Work, Wellness & Space

A New Configuration for a New Era

Expectations related to health and wellness have been changing steadily over the last few decades.

Not only are employees seeking jobs that provide meaning and purpose; they want jobs that promoted total health and wellness—for themselves and the environment.

The rush has been on to design and meet the needs of new, discerning talent pools. COVID-19 accelerates things, and it changes much of the underlying equation.

Research indicates that employee satisfaction and productivity are typically higher at companies that demonstrated a total commitment to a healthy work/life balance of employees.

Employees, it turns out, reciprocate, and commit to those kinds of companies for a longer period of time, doing wonders for retention. They also become companies’ most important and powerful advocates.

As the world comes to grips with the social realities of zoonotic diseases—how and where it they are transmitted, the potential of lethal mutations—it must also rethink “the world” itself.

Clearly, the old configuration will not fully support our market economy—or protect its producers and consumers or safeguard supply chains—when the next, equally paralyzing global crisis hits.

That means COVID-19 is spurring us out of our complacency.

The Dawn of Holistic Preventive Design

In early 2020, GreenHouse and Greentarget launched Immediate Frontier (IF), a unique, collaborative initiative that affords an opportunity to share resources, intel and domain expertise in order to tackle the most pressing social challenges and design new models and guidelines for solving them.

While the lockdown stemming from COVID-19 forced the cancellation of offline focus groups and roundtables, the IF team stepped up its research on various web platforms, interviewing individual actors and surveying groups of actors in:: commercial real estate; pharmaceutical and health insurance companies; law firms; management consultancies; as well as architects, designers and a team of health and wellness experts.

These interviews and surveys have, already, provided a fund of insights for a world in which black swans—ones that kill—are less rare.

IF plans to release those insights in the coming months as we re-imagine wellness, space through the lens of what we have defined as holistic preventive design in an effort to better understand what our lives will look like in the short-term and in the years to come.

What we know is this:: until there is a cure for zoonotic diseases—and solutions to a host of other complex problems that threaten human health, safety and wellness—there is prevention.

Here’s the challenge:: We’re still governed by the norms of a curative world; a reactive world, influenced by outmoded expectations related to concepts of healthy sustainable development, which served the needs of last century, but not the present one.

If a healthy immune system is one of the best defenses against even novel diseases, then shouldn’t our world, and the spaces in which we work and socialize, be designed holistically to support preventive life and living?

Assuming the answer is “yes,” then we’ll need to do more than simply get imaginative with existing notions of scheduling flexibility, health benefits, floor plans and staffing solutions.

We will need a grand strategy—and a set of guidelines—to move from a sense of possibility, which is where we are now, back to a sense of reality as it comes time to embrace—and flourish in—the future that was thrust upon us through Holistic Preventive Design.