How an office environment can contribute to workplace stress

A new study from Cisco found that while employees across the Asia Pacific are willing to return to the office, a portion don’t think the office enables them to do their best work.

According to the report, 71% of employers said their staff responded positively to their company’s mandate to return to the office, while 77% of employees wanted to return to the office at least a few times a week.

However, 64% of employees believe their offices are “not fully fit for purpose” to allow them to do their best work, the report said. And further still, 81% of employees believe office layouts and seating arrangements are not conducive for brainstorming and collaboration.

“Our study reveals that employees across the region have embraced hybrid work and are willing to return to the office more often, but with a caveat, workspaces must adapt to their evolving needs and expectations,” Sandeep Mehra, managing director collaboration sales, Cisco APJC said in a statement.

“In the era of hybrid work, we must prioritise the evolution of our office spaces and technology to meet the needs of employees.”

Stress in the office

Libby Sander, MBA Director and assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Bond University, explained how an office can contribute to workplace stress on employees.

“There's a few different ways with the design of modern offices because most of them are open plan now,” she said. “And so what that often means is that they come with a lack of visual privacy, a lack of auditory privacy and for some employees, they also don't have their own desk allocated.

“And what research has shown is that… other people talking is the most distracting and stressful aspect of working in an open plan office. Because what happens is that you can't concentrate effectively to get your work done.”

Sander highlighted other factors that can cause stress in the office such as insufficient natural daylight, poor lighting overcrowding and poor temperature. But she also emphasised the impact noise can have on employees.

“I did a study with some colleagues here that…showed that just standard open-plan office noise contributed to a 34% increase in physiological stress and a 25% increase in negative mood,” she said. “That was a causal link, it was just the open-plan office noise, it wasn't particularly high, that causes a big rise in stress and in negative mood.

“And we know that's not correlated with good outcomes for wellbeing or for productivity and performance. And often people don't realise the effect that noise has on your body, has on your ability to concentrate. Because we don't notice it as much overtime but you don't actually habituate to it in terms of how your body and how your brain responds to it.”

Return-to-office stress

Sander went on to describe the amount of distractions employees could be faced with when returning to the office.

“Since the pandemic, it's worse, because what we often hear in our research is that there aren't enough meeting rooms or there aren't enough phone booths or that people just can't be bothered moving from their desk to one of those spaces when they want to take a phone call,” she explained.

“And because there are more and more online meetings, people are telling me quite often that people are conducting Zoom or Teams meetings in the middle of the open-plan space, which is obviously then very distracting to people who are sitting around them,” she said.

Further, Sander discussed how office interruptions can hamper employee productivity.

“Every time we get interrupted it takes between 15 to 20 minutes to get back on task,” she said. “So you can imagine how distracting that is over the course of a day. Even if we're not interrupted directly by someone talking to us, you hear all the time in the research, of people having impromptu meetings, standing next to your desk, talking on the phone to their colleagues, talking to each other.

“And we change what we do in our work multiple times over the course of the day. Sometimes we're doing collaborative work, sometimes we're doing problem solving, sometimes admin and a lot of the time things that we really need to focus and concentrate on.”

While some may argue that a return to office is good for collaboration, Sander highlighted a different perspective.

“It is a misnomer, this idea that if we get everyone back into the office, they will collaborate more, solve more problems, network with each other,” she said.

“The research has conclusively proven for multiple, multiple studies over a decade, that that doesn't happen. Just sticking everyone together in one room does not make them do that. In fact, it can make them do the opposite. Because if they can't focus and concentrate on their job, they're more likely to become more withdrawn, less collaborative and in fact, in some cases, more hostile towards their colleagues because they're feeling frustrated that they just can't get their job done.”

And while employers can create spaces that do enable collaboration, Sanders said it isn't a one size fits all approach.

What HR can do

To address the potential stress that can be caused by returning to the office, Sander suggested HR teams have individual consultation and also see what works best for each team.

“Working at a team level is what we see in the research often works the best,” she said. “For the team to work out: what's the rhythm of our team? How much synchronous versus asynchronous work do we have to do? How often do we have to do that?

“And for some teams, it might be optimum to come into the work to the office four days a week, other teams may need to come in less. But I think organisations should avoid the one size fits all, everyone comes back a certain number of days.”

It is also important for HR teams to focus on the outcomes and then let teams design the best way to achieve them based on the people they have in their team, Sander added.

“We're focusing on the psychological state that we really need to achieve the type of work we're doing, whether that be creative work, collaborative work, focused work,” she said. “People are much more accountable if they've had a role in co-designing how they're going to be assessed in terms of their performance. They’ll take more accountability and responsibility.

“And as we know, autonomy is an enormous predictor of satisfaction and organisational commitment. So the more organisations can work collaboratively with teams and individuals to set those outcomes, and to let people then design the ways that are going to be optimum for them to achieve those outcomes, is really the way forward.”