09/04/2024 • 4 min read
Create workspaces that foster emotional well-being and connection
by Haworth, Inc.
In today’s rapidly evolving work environments, supporting employees' emotional needs has become increasingly important for their well-being and performance. Emotional Affordances, one of 3 components of Haworth’s Affordances framework, describe how environments evoke a range of emotions to influence our experience at work.
Within our framework, we look at Emotional Affordances through authenticity at the holistic space level, affinity at the community level, and well-being at the individual level.
From a design standpoint, authenticity is the degree to which a workspace reflects the values and heritage of an organization and its people.
Well-being is a subjective state of overall mental and physical health. In the workplace, well-being is facilitated through factors, such as autonomy over one’s work, feeling inspired, using the environment for mental fatigue recovery, and feeling secure.
A major component of flourishing at work is feeling a sense of connection—to both coworkers and the work itself. Spaces can foster affinity in multiple ways, from facilitating belonging and interactions to promoting organizational culture and trust.
Understanding Emotional Affordances helps us recognize how the work environment contributes to employee productivity and well-being. Designs can create rich, emotive experiences that help people engage with the organization, their work, and each other—for outcomes that are beneficial all around.
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