“Green” offices with plants make staff happier and more productive than “lean” designs stripped of greenery, new research from the UK and the Netherlands shows.
“Our research suggests that investing in landscaping the office with plants will pay off through an increase in office workers’ quality of life and productivity,” said lead researcher Marlon Nieuwenhuis, from Cardiff University’s School of Psychology.
“Although previous laboratory research pointed in this direction, our research is, to our knowledge, the first to examine this in real offices, showing benefits over the long term. It directly challenges the widely accepted business philosophy that a lean office with clean desks is more productive.”
Principles of lean office management increasingly call for space to be stripped of extraneous decorations so that it can flexibly accommodate changing numbers of people and different office functions within the same area. Yet this practice is at odds with evidence that office workers’ quality of life can be enriched by office landscaping that involves the use of plants that have no formal work-related function.
To examine the impact of these competing approaches, 3 field experiments were conducted in large commercial offices in The Netherlands and the UK. These examined the impact of lean and “green” offices on subjective perceptions of air quality, concentration, and workplace satisfaction as well as objective measures of productivity. Two studies were longitudinal, examining effects of interventions over subsequent weeks and months.
In all 3 experiments enhanced outcomes were observed when offices were enriched by plants. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Back in 2012—and long before that, actually—parents and teachers have been advising their students to maintain a neat and orderly space for studying. They say doing so will increase their productivity while studying.
“Take some time to create a clean, organized, neat work space for studying, and then endeavor to keep it that way. Let your family know that your desk is yours, and their clutter doesn’t belong there. … Remember that a cluttered learning environment clutters the mind,” writes the Western Governors University in a post entitled “11 Ways Your Study Environment Affects Productivity (And How You Can Improve It).”
Neat is OK, I guess, but this new research seems to suggest having a few plants around, in a feng shui sort of way, may make you even more productive than having a clean desk.
About before WGU advised students on the 11 environmental study aids, researchers at Princeton reached a similar conclusion in their report entitled “Interactions of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mechanisms in Human Visual Cortex”:
Multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system.
Which is just a fancy, scientific way of saying you should keep your study space clean and uncluttered in order to achieve maximum productivity. In other words, tidy up your room. Then, get some plants. Not too many.
