At the office, naturally

Firms are going way beyond pot plants and coffee to attract a happy, diverse workforce – with paybacks in productivity and wellbeing.

- FIONA TERRY

Heath Boot had been in the corporate marketing world for 22 years before retraining as a teacher. He loved his new role but there was one aspect he couldn't get used to – the environment within which his students needed to learn.

The classroom he shared with another teacher at Silverdale School on the Hibiscus Coast was a large, modern, open-plan space with 63 children aged 10 and 11.

Such classrooms “can be a visual cacophony of art and design and a clutter of educational information and messaging”, says Boot. Corporate life had shown him multiple examples of workspaces more conducive to thinking and learning.

On top of brightly coloured and randomly placed artworks, the noise levels may not be conducive to work, he says. “The big open-plan classrooms are really challenging, especially for neurodiverse children. And as a teacher, they're definitely not ideal workspaces.

“I wanted to see if we could improve them, primarily for the children but as it turns out, with benefits for those of us working there, too.”

With friend Blair McKolskey, whose business, PLN, designs workplace furniture and lighting, a plan for a better classroom environment was germinated. Quite literally – one of McKolskey's recommendations was biophilia, or connection with nature.

“I'd been investigating getting plants and nature into the classroom and Blair explained the benefits of biophilia, which he'd been doing a lot of work with at his firm. Our proposal was to introduce features of it through simplifying the environment, adding a floor-to-ceiling wall mural of a forest walk from a nearby reserve so the children could connect with it, and introducing plants.”