Excerpt from International Arts + Mind Lab's Psychology Today "The Art Effect" blog:
With the pandemic stretching into a third year, employers are scrambling to reconfigure how and where work gets done, with more businesses returning to in-person following years of Zoom meetings and remote setups.
Compared with the creature comforts and convenience of working from home, office life can appear less attractive to some. After all, at home, we can more easily slip into spaces and routines that restore us–both during and after a hard day’s work.
Employers are now considering how to make time spent in person more appealing, productive, and healthy for the worker, especially in light of increased rates of burnout and stress brought on by the pandemic. While most workplaces lack spaces intentionally designed to support mental health, that may be changing.
Making the Most of In-Person Work
The initial lockdowns and shift to remote work made many of us more aware of our personal surroundings and their effects on our productivity and wellbeing.
“The built environment has such a profound impact on the way people think, on their emotions, on their functionality, on their behavior,” said Sarah Williams Goldhagen, architecture critic and author of Welcome to Our World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives.
COVID demonstrated that working from the comfort and safety of one’s home is not only possible but preferable for many. But “there are certain kinds of teamwork–maybe all teamwork–that really are much better done in person,” explained Goldhagen.
Teamwork for projects with iterative processes requiring cycles of work, feedback, and revision and whose output requires a “kind of percolation of creativity,” instead of something more straightforward and task-oriented, may especially benefit from face-to-face time, she added.
The catch is that many workplaces are not set up to maximize this kind of demanding cognitive work. And the design of the physical office space, including its lighting, temperature, acoustics, and decor, ends up being counterproductive, making in-person work even more challenging.
How Workplaces Drain Your Brain
For most, if not all, people, the workplace causes some level of stress and mental fatigue.
Our attentional resources are limited and can be depleted with use. Attentional fatigue has real consequences and is associated with lowered ability to make decisions and poor self-control. With our attention tank running on empty, we are more likely to procrastinate, make errors, and give up in the face of failure. It could partially explain the rampant case of “presenteeism” facing employers, with workers physically on the job but not really performing due to poor health or well-being.
“I think that it's something that workplaces, corporate workplaces, in particular, need to pay a lot more attention to because attention restoration is well established as a human need,” said Goldhagen.
Many workplaces try to address these needs through meditation or wellness spaces that provide an escape from the surrounding environment and focus on turning one’s attention inward. But they are missing a key ingredient necessary to recharge our brain’s batteries—a sense of mystery or what experts refer to as “passive fascination.”
According to environmental psychologists, restorative environments evoke positive moods and have properties that draw people’s attention without being stressful or demanding. “It’s the sense of being captivated by an object in your environment and its composition, smell—whatever multisensory experience is around you—in a way that kind of fascinates you without you having to exert too much attention to appropriate it cognitively,” explained Goldhagen.
To read more, visit Psychology Today
