This concept initially emerged among the big technology companies in Silicon Valley, such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.
To perform well and achieve visibility in the market, companies increasingly need the focus, creativity and ability of employees to solve problems in an agile and assertive way. However, it is necessary to create an environment where well-being prevails, after all, no one can live under such pressure, in a context of stress.
In response to this whole situation, and following the trend of humanizing the programs of large corporate organizations, whose process was accelerated by the recent health crisis, the decompression areas are environments that provide a break in the pace of continuous production, where the employee can rest your mind and become more productive.
‘‘The decompression spaces help in the comfort of employees who are pressured by stressful and immediate results, helping in productivity and increasing individual performance in the long term’’, explains Fernanda Almeida, Project Analyst at Cushman & Wakefield.
In addition to the benefits already described, decompression areas offer other advantages for the company, such as:
• Employee appreciation
• Greater interactivity among employees
• Increased creativity
• Prevention of diseases
• Decrease in absences
These rest areas also become an attractive point for employees to return to face-to-face work, through the resumption plans of many companies, after the pandemic situation we went through, where many joined the hybrid work model, in which they have more flexibility to balance personal and professional tasks.
Another point that corroborates the adoption of decompression areas, according to scientific studies by BBC News, is the fact that short breaks help the brain to learn better. It is during these rest periods that the brain consolidates much of the information it needs to transform new skills into a lasting memory.
According to Leonardo Claudino, researcher in computer science, co-author of a study published in 2021 by the US National Institute of Health, one of the most recent discoveries is that small breaks interspersed with the practice of activity lead to great learning gains: ''the brain takes advantage of these pauses to make a super-fast mental "replay" of what it has just learned, reinforcing the newly acquired skill”, he says.
As noted, it is increasingly necessary to work environments that promote social interaction and the performance of relaxing and therapeutic activities.
One of the tools that help in the elaboration of areas of decompression and well-being in the work environment is the XSF – Experience Per Square Foot – a global study carried out by Cushman & Wakefield in partnership with WeWork that gathered more than 6 million points data from 125,000 people on their work experiences over the last five years.
The XSF results show a strong correlation between the employee's experience in the workplace and their engagement, and provide the answers that customers need to plan their spaces in a way consistent with the identified needs.
This tool is applied internally at Cushman & Wakefield and some customers. The goal is to improve the experiences of employees around the world, after all, by improving experiences in the workplace, consequently the company performs better.
Click here to find out about this and other Cushman & Wakefield solutions to help enable and optimize work processes.
