In Canary Wharf, developers are building a “green spine” that will soon wind through the skyscrapers, giving workers ready access to green spaces during their workdays. Across town at Google’s under-construction UK headquarters, a 300-meter-long rooftop park with over 250 trees crowns the building, providing employees with a natural escape from the offices and urban environment below. On the other side of the Atlantic, retailer L.L. Bean cut out the middle of one of their warehouses and turned the space into a courtyard, so that everyone at their new home office would have views of nature while working. These real-world examples of incorporating nature into commercial spaces are part of a growing trend to design places where employees can be immersed in nature during their workdays.
Increasing nature in the work environment certainly aligns with many companies’ sustainability initiatives. However, the motive also stems from nature’s effect on humans — it is well established that nature makes us feel better. Our emotions, our thinking, our connection to others, and our physical well-being are all enhanced by being in and around nature.
Despite the connection between contact with nature and our well-being, large investments in bringing nature into the workplace raise some thorny issues. First, in a time of economic headwinds and cost-cutting, is there a business case for incorporating nature into employees’ surroundings? Second, what about those workplaces where it is not feasible or sensible to incorporate a green spine or a rooftop garden?
Answering these questions requires first understanding whether nature has effects on metrics that matter to organizations’ bottom lines (e.g., employee satisfaction and performance) and if so whether less-extreme doses of nature are meaningful enough to elicit these gains. Thus, we set out to test the effects (if any) of what we call micro-nature — small, affordable, seemingly innocuous ways of incorporating nature into the workplace — on how employees feel at work, and how they perform….