In a flexible office, spaces crafted to support rigorous collaboration can be a positive contrast to relaxing, decompression areas.
We’ve all had that a-ha moment while brushing our teeth, washing the dishes, folding the laundry, or doing any number of mundane activities where we allow our minds to wander. It’s surprising to many of us, and yet it makes complete sense. Our brains need time to unwind; to let that subconscious piece of our mind absorb information and stew it around a bit; to allow the data to mix and mingle up there in our brain matter and churn out more creative ideas. We need time away from our challenges in order to solve them effectively. Essentially, in order to speed up our innovation, we need to slow down our thoughts.
Today’s work culture assumes an expectation of 24/7 connectedness. Our email is accessible by the little computer in our pocket we carry around everywhere, from meeting to meeting in our office, and from room to room in our home. And so, when the spaces holding our meetings look exactly like the spaces we call home, can we truly ever turn all the way off? How can we slow down our brains if the surroundings we relate with relaxation and downtime look exactly like the places where we’re working to solve our hardest challenges? That blurring of spatial lines is becoming more and more visible in the general apathy of our working population. In 2016, Gallup reported a shocking statistic suggesting seven out of 10 employees in the American workforce are disengaged in some fashion. This led us to ponder whether this finding is not just a crisis in engagement and more a critique of the health of our mental cycles. It begs the question: is today’s engagement crisis actually due to the fact that our workforce can no longer truly relax? And how does the design of the workplace fuel or relieve that problem?
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You see it in all the magazines and in all the articles published about the latest workplace trends. Everyone wants their office to have that “resimercial” feeling – that blend of residential comfort in a commercial environment. But we should not forget that we are still in a professional office setting, that the mind associates that professional setting with the tasks it needs to complete, and that those associations start to influence our behaviors. Don’t get us wrong, we are big advocates for warm, welcoming palettes in our workplaces. And we absolutely need spaces where we can decompress from a very intense meeting or phone call, or take a quick 15 minute break away from our desks to enjoy a cup of tea. We even, on occasion, search for that super comfortable lounge chair in that precious little corner nook with all that gorgeous natural light to steal a moment of calm in the midst of a busy and hectic work day. We search for spaces that feel like our homes to get us in these mindsets, to allow us that slight break from reality. But these cannot be the norm for all office spaces. In fact, these should be the hidden gems of our workplace, where we seek out the comfortable relaxing vibe of our own living rooms at home to gain a small piece of respite from the intensity of our everyday work. We need to get back to designing offices to support and promote the myriad ways in which we actually work today, and break free from simply following the latest trends in look and feel.