A logo sits on a campus building at the Novartis AG headquarter campus in Basel, Switzerland, on Jan. 16, 2019. At a cost of more than a billion dollars, the campus was designed explicitly to encourage creativity and inspiration.Bloomberg/AFP/Getty Images
Colin Ellard is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Urban Realities Laboratory at the University of Waterloo, where he conducts research on the connection between human psychology and built environments both real and virtual. His most recent book is Places of the Heart.
We have had a love-hate relationship with our workplaces for as long as such things have existed. From Dilbert cartoons to television series such as The Office and Industry, we have glorified, vilified and mythologized what it means to work in an office. Like the family gatherings we dread but also fear missing out on, office life evokes a complicated panoply of emotions, from the pleasant to the horrific. In my own office, I’ve soared inspiring heights during meetings with students and colleagues, and I’ve emerged victorious from grinding all-nighters to vanquish deadlines. But I’ve also endured emotional shouting matches with co-workers and disappointments that have left me lying face down on the carpet while I try to regroup. I’ve lived a life in that little room. But for all of this, it has only been in the past three years that we have become obsessed with the most serious question of all: What is an office for?
The COVID-19 lockdown demanded a mass migration of employees from their traditional places of work to makeshift home offices. The myth that we somehow held things together during the pandemic ignores the mental-health crisis that ensued, especially for the young. But, more significantly, it has ignited serious debate about how much we need purpose-built workspaces, if at all.
Not surprisingly, the academic world has leapt into the fray with both feet. One systematic review after another will tell you that people seem happier and more balanced with working from home (WFH) and that, if anything, productivity is enhanced. Don’t believe it. A close look at the evidence shows that most studies purporting to demonstrate the advantages of WFH have simply asked employees how they feel about their level of productivity, rather than measure it directly. Studies that use more finely tuned quantitative measures tend to show that those of us working from home spend more hours working (including the time that we “save” by not having to commute) but are generally a bit less productive than those resident in workplaces.
In some ways, the desire to work from home is perfectly understandable. But why now? The technology that enabled us to work remotely has been around for quite some time. So it does seem rather curious that until we were forced to stay home, it never occurred to us that we could. We don’t know what we don’t need until we can’t have it.
On the other hand, it makes me wonder what the workplace was for in the first place, at least in the so-called knowledge industries where the main products are ideas, designs, words and images. There is a good deal of arm-waving about the magic of interaction, the serendipitous encounter, and the warm buzz of inspiration that comes from rubbing shoulders with work buddies. But unless these benefits eventuate in a tangible outcome, such as a fatter bottom line, they can be hard to quantify.
So, workers voice their suspicions that employers are moving goalposts with the intention of getting employees back in the corral. Employers despair at finding ways to convince their workers that it is in their own best interest if the company as a whole thrives as a vibrant, creative, leading-edge enterprise. Sometimes it seems as though nobody has a clear sense of what’s at stake.
Regardless of how precisely productivity can be quantified, the more profound questions about the impact of the workplace are too often ignored. Recently, I had a chance to visit the campus of the Novartis pharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland. There, workers are surrounded by a magnificent assembly of buildings designed by an entire squadron of Pritzker Prize-winning architects, all integrated into a careful master plan that is embedded in gorgeous park lands and bordered by a graceful, winding curve of the Rhine River. At a cost of more than a billion dollars, the campus was designed explicitly to encourage creativity and inspiration. As I explored it, I discovered the most important but least considered part of the WFH discussion: Well-designed dedicated workspaces can raise us to the kinds of transcendental accomplishments that we will need to solve the world’s wicked problems.
Not every company has a 10-figure jackpot to spend on a workspace, but the lessons of Novartis could be realized in many more modest plans with more reflection on human psychology and how our accomplishments are helped or hindered by our surroundings. Good buildings move us to great accomplishment. Lacklustre buildings make us want to stay home.
Certainly, there are good arguments to be made for our spending more time working in our homes. But if we use the advantages as an excuse to tear down our offices and workplaces in favour of a screen-based simulacrum of working life, ignoring the power of real spaces to make us feel, think and work together, we will end up as nothing more than pallid shadows of ourselves. Part of our reluctance to return to the office must surely have come about because so many of our working spaces fail us. If you build it and they don’t come, you’ve built it wrong.
I’m not an industrial psychologist or a captain of industry. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the business world. But what I do understand is the power of setting to influence human behaviour and I am certain that if our workplaces are such repellant places that we would rather strike than endure them, then something is wrong with them.
What are the key ingredients for a workplace that encourages patterns of thought and activity that might make it successful – and not just in the bottom-line sense but more broadly than that – a workplace where people are more likely to have fantastic ideas, feel inspired, enjoy themselves and perhaps even experience better health, especially mental health?
I’ve experienced the dispiriting lack of connection with a colleague who is only present to me as the unblinking eye of a camera. I’ve been the face on the screen on the wall, stripped of access to so much information that I feel more like I’m watching Netflix than participating in a meeting, as I flail my arms trying to be noticed and losing out in the lopsided competition with the beautiful choreography of live, human interaction among the in-person attendees. Even the most impressive arrays of screens and cameras leave us floating in space, like impotent, disembodied avatars.
But it isn’t just the clumsy nature of digital interactions in meetings, and the odd disregard, at least for a psychologist, of all of the richly textured content of the meeting, as if all that mattered were the words that are spoken during the meeting. It’s also everything else about place that gets left out of digital workplaces.
When I’m in a real place, I can walk around, choose where to look, what to touch, where to go. I can get a sense of a place from its soundscapes, the texture of the floor, the design of the furniture, the smell of the air. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. There’s no substitute for actually being there.
No less significant is the fact that I have to get to the workplace. The building where I work is not pretty. But I’ve been going to that building either in a car or on foot or on a bicycle for decades, and there’s something about the broader context that frames the experience. By the time I take a seat in my office or stand in front of a class, I’ve been primed by thousands of sensory details, the memories that they trigger (both good and bad ones), reminders of who I am. I’m stitched into that place. To suppose that this could all be replaced by my tumbling out of bed in the morning and into the chair in front of my computer screen is to ignore so much of what constitutes genuine experience. It suggests how much is at stake if we miss the opportunities that the seen and felt world provides for enriching all of our experience, including our work lives.