On a normal morning at work, your browser looks like this: work email on the left portion of your screen and a bunch of Word documents for other projects on the right side.
There’s another set of browsers opened with several tabs meant for different tasks and activities – and there’s also your phone, nagging you with calls.
The only problem is that because of having so many activities right in front of us, our brains are having a hard time directing our attention into one activity.
If you’ve been struggling to achieve deep work, whether you’re doing it in a shared office like a coworking space or an enclosed room like a private office, you may be experiencing attention residue.
The term sounds overwhelming but it’s a really simple phenomenon; it’s what happens when you constantly redirect your focus from one thing to another.
Those quick checks can reduce your brain’s cognitive capacity and costs you a seemingly-trivial but not really trivial amount of time before it clears up.
And as today’s businesses finally see the value of employees truly engaged in their work – a good example of encouraging certain patterns of thought and behavior – they finally realized that maybe they should be paying more attention to office design.Environmental psychologists are mavens of design for the scientific world.
A large number of environmental psychologists are moving what early scientist have learned about how humans experience space into design practice where it can help make people’s lives better.Among the factors that they focus on is how design affects one’s mood.
Through a series of psychological chain reactions, mood influences worker engagement – meaning, a positive state of mind results in enhanced levels of engagement.
So in order to create engaging environments, organizations need to design a workplace that emits positive mood.Employees who work in offices as such convey to their colleagues that their employers value their presence in the team and the contribution that they make to their company – and the good feeling they get from being respected enhances their engagement.
Hence, it’s no surprise that what they are communicating to the members of the workforce carry more weight than easily generated passages.Workspaces indicate respect for its users when it supports them as they do their jobs – employees want to do their work well and this creates a big influence in one’s self-identity.Generally speaking, designers speak to the employees who will work in that space regarding their jobs and how it can be designed in such a way that would optimize their performance.
More often than not, it gets designed to look good – to resemble that one workspace seen by the CEO from some magazine spread.Instead of copying some other aesthetically pleasing space, the main aim of its design should be to be able to help workers do well in contributing to their respective companies.
Affecting productivity and driving up voluntary turnover, the phenomenon has cost US employers nearly $200 billion yearly in healthcare coverage.
From encouraging sleep and meditation through nap pods down to healthy snack bars, quirky perks can be found in almost every modern workplace today.Yet amidst all of the clout and other activity going on, we have easily overlooked the fundamental factor that contributes to workplace stress: work environment – starting with the work itself.
For years, researchers have advertised the benefits of better work practices for performance and productivity, enumerating two critical contributors to employee engagement: job control and social support.
Recent studies have also indicated that having limited job control creates ill effects that extend beyond physiological well-being, it actually imposes burden on a person’s mental health.
Physical and Mental HealthBritish epidemiologist Michael Marmot and his team lead one of the most notable studies in the area popularly known as the Whitehall Studies.
Together, they discovered that the higher an employee’s rank is, the lower their morality is to cardiovascular diseases.
Remember that cute kid in yellow and her younger sibling in a stroller barging in on their dad during a video conference with the UK broadcasting company, BBC?
That video wherein their mom would later rush into the room to grab the two kids and the broadcasters – and their dad, too – were left baffled and in fits of laughter.Yeah, that video.It went viral not just because of how adorable and funny the whole scenario is, but because a large majority of the world can totally relate to the confused dad and the panicking mom.
Working parents have been there before – some, too many times – and they all know the anxiety and the fear of your kid wreaking havoc as you participate in a conference call with at least five members of your management.Parenting while maintaining a professional career is indeed stressful, but that’s the reality for almost sixty-one percent of married-couple families with a kid or kids under 18 in which both partners work.
And because of the advent of remote working and virtual offices, more and more companies are encouraging parents to work from their homes.Whether you’re a mom, a dad, or maybe both, here are a few inspiring stories and tips on how you can avoid your kid from going completely viral:“Secrets of the Remote Workforce” co-author Teresa Douglas is a proud mom who has been working from home since 2010.
In order to establish this with her children, she puts a “STOP, in a meeting” sign on her door.
In addition, she also implemented a house rule that if her door is closed, you can knock once, but if nobody answers, it automatically means she’s in a meeting.The physical barrier that you would establish can help remind you and your kid of the difference between work time and play time.