Photo credit: Tanya Lee Hervey Photography
Plants in the workspace can have a positive impact on your health and well-being. The workspace has taken on new forms for all ages in recent months. Improvised home-schooling areas and remote offices have become the new normal at home, and with back to school upon us, now is a good time to introduce a few plants to keep us focused and moving forward.
While it’s always a little sad to see the carefree days of summer come to an end, the structure the academic year provides is a welcome return to routine. Since it remains unclear what the classroom will look like, or how long we might be working from home, we take a look at how introducing some greenery in our workspaces can have a positive impact on our health and well-being.
Control What You Can
There are so many big things out of our control right now, it helps to focus on the small things we’re able to control. Our daily routine and our personal workspaces fall into these categories. We do better when we know what to expect, so it’s important to stick to our routines and make ourselves as physically and emotionally comfortable as possible right now.
Simply adding plants to your workspace can help to personalize or normalize your temporary workspace, and may even serve to neutralize the repeated anxiety of facing another day of uncertainty, or finding our way in what is otherwise an unusual work setting.
Add houseplants to your home office desk or the home school table as a grounding centerpiece, or place them as a natural workspace divider for multiple student learners.
We like these low light and low maintenance plants for desk space: Chinese Money Plant, Heart Leaf Philodendron, Marble Queen Pothos, Robusta Snake Plant, Maki Podocarpus & Candy Nephthytis.
Plants Reduce Stress & Improve Productivity
Human beings of all ages tend to carry around stress. When we bring that stress with us into our work environment, the spaces we’ve dedicated to concentration and productivity, our purpose there is defeated.
Plants have been shown to improve creativity, productivity and motivation in the workplace while helping people stay calm, relaxed and focused .
Children may have a more difficult time identifying or articulating sources of stress, resulting in frustration that impedes learning or behavior problems that disrupt the larger learning environment.
Studies conducted by the National Initiative for Consumer Horticulture show that classrooms with plants have many positive effects, including:
- Test scores increase by 10%
- Children are 7% healthier
- Symptoms of ADD are reduced
Purify Indoor Air
According to scientific research from NASA and others, plants clean indoor air, stabilize carbon dioxide and create comfortable ambient air humidity. Plants also boost healing, happiness, and productivity.
The #PlantsDoThat Inside infographic on Where We Live shows:
- Rooms with plants have fewer pollutants like VOCs (volatile organic compounds).
- Plants in our homes increase room humidity by 10%.
- Plants remove up to 90% of formaldehyde in a room.
Check out our naturally Air Purifying Collection of NASA-tested plants.
Locals can wander our greenhouse (it’s a calming experience in itself!) to find plants for the workspace or you can find all of our houseplants available online for delivery right to your door – anywhere in the US.
My Pro Tip
Here’s a great resource from scholastic.com to create lessons about the science of plants. Allow children to care for plants as part of their daily routine. To promote ownership and responsibility, we encourage “adoption” and the naming of plants. Use wooden craft sticks for labels and download our Adoption Certificate here.
See you at Studley’s!
