One Thing Leads to Another: Supporting Diversity, Inclusion, and Mental Health Through Multisensory Workplace Design

In this new era of office work, when the employee has been recast as a discerning user for whom organizations must thoughtfully design their spaces, a variety of new workplace priorities, including hybridity, inclusivity, and flexibility, have emerged. Chief among those priorities—perhaps at the center of them—is mental health and the importance of employee well-being for any organization that wants to maximize productivity and retention (in other words, every oneof them).¹ With this in mind, several previously unthinkable policies such as flexible hours and unlimited paid time off have become something of a norm in several sectors. By giving employees the time and space they need to take care of themselves, employers are ensuring that they can come into the workplace refreshed and singularly focused on the task at hand.

While the importance of mental health in the workplace is gaining attention, so is the impact that the physical workplace itself has onemployee well-being. Epigenetic research continues to demonstrate that our environments are just as vital determinants of mental illness as genetic predisposition, and that stress provoked by one’s environment is the “overwhelming, even dominant” cause of mental illness.² It becomes increasingly clear, then, that in order for employees to sustain good mental health, their workspace, where many spend dozens of their waking hours each week, should alsobe designed to foster a sense of calm and well-being. For an organization to holistically uplift its workforce, those aforementioned priorities, which are sometimes most visible in updated policies, should also manifest in the form of updated workplace designs.

But how can an office space, which serves occupants of all generations, abilities, and personal preferences, accomplish this? How can a workplace design ensure that people with various workstyles, backgrounds, and personal preferences are fully accommodated? The answer is simple, though its application is not always straightforward—a dynamic diversity in space must reflect the dynamic diversity of the workforce. And when we use the word “diversity,” we’re not just referring to the most salient factors to which we’re accustomed to talking about, like ethnicity and gender, or introverted vs. extroverted spaces, though those are undoubtedly critical. We’re also talking about the diverse range of needs that any one personmight exhibit over the course of a day, along with those less tangible but universal considerations such as smell and temperature that are essential components of anyenvironment, but until recently had been dismissed as peripheral to workplace design. Diversity has been proven to benefit quality, outcomes, and resiliency in everything from ecosystems to personal diets – why shouldn’t the same principle apply to spatial design?³ Though these considerations may be relatively new in the context of workplace, they are anything but new in the science of mental health—researchers were discussing the mental health impacts of homogenous design in settings such as hospitals and psychiatric facilities as early as the 1950s.⁴

Since 2012, PLASTARC has been helping organizations evolve from a traditional one-size-fits-all approach in workplace design, to one that intentionally centers the well-being of employees. Our mission to “make the world a better place, one workplace at a time” is predicated on the idea that the office should be framed as an environmentthat has a cultural, physical, and emotional impact on its occupants, and that it’s both a moral and financial imperative for any organization to design with this in mind. Toward this end, we’ve helped countless organizations move away from focusing on traditional metrics, like cost-per-seat or square-feet-per-person, and over to social metrics, such as accessibility, comfort, and interdepartmental exchange, that take each individual’s first-person experience of the office into account. Using a science-based approach, we help organizations understand the unique needs of their workforce and provide a range of potential solutions—spanning technology, policy, and space—that could help them meet, and hopefully exceed, the diverse range of needs that their employees hold. By soliciting employee feedback through interviews, workshops, and surveys, and integrating it into our proposed solutions, we strive to ensure that the dynamic diversity of needs expressed by a workforce is reflected in a newly realized diversity of space. This user experience design approach is common in several design disciplines but has been notably absent in architecture until recently.

In our engagements with a wide range of clients across the world, a few predominant workplace trends have emerged. Perhaps the most prominent among them is that workers, particularly young workers, want to be seen as cognitively-diverse first, and treated as such.⁵ But traditional techniques in workplace design did little to take this into account and instead implicitly framed the workforce as demographically homogenous: cubicles were conceived so that six-foot tall people could peek over partitions when they wanted to converse with colleagues, and frigid indoor temperatures in summertime were ideal for men wearing three-piece suits. In refusing to meet employees where they are, the misinformed belief in a universal solution not only fails to support overall employee well-being by prioritizing a narrow worker profile, it also makes employees feel disconnected from their organization, breeding feelings of indifference or resentment toward their leaders, and in the process causing emotional dissonance and stress.

In lieu of this one-size-fits-all approach, PLASTARC leverages design techniques that accommodate the tapestry of personality types and habits that comprise a workforce. While some people need peace and quiet for reading, writing, or analysis and might become cognitively exhausted in a frenetic environment, others find the stimulation of nearby activity an energizing context for the very same kind of heads-down work. At the core of all of this is an activity-based working (ABW) model, which disavows individual space assignments for a diversity of space types and the individual freedom to determine what kind of environment each employee would like to work in at any given moment.⁶ The freedom to choose or alter one’s environment, offered along with a wide range of space types and dynamic workspace elements such as manipulatable furnishings, has been linked to feelings of agency in the workplace, which demonstrably increases workers’ sense of emotional comfort.⁷ This sense of comfort goes a long way toward promoting mental health, along with overall employee satisfaction and adaptability, particularly in high-stress workplaces.⁸

By giving workers freedom to move from one space type to another throughout the day, activity-based working environments cultivate movementthrough the office, the mental health benefits of which cannot be overstated. On an individual level, physical activity during working hours has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety while improving cognitive function and a personal sense of confidence.⁹ On a social level, increased movement through space gives way to spontaneous interactions. In a traditional, non-ABW office space, it’s borderline impossible to tell employees that they should walk around a space and expect them to follow suit because there’s very little intrinsic needfor them to do so. Studies have shown that employees in traditional, non-ABW offices are far more likely to lead sedentary work lives, which can precipitate countless mental and physical impacts including musculoskeletal disorders.¹⁰ The endless sea of white desks that exemplifies the traditional office landscape helps drive home the point that a spatial monoculture fails to inspire exploration, physical, or otherwise. If each desk is just like the next, what reason would anyone have to navigate through space?

An ABW office, on the other hand, uses spatial diversity to activate movement, and in so doing, channels the extemporaneous spirit of a college campus where students go from one area to another as they follow their self-determined schedules and exchange ideas along the way. With freedom of movement and unassigned workspaces, people of diverse backgrounds find themselves engaging with a much higher frequency, leading to the type of interdisciplinary and cultural cross-pollination that has proven to increase risk-taking and innovation, and ultimately drive business. The increased familiarity between coworkers also heightens the sense of communal and social responsibility within the workplace, which serves to foster a sense of company culture, emotional comfort, and personal belonging.¹¹

For example, our work with a New York City-based art and technology startup in 2017/18 addressed their need to resolve connection and communication difficulties that had emerged as a result of siloing teams on different floors.¹² They needed a more diverse, interdisciplinary, and people-centric approach in order to respect different work patterns and styles within each department while fostering more connection and community engagement. Our workplace recommendations included a single contiguous ground floor space that would, among other benefits, facilitate interaction between those previously at risk of being disjointed.

Taking on a Diversity-First Approach

By placing mental health at the core of its work, PLASTARC has helped numerous businesses design their physical spaces to maximize the potential of individuals, the teams they comprise, and the organization as a whole. When first engaging with clients, we often use the “square peg, round hole” analogy to describe how traditional offices tend to marginalize employees by assuming that a prescriptive design will work for everyone. This assumption, we often remark, immediately undermines the common expectation that workers should bring their whole selves into the office. People come in all shapes and sizes, but a “round hole” of a workplace will only ever accommodate a “round peg” of a person. This problem is especially pernicious in creative work environments where employees are tasked with pulling from their unique experiences and perspectives to come up with innovative solutions to original problems. Who can reasonably expect employees to be their fullest selves when the spaces they occupy demand that they conform to a singular predetermined space?

By now, we’ve established that a work environment that’s not as dynamic as the workforce it serves will invariably cause physiological and psychological discomfort. Some employers may assume that wellness programs are enough to counteract these risks, but in doing so, they’re missing the point.¹³ A less diverse space is an accumulator of stressors and contributes to poor mental health, but a more diverse space actually has the oppositeimpact and proactively fosters well-being. While wellness programs and similar initiatives might do something to alleviatestressors caused by a workplace, a more holistic workplace design prevents many of those stressors altogether. It does so by taking a diversity-first approach to workplace and environmental design, which honors and uplifts the various workstyles of its occupants rather than lumping them all into one standard profile.

A potential limitation of a diversity-first approach is that, unlike generic office design, it benefits from a modicum of user and employee engagement. That’s because, just like every individual worker, each team, department, and workforce is distinct in its own preferences, needs, and day-to-day rhythms. Though it’s a step in the right direction, a company that simply offers a mix of different space sizes and shapes without first consulting directly with or collecting data from their workforce is still falling short. To reflect the individuality both of each employee and of their overall workforce, employers should aim to build an inclusive, multi-faceted profile of their organization, which, rather than fixating on a “typical” or “standard” worker archetype, acknowledges the tapestry of needs and preferences that uniquely distinguish their workforce from others. PLASTARC’s recent work with a Canadian retail bank offers an exemplary case study for this approach—we activated the diversity of business units and individuals by generating a comprehensive set of workstyle personas.¹⁴ This helped employees feel seen and included by virtue of their ability to identify with a specific persona and understand how the workplace was designed to accommodate their distinct set of needs.

Since this piece is more focused on a diversity-first philosophy than on the techniques behind that philosophy, we won’t go too deeply into what a comprehensive research effort entails. Suffice it to say, though, that several data sources—including daily usage of space types, anecdotal reports, survey responses, and collaborative visioning workshops—together form a full picture of a current workplace, its individual occupants, and what can be changed in order to best serve their wide array of daily needs. By maximizing the number of data sources—in other words, diversifying the data—a company can achieve a more nuanced portrait of their distinctive workforce and confidently design a space that reflects its constituents.

Multisensory Design for All

Thankfully, a lot has already been done over the past three years to prioritize the physical and mental well-being of office workers. Having suddenly become distributed, many organizations have had to recognize the negative health impacts that traditional office designs have had on their employees and remediate elements of those designs in order to entice their employees back into the office. Centered in these efforts has been a multisensory philosophy, which recognizes that humans are full-body sensors and that our “feelers” are active at every moment, including while at work.¹⁵ These inputs—the same five senses we learned about in kindergarten—directly impact our mood, our behavior, and ultimately, our well-being. By newly integrating those sensory experiences into their workplace designs and prioritizing things like natural light and airflow, organizations are taking a necessary first step in creating a healthier office and elevating their employees’ well-being. Biophilic design principles, which incorporate biological and ecological concepts to mimic elements of nature, further help create environments that reflect each individual’s cognitive complexity.

PLASTARC’s multisensory approach, however, takes all of this a step further by embracing the diversity of experiential preferences. While some multisensory criteria like exposure to daylight and maximized fresh air in the office are universal imperatives, others are more subjective.^{16 17} A person’s ideal indoor temperature, for instance, will vary based on their metabolism, and their desired levels of atmospheric sound will correspond to a number of factors, including personal workstyle, introversion/extroversion, and their hearing, which both varies from person-to-person and changes with age. The wide range of contexts contained by an office further necessitates a wide-ranging palette of sensory possibilities—spaces should not simply be categorized as “communal” or “solitary,” for instance, and then fall under one of those two generic profiles. Instead, a truly integrated, multisensory design should offer a full range of potential sensory environments, just as it offers a full range of space types. An office that has ten meeting spaces, for instance, might well design each of those spaces to offer a distinct sensorial profile. While one could use fuzzy furniture and low, round-edged surfaces to foster a sense of comfort and playfulness for team-building functions, another might feature natural materials like wood, greenery, and dappled light, the positive biophilic effects of which can subconsciously uplift workers during meetings or presentations with higher stakes. Each of those meeting spaces should also provide a commensurate or changeable lighting profile that feeds into its unique social atmosphere.

When considering design, PLASTARC often reflects on the pleasurable character of a garden or forest, which tend to offer incredibly rich ranges of visual elements and sensory experiences. The most well-designed spaces, we believe, borrow from these outdoor ecosystems to create surprising environments that offer a variety of distinct “habitats.” Just like the many species of plants and animals that harmoniously inhabit those places, workers have a vast array of daily needs and instincts. And in order to fulfill those manifold parameters and accommodate a neurodiverse workforce, designers must take allsenses into account. Multisensory design techniques have existed for decades, but they have only gained widespread attention in office design more recently as we strive to better accommodate neurodiverse workforces. This is anything but coincidence.

It’s also important to note that experiential diversity, in and of itself, goes a long way toward enhancing an individual worker’s mental health and fostering a sense of workplace connection. Your office might try to offer an unparalleled experience by providing freshly-baked pastries each morning, but even bagels get old—they’re also not something that everyone can eat. By offering a range of nutritious food options, an employer communicates that they are making a concerted effort to elevate their workers’ everyday in-office experience. And this amounts to much more than a simple gesture—time and again, we have found that employees’ recognition that their employer cares for them helps drive engagement.¹⁸

This foundational imperative for diversity in the workplace, due to its beneficial impact on everyone’s mental health, applies to all five of the senses. Here are a few quick, accessible things to try in your environment to support each sense:¹⁹

Sight: By having visual access to the outdoors, or even a plant in their workplace, workers can reduce their office-related stress. People can also maintain energy levels and synthesize more Vitamin D through circadian lighting or by bringing work outdoors.^{20 21}

Scent: By providing scented candles in restrooms, offices can make an otherwise pedestrian setting feel exciting and help employees form a positive association with their surroundings.

Taste: An eclectic and healthful selection of flavors and textures available in a pantry or vending machine also sends the clear message that you want there to be something for everyone, regardless of dietary restrictions, and that people should feel encouraged to try something new.

Sound: Allowing occupants to customize music in selected spaces further advances their sense of personal agency, which fosters comfort.

Touch: A workplace that offers many tactile experiences through an array of furniture types (soft couches vs hard chairs, for instance), stimulates employees’ sense of touch both when they are usingthose furniture pieces andwhen they are predictinghow it would feel to use them!

In 2018, a global athletics retailer worked with our team in its endeavor to create “the world’s healthiest building.”²² With workspaces that placed a high premium on delight through a diversity of multisensory and neurological stimuli, the company embodied its mission of making technical gear that empowers people to live longer, healthier, more exciting lives throughits workplace design. Toward this end, PLASTARC conducted on-site research at our client’s Seattle and Vancouver offices, which resulted in an ABW strategy featuring easy-to-reconfigure furniture (to make space for group yoga!) as well as playful signage, increased access to daylight, and each restroom is provisioned with an assortment of personal essentials.^{23 24} By applying innovative multisensory solutions to their curation of the physical environment, our client cultivated a more physically diverse workplace, which created a more varied and dynamic work culture. Throughout our work at PLASTARC, we see it time and time again—diversity begets diversity.

A New Era of Work

By expanding our understanding of what an office can and shoulddo for its employees, practitioners of ABW design like PLASTARC and our clients are striving to create a healthier workplace for everyone. With this in mind, we must continue to holistically embrace diversity in all its forms, from demographics like age and ethnicity to the wide variety of needs that a single individual might have over the rhythm of their day. Combining qualitative and quantitative research to capture the multifacetedness and distinct identity of each organization, PLASTARC helps our clients reconceptualize office design as something that can best support their bottom line by first supporting the mental health and well-being of their workers.

Companies that choose not to reflect workplace diversity through dynamic office design are likely to experience a rude awakening in the coming years. In an era when employees have more leverage than ever before to choose where and for whomthey work, we’re likely to find that stubbornly traditional workplaces, where people are asked to sit at assigned desks for hours on end and work in siloed departments, will find themselves falling behind their competitors in productivity and retention. A uniform environment breeds homogeneity across the board—of experiences, of people, and of ideas—which, in turn, leads to emotional and organizational stagnation. But instead of taking our word for it, take a look at the growing body of evidence demonstrating that teams, particularly problem-solving teams, are objectively more innovative and productive when they are diverse.²⁵ When neurological stimuli are embraced as a metric of space in workplace design, innovative and interdisciplinary paths of discovery emerge. The optimization of sensory experience enables more diverse physical spaces, and, as a result, a more cognitively and culturally diverse workforce.

To be sure, this is nothing short of a paradigm shift. Rather than focusing on the financial and geometric maximization of space and implicitly dehumanizing employees in the process, organizations are taking the initiative upon themselves and asking what they can do to serve a constantly evolving, neurodiverse set of employees. As study after study demonstrates that ABW offices decrease stress, increase workers’ sense of psychological safety, and improve their ability to work effectively, we’re not surprised by the sea change that’s taking place at offices across the world. At PLASTARC, we’ll never stop advocating for workplaces that prioritize individual autonomy and a range of neurological stimuli so that everyone, no matter who they are, can truly thrive in the office.