Employee burnout is a serious workplace issue; it degrades employee quality-of-life and professional performance (Appel-Meulenbroek, Le Blanc, and de Kort, 2020).
Employee engagement, conversely, supports worker wellbeing and performance to full potential (Bakker, 2011). Maslach (2017) reports that “work engagement . . . is not the opposite of burnout (although it is negatively related to it).”
Maslach (2017) recommends that organizations battle burnout by focusing on employee “workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.” Focusing on the six burnout predictors/risk factors identified by Maslach, design can generate conditions of positive affect inconsistent with burnout and supportive of engagement (e.g., Al Horr, et al., 2016; Appel-Meulenbroek, Le Blanc, and de Kort, 2020; Newsham, et al., 2009; Veitch, 2012). Similarly, design strategies can directly make employee engagement more likely (e.g., Veitch, Stokkermans, and Newsham, 2013).
Negative workload-related experiences are less likely when the design of the workplace supports tasks-at-hand (Appel-Meulenbroek, Le Blanc, and de Kort, 2020), for instance, and when employees have at-work opportunities for cognitive refreshment (Veitch, 2012). Investigators have directly linked providing a workplace that supports professional activities with lower levels of burnout/greater employee engagement (Barnes, Wineman, and Adler, 2020); similarly, adequate cognitive restoration has been tied to less employee burnout (Thompson and Bruk-Lee, 2019).
Researchers have comprehensively assessed how workplace design can support particular work activities and design consistent with these findings makes workload overload less likely. For example, looking at the color green can enhance creative performance (Lichtenfeld, et al., 2012; Studente, Seppala, and Sadowska, 2016) as can being in warm light (Weitbrecht, Barwolff, Lischke, and Junger, 2015).
Similarly, researchers have determined that when workers have a comfortable (Iyengar and Lepper, 2000) amount of environmental control their workplace wellbeing as well as their performance is optimized (O’Neill, 2010; Veitch, 2012). Investigators have directly linked having appropriate amounts of environmental control to lower levels of professional burnout (e.g., Laurence, Fried, and Slowik, 2013). Researchers have also identified effective methods for providing environmental control, for instance, via activity-based work environments (e.g., Spivack and Milosevic, 2018).
Workplaces can send nonverbal messages that support positive moods inconsistent with burnout (e.g., Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the British Council for Offices, 2006; Visher, 2007) and can signal that employment-related decisions and rewards are fair (e.g., Visher, 2005) as well as convey organizational values (e.g., Becker and Steele, 1995).
Workplace design can support the positive development of employee communities, via, for example spatial layout (Allen and Henn, 2007) and tactile experiences (Ackerman, Nocera, and Bargh, 2010).
Hoendervanger, Ernst, Albers, Mobab, and van Yperen (2018) generally link environmental satisfaction, and the resulting more positive moods, to employee engagement and Nieuwenhuis, Knight, Postmes, and Haslam (2014), for instance, tie the presence of green plants to greater levels of employee engagement.
Workplace design recommendations, informed by scientific studies and empirical research, that support minimization of burnout and optimal levels of employee engagement, are synthesized in this paper into a model that is practical for workplace designers/managers and human resource professionals to apply.