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The No. 1 Office Perk? Natural Light, According To Hundreds of Employees (hbr.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The news headlines about what perks or elements of office design make for a great employee experience seem to be dominated by fads -- think treadmill desks, nap pods, and "bring your dog to work day" for starters. However, a new survey by my HR advisory firm Future Workplace called "The Employee Experience" reveals the reality is that employees crave something far more fundamental and essential to human needs. In a research poll of 1,614 North American employees, we found that access to natural light and views of the outdoors are the number one attribute of the workplace environment, outranking stalwarts like onsite cafeterias, fitness centers, and premium perks including on-site childcare (only 4-8% of FORTUNE 100 companies offer on-site child care). The study also found that the absence of natural light and outdoor views hurts the employee experience. Over a third of employees feel that they don't get enough natural light in their workspace. 47% of employees admit they feel tired or very tired from the absence of natural light or a window at their office, and 43% report feeling gloomy because of the lack of light.
The #1 office perk is getting a paycheck. Health insurance is a close second. Bathrooms will be up there above natural light as well.
As is the ability to reduce the eye-searing blaze of overabundant fluorescent and LED fixtures that typically exceed the minimum legal requirements by a huge margin. When the average background field of the ceiling and walls is as bright as, or brighter than your monitor, it is very bothersome. This is obviously in the context of a circumstance where one's primary duties are on computers.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
As a programmer and designer: Noooope! Light and reflections create monitor glare which in turn create headaches, color/contrast inaccuracies, and more trouble. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy daylight... when I'm outdoors or in a rest area. When I'm working, I'm working. Outdoors & daylight are distractions at that point.
Yeah, no thanks.
I want a window office.
Health insurance is an USA only thing with jobs!
For me silence is a perk.
They say "open collaborative concept workspace", I say cheapskate.
As a programmer and designer: Noooope! Light and reflections create monitor glare
As a programmer and photographer, I very much agree that natural light is valuable. Office lights cause glare too, so with any lighting source it's more about placement of the monitor - I sit right by big windows in my home office and have no glare because I Sith with a neutral wall behind me, windows to one side, all artificial lighting behind the monitor.
I hadn't really thought about it before but I totally agree that natural light is a highly valuable resource to me. Outdoors is not a distraction, it gives me energy I need to work effectively.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's pretty much the complete opposite of my work environment :(
I've had offices in:
1) A windowless room, but two doors away from standing at the coast. This was crappy even though the seawall was great to walk during breaks.
2) A full wall window on the 9th floor of a tower with a clear line of sight to the horizon. Rarely went outside the building, but I miss this every day. So do my plants.
3) A half wall window on the ground floor looking at the forest. This was somewhere in between - the light was nice, the view was OK, but I did go walk in the woods quite a bit.
4) A windowless room with some forest outside. This is kind of crappy, I don't like florescent lights.
By far the offices with more natural light were much better workspaces, and I would willingly (sometimes unthinkingly) spend much more time at work and being productive from them.
I've had a window office. I've also had a cube adjacent to a windowed wall where turning my head left let me look right outside. I've worked in labs with windows. However, I found I was always more productive in offices or rooms without windows. Invariably, I find having a window ends up being more of a distraction than a benefit.
What I prefer instead is being able to leave the site during lunch. That gives me plenty of time to get out, enjoy some fresh air and clear my head midway through the day. As a result, I rank flexible work hours and being able to pick when I arrive, and when I leave as a much higher than having a window. Vacations, sick days, personal days and so forth also rank much higher than having a window. And of course, getting paid and getting insurance tops all of those.
As someone who spent close to a decade in a cube city before I finally landed an office with a window, I noticed a few things after a couple months:
1. I actually looked forward to coming into the office on any given day.
2. It was distracting at first, but sometimes a needed distraction that would pull my active attention away from the problem at hand and allowed my subconscious and opportunity to fill that hole with a Eureka! moment that not only solved my problem, but a few others as well.
3. I found fewer reasons to sky off by browsing web pages or making busy work by cleaning out old email, etc.
4. I've been sick a whole lot less frequently, though I'm going to bet this was because I wasn't working in the middle of a petri dish where folks brought in every single germ their kid or spouse had.
At the government lab where I work natural light is a status symbol.
The civil servants above a certain rank all get their own offices with windows, whereas "contractors",
of no matter what status and how many years of working at the lab., have shared windowless offices.
(Me, bitter? Maybe only slightly...)
Every day I envy the desk jockeys a little less. My job is hard physical work, but jeebus christ, at least I'm not so miserable that sunlight is considered a treat. LOL
1. Light that doesn't cause monitor glare. Don't care about the source.
2. Reasonable volume level. No music.
3. Suitable heating/cooling
Now I know that I live in a socialist hell hole worse than Venezuela (According to Fox News). But it is actually the law that you can't build a office where people sit in more than two rows from a window.
https://arbejdstilsynet.dk/da/...
Google translated version: https://translate.google.com/t...
L'Idiot
Seriously, I don't give a f*ck about that.
An office with a door is FAR more important. I'm perfectly happy with no sunlight as long as I can close off everybody else when I'm trying to concentrate on something.
And no glass door or glass wall either. A solid door, with no windows in it or in the interior walls. I'm fine with a window to the outside, as long as it has curtains I can close if I want the glare to go away. And a lock on the door is an essential. Don't knock, don't call, just go away if my door is closed.
If I had to be in an open plan office all day I'd go insane.
(I'm so glad I work from home most of the time.)
south facing large windows. without the blinds i'd be dazzled by the sun and people wouldn't be able to see their screens.
yes a nice bit of diffuse light coming from the ceiling is good or a north facing window but just huge windows everywhere else is a problem.
a company i worked for in ireland got a new industrial building with a huge wide south facing window where there was nothing blocking the view, so daylight straight in from about 5.30. by mid march it was so hot in there i wanted to puke most of the time and quit.
is a cube with decently high walls, or better yet an office. Who gives a damn about natural light in a open-plan sh*thole?
I'm surprised an IT-oriented site doesn't mention the seminal book Peopleware, which covers office design.
Let's leave aside the headline's clickbait 'perk' as in *bonus thing* or perquisites in offices, and get back to pre-requisites - in other words, the necessary things.
Here are my two prerequisites. One is for professionals working in offices. The other is for the profession that designs workplaces.
For users: silent places where I can get into my flow time so I can be productive. This takes about 7 to 10 minutes from my last interruption.
For designers: provide the evidence from peer reviewed studies, not hand-waving, that open plan offices are more productive. Peopleware pointed out there was no positive evidence for open-plan, it was just less expensive to set up.
There's been nil competent research to justify open plan in the three decades since.
Meantime, as someone who is expected to use my brain to be productive, I actually have to battle and overcome my employer's choices in workplace design in order to get any work done.
Yes, it's open plan with long rows of tables/ desks, low partitions, breakout rooms, funky light globes, natural light, the whole thing refurbished by interior designers 6 months ago and looks great on the web page as an employer of choice.
Now let me shut an office door so I can get some fucking real work done.
A corner office
No 1 should be an actual office.
Not some bullshit open-plan or cubicle hell dreamed up by a $500/hr consultant to foster collaboration and synergy of your brand.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Free as in Natty Light! Obviously, that wins.
Having just moved my desk in the office to somewhere *away* from the front windows, I don't want any more natural light!
Sitting up in the front of the building, you catch a real nice glare in the morning from the sun hitting all of the glass and chrome out in the parking lot and then again in the afternoon. That sunlight is like a laser beam, and it tended to come right through the holes in the blinds even when closed.
No thanks! My current corner of the office is much darker now and I am much happier for it.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I had my own large office with a door and a large window once, but this was also my worst tech job and one where I was paid the least. They just had an excess of offices with windows and they didn't have cubicles except for visiting sales people. My next job was my first time in a cubicle, and I was much happier there.
I suspect fresh air is more conducive to a happy healthy work environment than natural light.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I would so much *extremely* prefer to work in an interior office with no window rather than my current office with two big exterior glass walls but having to wear noise-canceling headphones all day long to drown out all the jerks with loud sports cars and motorcycles going by on the road constantly.
I once worked in "the basement", and lack of natural light was indeed a common complaint among colleagues. (Cockroaches were another problem there.)
They joked about getting rickets from lack of outdoor light. Even seeing a sliver of sky seems to calm people.
Companies may be able to pay lower salaries if they focus on personal perks. For example, instead of a raise, they could optionally give you menu of things like:
* Better chair
* Bigger cubicle
* Better monitor(s)
* Cafeteria discounts
* Foosball table
* Nerf gun targets
* Better parking spot
* Bus/tram discounts
* Being closer to windows (or further from Windows)
* Better dev stack/language
* Permission to troll Slashdot
* Not getting yelled at when you screw up
* More attractive colleagues (yes, men are horny, deal)
Once I was given a window office. It was really nice, but created mass jealously, being I wasn't a manager. It wasn't worth the complicated office politics it created. Some people are really petty.
Table-ized A.I.
Back in the mid 90s, I spend a month on business visit to Copenhagen.
All the offices had natural light. The building was a central corridor, with offices on the left and on the right of it, and all with big windows.
When I asked about that design, I was told that there is a law where no person should be farther than X meters away from a window, because their winter is long, and the days are short.
A far cry from the cubicle farms in the USA and Canada ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Yeah and that situation has to go.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Supervising kids outdoors at a daycare? I've hit the big time!!!
At my last job I pushed and pushed for promotion and upgrades until I had a real office with an actual door and many windows to the outside.
I then proceeded to never shut the door, and kept the blinds firmly closed.
Give me an office with a door I can close, all by myself. Windows are nice, but a fucking door is a requirement.
Silly question. You pay me $170k/year + bennies. Why would you put me in a cube farm (open office? I'm gone) where you save $10k, and I lose half my productivity?
I'm guessing my lack of an MBA is showing here.
Where I work most workers avoid natural light like it would literally turn them to stone.
Now i'm working in an office building where I have a view of planes landing and taking off at a major US airport. I am facing a 4th floor window all day and that makes things feel a little more open. But no outdoors.
Definitely beats my other desk though that's a cube on the interior of a building. You wouldn't know if Armageddon had started.
Scott
Got my window spot back 3 weeks ago, not going to give it up again. I noticed a definite health decline without having a window.
You're in an office to do work and to work with others. Most businesses don't allow this isolation every day.
You might be allowed isolation, you are unlikely to be allowed privacy at your desk. Hiding from your colleagues is a sure way to be accused of a crime; even if you're not alone. The workplace (and any semi-public space) requires following the "nothing to hide" dictum.
I would kill for having mountain view from office window, as I had in my office lab when I was a student. Not this, but something like that.
You need to get a better job. Private health insurance is a common perk world over. Good jobs will cover your spouse & kids too, even in the U.K. (where we have a fairly decent National health service).
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I have an office too but it's enclosed with no windows. And let me tell you, it's depressing. My team area is right outside my office and I've tried sitting in the cube area (fairly large cubes with privacy but also quite open) but the problem is that I often have to take phone calls and discuss sensitive issues so I find myself trekking back to the office, finish up the call, and then head back. Or someone will come by looking for me, realize I'm not "in the office" and I won't know until I run into them by chance later on.
It gets tiresome after a while so I stay in the office. I also have a multi-monitor set up in the office that's hard to replicate in a cube, mainly due to corporate costs (each hardware (e.g. monitor etc.) purchase has to go through a convoluted approval process)
The most depressing thing about an enclosed office is you have NO idea what's going on outside.
Is it pouring rain? No idea.
Did we just get hit with 12" of snow in the last 2 hours? No idea.
Is there a thunderstorm brewing? Dunno.
Is it really hot outside? Not sure, it's cool with the building A/C on
May as well be living in a cave with fluorescent lighting
Does beer pong count as a team building activity? Asking for a friend.
I can see why you don't care about sunlight. Don't you work in one of those black spheres that open from the top?
We have an open plan office here, with plenty of natural daylight which is great, but what we don't have is a way to muffle any conversations going on nearby. At least with cubicles we could have relative silence; I've had to invest in some noise-canceling headphones so I can concentrate on my code.
with all dark themes enabled if im on windows or macOS. so much better on you eyes, add anti blue light glasses and you wont be half blind as i am already
Fuck you and fuck your fucking dogs. Every day that someone brings his fucking dog to the workplace, we get a "stay at home and still get paid" day.
#DeleteFacebook
I don't really like separate offices but I agree the open floor plan can be a pain when you're trying to think. I bought a nice pair of noise cancelling headphones seeking some kind of isolation but... that just resulted in people walking over to my area and standing behind me awkwardly until I acknowledged them.
Health insurance is a huge perk here in Canada.
Re: "I want a fucking door"
Welcome to your workplace. May we help you?
Yes.
How may we help you?
You can start by wiping your fucking dumb-ass smiles off your fucking faces.
Then give me a fucking door.
A fucking glass door,
a fucking wood door,
a fucking steel door.
One fucking panel with a handle.
We don't care for the way you're speaking.
I don't care for the way you put me in a fucking cubicle
with a desk and a fucking computer that is fucking locked down.
I didn't care to fucking disable the staff monitoring software
and to bypass the fucking DNS filter
and every fucking morning have you smile
at my fucking face.
I want a fucking door
right fucking now.
May we see your employment contract?
I threw it away.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy, what?
You're fucked.
#DeleteFacebook
It sure sounds bad, but...
Ah, there's your problem! Get yourself LED lighting, 5000K (daylight).
#DeleteFacebook
If I lean just right ... I can see a sliver of sunlight ... or maybe a glow ...
I could turn off the lights during the day. I don't need to read anything that isn't on a computer monitor so there is zero reason to have the lights on. All they are doing is wasting electricity, generating electrical noise (flourescent light hum), and attracting insects indoors.
I've had a corner window office before, they are not all that great, especially if they are South or West facing. There is nothing you can do to escape the heat generated and the glare from sunlight is tiresome.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Having a door and walls doubles my productivity. Annoying chatter down the hall? Close the door. Screw sunlight; it just makes my office hot and the screens hard to read. Maybe a north facing window, but if I had to choose interior or exterior sight unseen, interior with doors hands down.
The No. 1 Office Perk? Natural Light, According To Hundreds of Employees
In what country are they interviewing? Who the hell are they interviewing? The #1 thing American workers want as a perk/benefit is a permanent, full-time job with a decent health care plan.
Those who view sitting next to a window as a perk have never had a desk next to a large office window that can't be opened and lets the sun shine through on already hot summer days without an AC unit that's actually capable of cooling things down adequately.
Oh man...... Just thinking about the procurement process to get some none standard bulbs/light fixtures for my office is making me depressed. Id have to go through at LEAST 5 levels of approvals with 3 different business cases......
I read it as they were providing Natural Light, the beer. And I thought to myself, that should not be anyone's perk...That's just cruel.