Planting office happiness

Employers can go to extraordinary lengths to make employees happy. They might for instance install a chocolate and chip dispensing machine, which is really only going to make their employees sad about being overweight and unhealthy in the long run. Other employers might arrange a staff day at the local paint-ball facility so that secretly harboured enmities can be played out and bruises can be nurtured as keepsakes of the day. An employer might do anything from putting in place a slippery dip to allow movement between floors, to making a room full of pillows available, to encouraging socialising after work; but new research shows that, before all of this, the first thing they should do is put plants in the office.

This research was conducted across two countries (the UK and the Netherlands) and involved researchers from the University of Queensland, University of Exeter (UK) and the University of Groningen (Netherlands). We know that people who live in environments with better access to green spaces have better mental health levels with less stress and less disposition to depression.

These researchers wanted to see what impact plants in the office space might have on the mood and job performance of workers, especially in light of a trend in some work spaces toward leaner environments with the thought that this leads to greater work output. The principles of “lean office management” call for limiting office decorations to allow for flexible accommodation of changing people with different office functions within the same physical space. Yet this is at odds with what we know as far as the importance of environment for our mood.

The study took place in large, corporate office environments in the Netherlands and the UK. The corporations in question were incorporating a lean office design and the researchers measured worker’s perceptions of air quality, concentration and workplace satisfaction as well as objectively measuring work productivity. The researchers introduced plants into these work spaces and then over subsequent months measured these factors again.

The results showed that the introduction of plants improved all of the measures and boosted productivity by 15 per cent. The theory goes that a greener workplace helps workers from previously lean environments by boosting happiness, helping them feel more emotionally involved in their work and making them feel that their employer cares about them. All of that leads to a more effective workplace.

If your boss is at all resistant to the idea of plants in the office, just point them to the 15 per cent productivity boost they will achieve. If workplaces don’t incorporate plants in their office spaces, it might be that the world will leaf them behind.