Enhance the Space
Reset and recharge by enhancing your space at the individual, team and community level.
By Alana Gelesic, Spring 2022 Intern
Published March 2022
Much like the air we breathe, our space is an all encompassing field around us, impacting our interactions with others and ourselves. The environment in which we function–our physical space, the people we surround ourselves with, our individuality–has incredible power to affect who we are and who we want to become.
Born and raised in the same city for my entire life, I decided to alter my space with drastically different undergraduate, graduate school, and work environments. I learned firsthand how my emotions, attitudes, and behaviors can be impacted by my surroundings, which led me to realize the importance of enhancing the space around us rather than passively reacting to it.
In this way, I often saw how key environmental psychology concepts, the science of interactions with our surroundings, can affect how we enhance our space through individual, team and community levels to help promote continuous growth and development.
Level 1: You, The Individual
Individuals are the units that lay the foundation of the building of life. As we navigate our personal and professional lives, it is easy to neglect our grounding principles–our values, mindsets, viewpoints, and aspirations. Therefore, it is crucial to feel grounded and secure in ourselves before we can effectively contribute to a team and the community.
Creating that healthy mental space through a strong connection to our individuality can often be difficult, especially recently. Declining mental health and stress control has continued to impact individuals in the workplace. Over 80% of adults say they experience stress while working, according to the American Institute of Stress. This is a prevalent issue as found from a Boston University study, with adult depression rates tripling since the start of the pandemic. Stress in particular typically comes from an interwoven relationship that presents both physical and emotional health issues. To build the best team and then outpour into the community, we have found that one should first regroup and reflect individually:
Watch the series
Hear from leaders within each of the three levels to enhance your space.
What do you want to accomplish in your life? What are you passionate about and what excites you? How are you going to get there and most importantly, how are you going to overcome obstacles? What is holding you back and what will you do about it?
These questions help begin this self-reflection process and have the ability to guide how you choose to live your life and enhance your space. Answering these is far from quick and simple. They should be constantly changing as we grow and learn, especially as we face unavoidable challenges throughout our lives, like maintaining an effective work-life balance. By using an established sense of who we are and how we want to achieve our goals as a guide to promote a healthy mind and body, we’ll then be able to utilize our environment to the fullest extent.
This plays into the ideas of ergonomics–how an individual is impacted by and interacts with their environment- and furthermore cognitive ergonomics, which outlines interplay between our relationships with our technology, workspace, team, and mental effort while handling various stressors. Ergonomics are valuable, especially now, as there is a shift in workspace locations whether it be in-person, remote, or hybrid. Human-computer interaction and comfortable and healthy work spaces affect mental workload and stress levels. This impacts productivity, decision-making processes, and effective learning and development.
We recommend taking time to reevaluate what kind of workspace you thrive in. This can help you achieve the mission and vision that you have for your life and promote better work that combats stressors and challenges. For example, this can be through the furniture or technology that you use. There is a parallel between these ergonomics concepts and levels of our space as we see the individual level of ergonomics building upon organizational ergonomics–the relationship between socio-technical processes in relation to organizational structure, teams, and management.
Enhance the Space workshop
This workshop deck with help you facilitate a meaningful session with your team to cultivate your environment at the individual, team and community levels.
Level 2: Your Team
There is no “i” in team but there is in infrastructure. This exemplifies the importance of a team that is built up of solid individuals who bring their own values, strengths, and weaknesses into the team space. As an intern at Thoughtium, there has been a beautiful blend of this. My team has created a space for me to become who I want to be while holding their values, mission, and vision closely to mine. I have been able to develop innovative work that is mutually beneficial for each party and increases confidence, productivity, and satisfaction for us all.
The age-old question for many organizations is how can teams work together more efficiently and effectively. Connection is more important now than ever before and this is dependent on both the office and social space.
At Thoughtium, self-reflection is ingrained in our onboarding process through a variety of interactive activities and modules. We consistently collaborate and share as a team defining our goals and passions as individuals and how we will come together to achieve. For example, when meeting internally to kick off projects, we discuss our individual values, what impact we want to make, and how this can be implemented as a team. We have found that questions like these can initiate the most valuable conversations:
What is the impact that we want to make as a team? What do we value and how will we get there? How can we utilize every member’s strengths, values, skill sets, and passions to get there?
With that as the foundation, the focus should shift to the environment. Does this space build the team up for success? The workspace can impact overall organizational value: this means team mood, emotion, communication, satisfaction, morale, engagement, and productivity, each developing upon one another. These also lay the groundwork for the company’s culture which forms the need to enhance your space physically and socially.
British environmental psychologist Dr. Lee Chambers, cohesively lays out the ideas of environmental psychology with the tight knit relationship to individual wellbeing and workplace effectiveness through both physical and social facets. Through a physical lens, elements such as open spaces, personalized office elements, light, air quality, and temperature all have been found to contribute to employee mood and engagement. According to the principles of biophilia, our innate desire for connection to nature, such as windows that give natural lighting and outside views provide restorative effects for us. We tend to take comfort in knowing the shift in time throughout the day, whether we realize it or not. However, biophilic design does not mean there needs to be drastic construction updates to your office. The simple incorporation of plants, greenery, and other elements of nature serve as a beneficial substitute. This has been found through several studies, to alleviate exhaustion and improve overall cognitive functioning and mood. Even the sound of birds chirping and water trickling or the smell of fresh air have been found to have equally restorative effects.
In the non visible space of a team, there is also great opportunity for enhancement. Connection is key and this can be developed through a myriad of practices. Consistent meetings with the team both as a whole and individually, covering business but also to develop personal, sustainable relationships has significant impact on morale, engagement, and productivity. We have found that this is very effective and does not require an extensive use of resources.
Similarly, feedback and conversation can be given to everyone at every level of the organization. While initially intimidating to some, the implementation of a feedback culture fosters a space of connection, accountability, and fulfillment that allows growth in an ever changing marketplace. This builds a system of support, develops a well-integrated system and team, and allows space for the team to grow and thrive. It begins with an established connection and understanding of what job is to be done and igniting a strong collective force to promote development in other levels of our space.
Level 3: Your Community
With a strong sense of self and team, you can expand your space outward with opportunity in your own backyard. Connection is important with your teams and everywhere that you go, but consider how you might enhance your space through community engagement. You can learn a lesson or gain advice from anyone’s story no matter how little you think you might relate to them.
This way you can utilize your resources and, in turn, act as a resource to those around you.
One way to do this is through the support of small businesses, which are often rich in extensive and authentic lessons. You can assess the values and offerings that you and your organization have and then see what complements another individual and their organization. Through this connection and potential commonalities, there is opportunity for partnerships or philanthropic work that can support even more people.
For us at Thoughtium, we’ve pioneered a proprietary “Small Business Strong” development program that focuses on a relationship among small businesses, community development, and Thoughtium’s capabilities. Through our unique experiences we offer deep rooted support to founders and “right-size strategic and business planning” for emerging organizations. This has been extremely beneficial for each counterpart, simultaneously providing and gaining insights and perspectives. To shed a little more light on Small Business Strong’s capabilities, Navigating Now Episode 43 with Daryn Schwartz: “Just Begin: Starting a Small Business with a Big Soul” is linked here .
Developing communities and networks has been very impactful for us. Internships or mentorship programs enrich the future generation’s space and give you the platform to share your passions, message, and stories at both the individual and team level. This also promotes goal setting and support systems, greatly benefiting both the organization and the mentee/intern. Providing interns like myself the tools to become a developed professional and practitioner helps them take these experiences to future opportunities, spread quality connections everywhere they go, and enhance every space that they find themselves in.
Reset and recharge by enhancing your space through all three levels, starting with yourself as your most valuable asset. Reassess what wakes you up in the morning, who you want to be, who you are becoming, and how you are going to get there. Determine what is or might hold you back and how you will continue to push through, utilizing your values and mindsets to their strongest capacities. Then, use this to effectively contribute to your team and the impactful work that you will achieve. And finally, take this unique opportunity as a unified team to learn from your outward space–the community.
At Thoughtium, we view everything through the lens of both the clouds and the dirt. A tree can only stand firmly with strong roots — our sense of individuality and wellbeing. This is typically not the most glamorous process, hence why we have to get into the dirt and work hard. Once we do, we allow ourselves to grow tall and spread our branches outward and upward — thus thriving in the clouds. Similar to Gestalt psychological theories in which there is emphasis on the whole over the parts, we as individuals are the trees and when we come together and develop this enriching environment, we become a wondrous forest, thriving and supporting the surrounding ecosystem. Contribute to your ecosystem and enhance your space!
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