For decades, humankind has sought to establish the link between office design and productivity. And by humankind I mean a parochial band of researchers, suppliers, workplace specialists, futurologists and designers with a special interest in the whole thing. Most other people only expressed a passing interest in the subject. It did not seem to matter to this band that the whole thing had been proved many times over many years, invariably falling on cloth, if not exactly deaf, ears. We’ve known for some time what makes people happy and productive at work and much of the new research has merely served to proved something we already know. Undaunted, researchers maintained their quest for the evidence that would get the message across to an apparently indifferent world. This quest has mutated over the past few years into something that is at first glance only slightly different but which has some rather interesting implications. The go-to workplace topic of the early 21st Century is no longer productivity per se, but wellbeing, and that is making all the difference.
Along with its sometimes evil twin, wellness, wellbeing covers issues that range from the demonstrably true such as the effects of daylight, movement, nutrition and breaks; moves on to increasingly difficult ideas that may or may not be within the control of employers, such as stress and happiness; before drifting off into the realms of things that are probably no business of employers in the first place such as spirituality and various forms of woo-woo.
The Damsel of the Sanct Grael by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Back when the debate was about productivity, things were easy because everything was couched in widely understood terms and there were clear parameters. Now, even a well respected body such as the US based National Wellness Institute feels comfortable in suggesting that there are six elements to wellness – occupational, physical, social, intellectual, emotional and spiritual – and that these are all equally the concerns of employers.