Creating Well-Being in the Workplace
With a new year also comes the time to reflect. After a year of realizing that the office is here to stay, we can now focus on how to make it better.
Improving our office spaces began with improving the quality of our questions. We needed to move beyond the standard needs, wants, and desires to better understand productivity and retention metrics. From this understanding stems design solutions that support the overall wellbeing of employees.
In a time where retention has become difficult, we can’t take a band-aid approach to wellness. If you dive into the “why” of your workplace, you can cater amenities accordingly in a much more meaningful way. The office becomes much more than just a place to get work done. A well-placed coffee bar is more than free access to caffeine, it’s a way to facilitate conversations and company culture. And the ergonomic home-office environment creates a preferred option to working at a dining room table.
Instead of trying to carve out time to fit our “life” into our work, it’s time to acknowledge work in our lives in a holistic way. Anything we do for 40 hours a week IS a part of our life, the two are not mutually exclusive. When facets of the workplace all work together to create a supportive ecosystem, we can meet both our work and life goals.
If we’ve learned anything it is that the landscape of work will continue to evolve. All we can control is designing today for the “why” of our organization, which will enable us to adapt to the needs of tomorrow.