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how to create working environments that enhance people’s wellbeing and promote productivity

Recent research has improved our understanding of how to create working environments that enhance people’s wellbeing and promote productivity,
writes Neil Franklin.

The quest for a proper understanding of the links between the places we work and our wellbeing and productivity has been ongoing for a very long time. It predates the facilities management profession as we now know it by decades, and has its roots in the design of early landmark offices such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin building in Buffalo, New York, and research such as that carried out at the Hawthorne Works in Chicago in the late 1920s.

The Hawthorne work has become seminal not only in the study of productivity and ergonomics, but also in wider management thinking in that it was initially interpreted as proof that an increase in illumination in a factory improved productivity levels. Subsequent experiments at the same site on the effects of changes like maintaining clean work stations, clearing floors of obstacles and even relocating workstations also yielded increases in productivity.

When it was discovered that productivity fell back to some degree at the end of the experiments, a second interpretation was postulated: that the workers were not merely responding to better conditions but also to the experiment itself. They liked the attention. And so the Hawthorne Effect was born.

‘It’s obvious to modern eyes, really,’ says Ann Clarke of Claremont Group Interiors. ‘People like to feel involved and appreciated. They don’t like being disengaged from work and like to know that their employers are paying attention to their wellbeing.

‘The better lighting is welcome and has a role to play, but there is a complex process going on, that means the lighting itself is not enough without the management and the focus on the individual. We’d take that thinking for granted nowadays to some extent, but then it must have been revolutionary.’

Clarke’s point is supported by the work of another researcher, Frederick Herzberg, who in 1966 showed that in his own terms the workplace was a ‘hygiene factor’, meaning that a poor workplace was a demotivator but a good workplace was not necessarily an important motivator. In layman’s terms, it doesn’t matter where you work if you don’t like your job, your boss, or your co-workers. It all has to fit.

This is the ultimate fallacy that lies behind the claims of many suppliers of ‘ergonomic’ products, according to Jorgen Josefsson of RH Chairs. ‘We see it all the time,’ he says. ‘People say that such and such a product is ‘ergonomic’, but really the term is meaningless unless you look at things in context.

‘Ergonomics is about the relationship between people and their environment, so that relationship is inherently a two-way thing, and however well designed a product is, the benefits of that design can only be fully appreciated when it is used properly, with proper training and in the right wider environment of organisational culture and management style. At the heart of that must be the belief that you are looking after people for the right reasons. It’s no longer enough to try to minimize the risk of harm, you have to look at improving wellbeing and productivity.’

We know a lot more about how to achieve that since the time of the Hawthorne experiments. Since then, a great deal of research has been carried out which paints an increasingly sophisticated picture of the complex relationship we have with our surroundings. These range from the academic, such as the work of Adrian Leaman and Bill Bordass at the end of the 1990s, which identified what it called four killer variables that linked building design to personal productivity, to recent research from Gensler and a 2006 report from CABE and the BCO (British Council of Offices) called ‘The impact of office design on business performance’.

Some suppliers are also doing their own research to make the point in specific areas. One is RH Chairs, which recently fitted a number of its chairs with ‘black box’ digital data recorders at the headquarters of Dutch auto-recovery company ANWB to measure how people used the chairs in terms of adjustments and movement. By measuring the amount of adjustment of the chairs used in the study, and combining this with answers given in a subsequent questionnaire, RH’s ergonomists could analyse the impact of chair adjustment on various areas of work and performance.

What they found was an expected large decrease in musculoskeletal complaints over the trial period. One of the most interesting statistics from the study was the decrease in sick leave percentage by two per cent in comparison to the same period in the previous year – and the fact that people felt more productive and comfortable at work.

While the Hawthorne Effect informs us that the study may have been inf luenced by other factors, it’s clear that the results provided a useful insight into the working practices of call centre workers, and RH has begun new research on a much broader scale at a large client site in Sweden.

Lighting

Another study that directly ref lects the Hawthorne experiment (in that it focuses on the impact of lighting on people’s wellbeing and productivity) was recently published by the University of Surrey in partnership with RS Components and Philips.

The research was conducted on 104 white-collar workers located on two office f loors. After baseline assessments under existing lighting, every participant was exposed to two new lighting conditions, each lasting four weeks. One consisted of blue-enriched white light (17,000 K) and the other of white light (4,000 K). The order was balanced between the f loors. Questionnaire and rating scales were used to assess alertness, mood, sleep quality and mental effort throughout the eight-week study.

As well as improvements in all of the assessed characteristics, the research also showed improvements in subjective measures of positive moods, fatigue in the evening, and ability to sleep at night. Furthermore, the workers reported reduced eye strain.

‘These are outstanding results,’ says Mike Lear of RS Components. ‘What we believe is happening technically is that specific wavelengths in blueenriched white light is more effective because it targets a photoreceptor in the eye. It comes down to something we’ve known for a long time, which is that people are not ideally suited to a world of f luorescent lighting and the blue-enriched light is akin to natural light. So it makes us feel better and work better.

‘What is great,’ he continues, ‘is that the research shows conclusively the way in which good lighting can improve levels of wellbeing and performance, even when people are not at work. It has enormous implications for the way we view lighting design.’

This move towards a more positive view of workplace wellness is now widely accepted, according to Clarke of Claremont. The firm has just finished work on a post-occupancy study with Pace Micros, the Saltaire-based firm featured in an FMX case study last year.

‘We find that most firms have clear objectives relating to what are fundamentally human resources and management issues when they look at the design of their offices,’ she says. ‘And these are less and less based on traditional health and safety issues, such as providing x amount of lux in offices, reducing the risk of upper body problems for computer users and so on. Sure, those are all important, but firms also want to know what it will all mean for productivity, absenteeism and staff retention.

‘When we set out to work with Pace, they had clear goals in all of these areas, which they’ve now realized according to the post-occupancy study. I can only see this thinking becoming more prevalent as we work with the current difficult economic conditions. The important thing is to leverage a small amount of extra cost in aspects of the way we design and manage workplaces into enormous benefits in terms of the way we manage people’.

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resource centre

how to create working environments that enhance people’s wellbeing and promote productivity

Lighting