Offices are literally transitional spaces. If we calculate the actual offices occupancy for example: we find out that companies pay rent for their office space for:

8760 hours a year (365 days x 24 hours).

BUT

The occupancy is only 2080 hours (260 days x 8 hours).

This means a 76% non-occupancy level.

Isn’t it time to start thinking about alternative solutions for using the office after hours and weekends such as:

Allowing people to work anytime of the day. I often have to make calls to Europe and the US and most of the time I have to do this from home in the evening or early in the morning. Instead global teams could work locally in the office in different time zones. A truly global office.
Being able to go to the office anytime of the day would solve the “morning person – evening person” syndrom. No more grumpy people at the coffee machine in the morning anymore. An office adjusted to your own bio rhytyhm.

Johan Cruyff made the comment that in Spain all the 22 football players make a cross when entering the football pitch. He commented that if praying or making a cross would really help, as both teams made a cross all the football games should end in a draw.

In a recent article in the Scientific American it seems that praying to actually can have the opposite effect. In a $ 2.4 million research study it was discovered that there was no significant change whether there was a group of about 70 praying for the recovery of patients undergoing heart surgery or not.
However, when the patient knew about the prayer group this would create stress and his or her chances of recovery actually became worse.

“The patient might think, ‘Am I so sick that they have to call in the prayer team?'”

Scott Adams wrote this on the article in his Dilbert Blog:

“I have to say that I wasn’t surprised to learn that praying for sick people didn’t help. If praying worked, convenience stores would have lines of monks down the block every time the lottery reached $100 million.”

The Financial Times had a very interesting article in their weekend edition called Sweet Child of Mine. The article discussed the transition of the way children are being perceived today compared to centuries past. Children from the age of 5-6 used to work around the home, later they would search for employment in mines and factories, from an economical point of view “children made sense”.
Today “children are worse than useless. Far from making any economic contribution to the familiy life…they loaf around at school all day…”

The writer, Richard Tomkins, goes on that now that children “no longer generate cash, the whole of their value lay in the emotional gratification they brought”. Thus this shift has resulted in parents who approach child-rearing by being obsessivily worried about “health, safety and academic achievement”.

Even though parents “embark on a programme of enhancing…cognitive, motor and social skills…further learning, organized sports and cultural enricing activities…none of it makes a scrap of difference to the way the children turn out…[as] about half the variation in a person’s personality comes directly from their parent’s genes and the rest is shaped by the forces outside the home.”

So why post this here? What does this have to do with WorkVitamins? One of the fundamental issues regarding the implementation of WorkVitamins is a greater emphasis that individuals place on themselves, all of which have an effect on how we look at the work environment. Companies not only compete for business, but will increasingly compete for staff as well. Finacial benefits alone will not get you the best staff, but emotional benefits might. I see the shift between companies who see their staff as purely financial commodities to those who tread their staff as a sweet child of theirs. Thus the importance of the design of the work environment, the continuous training and the “soft” benefits.