Workplace Design Guidelines For Employees With PTSD

PTSD is the result of a traumatic experience. Our prototype case is taken from an armed combat environment, which represents approximately 8 million people. Taking a look at the larger picture, you’ll see that trauma comes in many forms: abusive relationships, mass shootings, physical assaults, deadly accidents, civil strife and political upheaval. Other events can also lead to a PTSD diagnosis like natural disasters, wildfires, terrorist attacks and even a life-threatening event, which represents approximately 72 million people, and varies by gender and age. In fact, the overall prevalence of PTSD is almost three times higher among women than men.

We hope that the information we present here can be elevated to a larger conversation around the workforce. Technically, our approach falls into the neurodiversity paradigm that is used in the workplace design community to account for psychological functioning and value diversity in neurobiological development. In a contemporary setting, this usually refers to a person’s placement along a spectrum of autism.

But people with PTSD usually do not exhibit any type of early symptoms – there are no warning signs that a person is suffering from PTSD. Although through research, we have determined that there are certain behavioral indicators that suggest a person maybe be suffering. Many people with PTSD have no prior history of mental illness nor do they fit the current definition of someone who falls into the neurodiversity paradigm.

This creates an issue when considering that design should be inclusive and accessible for everyone. When we design for all, we also must consider the unknown. From a practicality perspective, this may not be feasible for some clients unless they are embracing the theory of universal design principals that incorporate aesthetics as part of the design approach. This means that they take into consideration all of the aspects of color, light and form and evaluate these principals from multiple perspectives.

We want to apply this thinking to a wider range challenges that can effect a person’s work style and differential reaction to environments. We are focused here on just one incidence of a psychological syndrome and that focus has been informed through personal experience, not just academic theory. It is our belief that the physical design of work environment can ameliorate some of the more common negative symptoms.

Design Challenges

What got us started down this pathway was a challenge presented by a client about how to design home/workspaces to accommodate people along the neurodiversity spectrum.

To better understand the underlying psychology of trauma and stress we spoke with Dr. Robin Pratt of Enhanced Performance Systems. Dr. Pratt has more than 40 years in the research and development of high performance experimental psychometric cognitive and behavioral assessment techniques. He explained that under high-stress conditions, signals from the environment are overcome by ‘noise’, people become highly distracted, lose their train of thought, and have reduced flexibility.