In an article earlier this year, I looked at the need to create healthier workplaces if people are to be enticed back from Covid-related lockdown measures.  It’s a concept research from the University of Arizona agrees with, with the authors outlining a roadmap to help companies rethink their office spaces.

The roadmap is based on integrative health research and provides a framework spread across seven domains to help design workplaces fit for employee wellbeing.  Such healthy workplaces encourage people to move more while reducing stress levels and even improving their sleep.

“The built environment strongly influences behavior, especially behavior that determines health,” the authors say. “The framework we describe for embedding integrative health into the built environment is even more important now, for post-COVID re-entry, to help keep people resilient and enhance mental health and well-being. This is the next frontier of integrative health.”

Integrative health

By adopting integrative health practices, the researchers believe that the built environment can help us to be more resilient to infections.  The paper covers all seven areas of integrative health – nutrition, relationships, sleep, environment, movement, resiliency, and spirituality, and the topic has taken on renewed importance as a result of the pandemic.

The authors highlight how the pandemic has prompted employers to move from a broad but quite fuzzy desire for workplaces to be healthier towards tangible actions to ensure that happens.  It became a business priority almost overnight, which made understanding how to make it work that much more pressing.

They go on to say that our built environment has a significant impact on our stress levels, with chronic stress well known to influence our susceptibility to viral infections, such as Covid.  They argue that the built environment contributes to our “allostatic load”, which describes our ability to withstand the stressors of our day.  By making our workplaces less stress-inducing, it helps us buffer the other stresses we encounter each day.

The pandemic has undoubtedly changed our attitude towards the built environment and its role in our health and wellbeing.  The authors argue that it will fundamentally change how we approach our workplaces and potentially even the way our cities themselves are designed, with a renewed emphasis on our overall physical and mental wellbeing.