport, as if conveying through movement the conviction of “moving on” together.⁷⁴

The health advantages of nature have been well-documented to the point that a national hospital system in Scotland now allows doctors to write scripts for outdoor activities as part of a healing regimen. Pediatricians at the University of California, San Francisco, have begun to do the same. Concerned about people’s lack of access to nature as a stress reliever and mood enhancer, doctors have begun to prescribe nature walks.⁷⁵ Indeed, entire countries are taking up the cause. The South Korean government is establishing meditative healing forests for its highly stressed citizens, and Sweden provides citizens tax incentives for adopting a lifestyle attuned to nature, such as commuting by bike (that lifestyle of living close to nature is called friluftsliv). Overall, research consistently finds that employees who have greater contact with nature also experience less stress and stress-related health complaints and have better problem-solving skills, more energy, better attention, enhanced coping skills, greater socioemotional health, and improved productivity,⁷⁶ a nexus between nature and design that dates back millennia to the principles of feng shui, literally, wind and water (see box 6.2)⁷⁷ Exposure to nature also elicits greater prosociality in people. For example, people who stood among massively tall Tasmanian blue gem eucalyptus trees versus next to a concrete building were more likely to help an experimentally planted passerby who dropped belongings.⁷⁸ In fact, any transcendental or spiritually tinged exposure has similar effects.⁷⁹ Imaging studies show that contacts that stimulate experiences of awe have physiological concomitants associated with activity in the parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is the part of the brain that is associated with attention, impulse control, planned and spatial reasoning, sensory processing, and more.⁸⁰ This part of the brain also has been associated with greater connectedness between oneself and someone or something outside oneself. That is, it is the part of the brain that tells us we are not alone and that there are matters of greater concern than our immediate personal needs. Nature and spirituality give us an outward focus toward others and on matters of broader concern to a community.