Connection
Wellness in the [home] workplace How to take cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being best practices from the office office to your home office. From lighting to storage to decorating, there are literally thousands of articles with information on how to create the ultimate home office.
at ways to create workspaces that serve us now and for the long term. Doing so will help you not only stay engaged and productive, but also feel better.
This is not one of those articles.
Many researchers break well-being into three categories: cognitive, emotional, and physical. Each plays a critical and distinct role in our overall health. Let’s look at each of these and what steps you can take to enhance your cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being while working from home.
As a workplace strategist, I work with companies to help them create spaces to fit and (if necessary) transform the culture of their organizations. For years, designers have been studying and applying best practices for something called the distributed work model, an organizational approach in which a team of coworkers is dispersed throughout an open office plan rather than being assigned to one desk. This approach allows individuals to select the space that best meets their needs for any given task throughout the day. Does this sound familiar to you? Now, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many in the United States are working in a landscape that has taken the distributed work model and expanded it to a local, regional, even national scale. Instead of opting to sit in the office cafe to tackle emails, we’re now sitting in our own kitchens, dining rooms, and home offices. We’re working during unique hours to keep up with the care of loved ones. We’re working — and we’re certainly distributed. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the countless strategies and tips on ways to maintain productivity in this new working environment. I prefer to focus on the reason we’re all working from home in the first place: our health and well-being. Very few U.S. workers have studied the standards of ergonomics; yet, under normal circumstances, many have the advantage of working in a space that has been thoughtfully designed and constructed to meet their unique ergonomic needs. Now as we observe social distancing and isolating, we’re all having to adapt to our new normal of the home office. No one knows with certainty how long it will be until we can venture back to our professionally designed offices. In the interim, we can look
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Above: The three distinct categories of well-being — cognitive, emotional, and physical — each play a critical role in our overall health. Image © RDG Planning & Design.