"Green" Workspaces = Healthier Workspaces!

Just this month, Steve Famulari published an important new book entitled Ways of Greening: Using Plants and Gardens for Healthy Work and Living Surroundings. This book focuses on rethinking working and living spaces and understanding how "greening" can make them healthier and their occupants happier. It teaches how to see unique ideas for spaces and some of the materials needed to create the designs. In addition, it gives readers a way to not only understand greening but to understand how to see greening applied to their place. 

When I spoke with Stevie this month, I asked her: "What are some of the ways in which ‘greening’ makes working spaces healthier?" Here is her complete answer:

Work spaces as well as home spaces are where people spend much of their time. These are spaces where people need healthy surroundings to be inspired, be safe, be creative, grow, and move forward toward their dreams and goals. Greening these spaces can help people in this. 

Having a space with at least 10% of the surface space of the room with living thriving plants improves air quality allowing people to be healthier with each breath. There are also studies that have found that being in green spaces improves people’s memory while studying, improves productivity, reduces the amount of time for people to heal, and reduces stress.

Be creative in designing your workspace and allow it to change over time as the interior garden grows and responds to the light and objects in the space. You can design your own green wall to fit your space which includes plants with colors, shapes, and scents that you enjoy. Using scented plants such as lavender or mint can enhance your space. Some scents such as lavender are helpful for relaxing, while others such as mint are helpful for reducing headaches. Scents have a close correlation with memory. A scent can help people recall a memory from their recent past or from a distant past. Using plants with scents while studying or preparing for presentations, and then having the same scent at the presentation can help people recall what they studied or researched for presentations.

By creating designs that are unique to the space, using green walls, and having plants that have bloomed randomly throughout the year, the site you create with your unique living garden changes and grows with colors and forms daily. Seeing change and growth happen naturally on a daily basis in green office surroundings encourages people to accept change in their lives with more ease and grace.

What do you think of Stevie Famulari's perspective on how "greening" affects workspaces and their occupants? Has your company incorporated these types of improvements in their office locations? How have employees reacted?

"Greening Solutions" = Healthier Workplace?

How much have you considered the "health" of your organization's work space in regard to the success of your organization? Sustainable design is proven as an effective approach to the development of productive and healthy work spaces. Sustainably designed and redesigned work areas not only benefit practical aspects such as energy costs, but longer-term social issues such as reducing employee absenteeism and recruiting a wider pool of talent. 

Just recently, a forward-thinking book book entitled Green Up! Sustainable Design Solutions for Healthier Work and Living Environments by Stevie Famulari was published addressing this burgeoning topic. During this past month, I had the chance to discuss this new book with Stevie, and I asked her directly:  “What are ‘greening solutions’ and how do they contribute to a healthier workplace environment?” Here is her complete response:

There are many ways to look at healthier work place environments.  Greening solutions is one approach that improves the air quality, as well as the emotional health of the people who work there.  Let’s consider this -- we spend notable portion of our time in a work environment.  The views, air, colors, scent, lighting -- all these factors influence the health of the space and affect how we feel about it.

Greening solutions look at using natural resources, including plants, composting, recycling, and other sustainable resources to create a sense of ownership in how each person can improve the space.

One greening solution is to use plants that improve the air quality of work spaces.  Most people have read that any plant benefits a space for air and psychological effects.  That is true, but there are also some plants that can be used to clean contaminants of work spaces -- such as the off gassing of furniture, the VOCs from paints, and the cleaners used throughout the office.  Some plants specifically can be used to uptake those contaminants.  They are called plants for phytoremediation.  Using those can be specific for a site.

Then, go a step further -- Use plants for fresh scents, for color accents, and for soft shapes.  With growing plants, people can experience unexpected moments of joy, change, hope while watching something one cares for flower, leaf, die, and then return again.  These changes allow people to remember that we move forward each day and can make new choices.

Greening solutions come in a variety of scales, and can be specific for each site -- for each budget, lighting, space, users, materials on the site, contaminants, and message the company wants to share.  Greening solutions can help the employees have a work space in which they are healthier and the clients who visit the site to expand their practice of healthy spaces.  Greening solutions experts can help any person look at their space with fresh eyes to find new ways to practice a healthy lifestyle.

What do you think of Stevie's perspective? What is your company doing to improve the health of its office and work space?