3 Reasons You Need to Add Plants to Your Office
Design & Photo Credit: K2 Space
It’s time to spruce up that Ficus in the corner and ditch the plastic plants in your lobby. Adding real greenery can provide real benefits to your office — the plastic stuff doesn’t count. In addition to filtering the air, plants can increase productivity and provide a more engaging work environment that your staff will actually want to be in.
Research conducted into the area of biophilic design (literally translated “plant/life enthusiast”) has been ongoing for over a decade. It turns out that adding greenery to your indoor space helps with an underlying human desire to be connected to nature. While it sounds obvious, the addition of greenery and sufficient office plants can lead to reduced stress and increased productivity among other benefits.
Check out below for the top three reasons why you should be adding substantial greenery to your office. We’ll also cover where you should start and when you should consider adding in ‘bio-walls’ if you want to go above and beyond!
Increased Employee Productivity
The average employee spends nearly 8 hours of their time indoors. These spaces are disconnected from nature, most of them don’t even have operable windows. By providing plants, green walls, and natural materials, your office can provide at least an implied connection to the natural environment for your team.
As a study in the UK shows, this can provide an productivity boost to employees, having them accomplish their tasks faster while also minimizing errors. Workplaces with plants rated at a higher level of satisfaction and promoted higher levels of concentration. Additional studies have indicated that being around plants continuously helped improve memory retention by 20%. With all of the codes and technical details needed for architecture, I could certainly use that kind of memory boost!
While there is a noted increase in levels of productivity, the study also makes mention of the fact that the gain did not reach a ‘critical significance level’. So do add plants to improve productivity, concentration and morale, but don’t add them in lieu of Donna in accounting.
Stress Relief
Human beings are programmed to seek out nature. By bringing nature into the office, you can satisfy this need and also help reduce feelings of anxiety and stress. According to a UTS Research study, plants can help lower anxiety levels by 37% and feelings of anger by 44%. There are also some indications that they can help reduce the feelings of fatigue in improves concentration.. In addition to relieving stress on your employees, this will no doubt funnel back into our first point about increased productivity.
Better air quality
The biggest contaminants in an office are VOC’s, which stands for Volatile Organic Compounds. These are usually the output of off-gassing chemicals, paints, adhesives, etc. from the materials in your office. Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you’ve encountered them before. Think about when a tenant moves out, and the landlord replaces all of the carpet & paints the walls — that smell. The ‘new office’ smell is actually a massive release of off-gassing from the materials that are being used.
Why does it matter? Being continuously exposed to chemicals can be detrimental to your health over time. There’s a term in the industry: Sick Building Syndrome. This is when the occupants of a space experience acute health effects which is correlated to the amount of time they’ve spent in a space. Aside from the obvious health problems, sick employees can lead to less work being accomplished, directly hitting your bottom line.
Fortunately, adding in significant amounts of greenery and plants can help temper this chemical assault. Just to be clear, putting one potted plant or two in your space probably won’t be enough to make a blip on the VOC radar, you really need to dive in. The best way to deal with this problem, of course, is to specify low VOC materials & paints. These use more eco-friendly adhesives and compounds to provide less off-gassing. If you want to take a step further, you could construct a bio-wall and connect it to the building’s air filtration system for your space.
While plants do help filter the air and provide comforting humidity to a space, they also come with the amplified benefit of perception. While the impact from only few plants is minimal, there is still a benefit of perceived cleaner air beyond what they are able to actually impact. This alone can have an impact on your office, even if you aren’t able to install vast quantities of plants.
Getting Started
Starting isn’t hard. While Amazon is aiming for 40,000+ plants in their new headquarters, you don’t need to go that far. Here are three ramped-up approaches on how to incorporate plants into your office.
Potted Plants
If you’re truly interested in a biophilic design, there are a couple of ways to go about it. The simplest form is to add a series of potted plants to your office. Easy. You can arrange them throughout the office, put the plants on casters for easy moving, and consider hanging them throughout your space as accent pieces. Some cleverly hung plants near the entry or seating area makes for a great welcome and shows off your modern design sense.
As an added bonus, the green of the plants plays well off of the use of natural woods, creating a very cohesive materials palette. If you go in this direction, make sure you vary your plants by size and height. Some smaller shelf plants, a few larger potted plants, and some hanging will provide great visual interest to your space.
Planters & Fabrications
Taking it a step up from using an assortment of potted plants, you can begin to incorporate built-in planters and/or sculptures strategically in your office. The planters can either be static with built-in irrigation or mobile with hidden casters.
Using casters allows you to relocate these planters with the rest of your furniture if you ever use your office for larger gatherings such as Holiday parties. Having worked in an office where everything was on casters, I can honestly say: trust me, they’re worth the minor additional cost! I’d recommend putting them in now or regretting it later.
Bio-Walls
Alternatively, if you are considering a renovation or looking for something to do with that dusty space currently occupied by your outdated magazine rack, you have another option.
You could consider integrating plants by constructing a ‘bio-wall’, which is quite literally a wall of living plants. These are also called ‘living walls’ or ‘green walls’ interchangeably. This provides the double benefit of adding greenery while reducing maintenance, because you can incorporate a timed irrigation system. You also get the added bonus of not accidentally killing all your plants when your whole office goes on that upcoming team-building retreat.
Bio-walls are fantastic for nearly every location. Not only do they help with office morale, but they double as a focal point while filtering the air. If you’re creating a new building rather than fitting out a tenant space, you have the additional opportunity to connect them to your mechanical system for enhanced air filtration. This should really be done as part of a new build, though. Retrofitting a mechanical system to connect to a bio-wall can be a costly endeavor. If you’re pursuing a sustainable renovation, you can count living walls towards your LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) points as well.
We Can Help
If you’re interested in adding some greenery to your next renovation, and you should be, reach out and get in touch. We’ll see if we can help!