Getting back to work for workers

COMMENT The Overton window has shifted on a more flexible working pattern and the greatest societal impact that real estate can have is embracing this change to improve health around the country. There’s an odd correlation between the growth of new, sustainable, grade-A buildings and the increase in non-communicable diseases, such as anxiety and diabetes. While our buildings are becoming more sustainable, our people are not. A global research study featured in the OC Tanner Institute’s 2020 Global Culture Report surveyed 20,000 employees and leaders across the world, including almost 2,000 from the UK. It found that 79% of workers are experiencing some level of burnout, with 48% of UK workers showing signs of moderate to severe burnout – second only to Japan (50%). We are rushing to make our buildings healthy, sustainable and productive but we seem to be creating a culture of work around buildings and not around work and workers. We are creating healthy buildings but sick people. Breaking the cycle As machine learning and automation becomes more dominant, the tasks the human will be responsible for will require complex cognitive processing and will have higher intrinsic load. This load is the pressure put upon a person’s neurological system. However, the more stressed a person is, the harder it is for their system to manage this load. When there is an imbalance, people typically become more tired and fatigued. Energy levels deplete and completing the task at hand becomes harder. The longer this goes on, the more wear and tear there is on the biological system. At Centric Lab we investigate through neuroscience how the body responds to stressors brought about by the urban experience, namely environmental and psycho-social. Stress is mainly mediated by the HPA axis and is constantly working in response to the external environment. When the HPA axis engages, it sets in motion a series of neuroendocrine-mediated metabolic and immune responses to help the body combat, heal and/or adapt to the stressor. However, in the urban 21st century, the majority of stressors we experience are chronic in nature. These subtle stressors are persistent and cause the stress response to continually engage. The modern pattern of work – wake up, e-mails, commute to work, navigate the CBD, think intently, go to meetings, think, go to more meetings, then navigate the commute home – brings biological stressors and continual engagement of the stress-response system. By arranging work like this, we are not doing people and their families any favours, nor improving the bottom line. This pattern of work is making people sicker, less happy and less productive. Giving back to communities Real estate and workforce management need to become more like sports teams in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sports science was brought in to help intelligent athletes outperform their opponents by helping them maintain the physiology needed to think better for longer. Backroom staff went from three or four to 20-plus today, with analytics teams looking for marginal gains everywhere. The last-minute pass that no one saw came not because of the boots they wore or the light of the stadium, it was because their physiology was maintained to such a high degree that they could perform better, and then do it all again three days later. Performing sustainably at the highest level with the lowest biological cost – this is what we need to achieve with workforces and real estate post-pandemic. Great leaders will identify methods to reduce people’s exposure to these health risks through flexible working patterns, arranging days in the office to be when they need to be with other people. In turn, they’ll have healthier and more productive employees tackling big problems quicker and easier. More importantly, families become healthier. Communities will have their members back in the community, spreading their earnings locally to rebirth their local high street. And, critically, the industry as a whole will go some way towards lowering the risk of non-communicable diseases brought on by inflamed and stressed-out biological systems. The effects of the pandemic are still not fully understood. But by changing the way we work ever so slightly, in tune to health science, we can build a healthier, more resilient workforce ready to tackle what comes next. Josh Artus is co-founder and director of Centric Lab