Chris Congdon

Welcome to Work Better, Leidy.

Leidy Klotz

Thanks, Chris. It’s great to be here.

Chris Congdon

Well, I am really excited about hearing more about your work because it’s a sweet spot. It’s an area that I’m really interested in, which is this connection between psychology and the physical environment, the spaces that we live and work in.

And one of the places that I wanted to start today, just to kind of ground everybody, is what you’ve learned about the connection between the physical spaces that we’re in and our emotions. Can you talk about why space actually impacts our emotions?

Leidy Klotz

Sure. I think the ones that I’d like to really emphasize today are just how our spaces and our relationship with our spaces influence our sense of agency, our sense of competence, and our sense of connection.

And those are things that we all recognize are important, right? I mean, anybody who’s in a workplace is saying, yeah, it’s important to have agency. It’s important that people feel like they can have a say in what’s happening around here. It’s important that people feel like they’re good at what they’re doing or they can see the impact of what they’ve done. It’s important for them to have that competence. It’s important for them to connect with other people.

But we don’t necessarily see our spaces as a contributor to that, right? And it’s not just that they could be a contributor. It’s also that they’re like the original way that we’ve kind of met those needs, met those basic needs for agency competence and connection. And in a lot of cases, they’re one of the only kind of things that we have control over, whether we’re an employee or whether we’re the one who is, you know, setting up the spaces for the employees.

Chris Congdon

Can you talk more about that? Like how do physical spaces help me with my agency?

Leidy Klotz

Okay, I’m going to go way back and then I promise we’ll come to the office. But you know, and this was fascinating to me because I, you know, in doing research for the book, you’re like, okay, where do these needs come from? And so if you think about our ancestors who didn’t have shelter, right? And at some point they had to say, well, let’s try to figure out how to move these sticks around or move these mammoth bones around to be able to make shelter and get us out of the elements and keep us safe from predators. They had to do that. And the ones that did that, obviously, were more likely to survive and pass down their genes to us.

So like the action in the world was to build something, right, was to make something, make this space, do something with your environment.

But there had to be a psychological pull for that, right? And so it felt good to move sticks around. It feels good to feel like you have control over your environment. And so these needs are coming from our interactions with our surroundings.

And now when you fast forward to the office, obviously, it’s not life or death whether we can do this, but there, one of the studies that really resonates with people in the study of nursing homes where they looked at people who could modify their space that they had moved into versus people that couldn’t modify the space that they had moved into and came back 18 months later and the people who could modify the spaces were 50% more likely to still be alive.

And so it’s, you know, and that doesn’t carry across every study, but it just shows how basic this need is to feel like you have a sense of control. And then some of these like mega workplace studies that study all different variables, that same trend is in there, where if people feel like they have agency, if people feel like they’re competent, if people feel like they’re connected, they’re more happy with their work, whether they’re getting it through the spaces or some other means.

I think it’s important too, because there are all these different things that our spaces can do for us, right? You know, like, okay, the blue paint color makes you feel a certain way and pink paint color makes you feel a certain way.

And I think that we need to, that’s important, But before we think about that, we need to think about these basic needs that our spaces are meeting or not. And so the example of agency could just be, okay, can I move the things around in my office is a very basic one, right? Am I able to rearrange my desk?

Chris Congdon

Yeah, for sure.

Leidy Klotz

I know some very high design offices where people have to clean their desk up at the end of each day to keep the basic aesthetic of the larger space in place. And that might be a good thing that you want to do that gives a good appearance of the company, but also you need to recognize that is like taking away agency from the employees. So there’s kind of the modification of spaces, but then there’s also, people know how to use the space, right?

So if you’re talking about hybrid work or like flexible workspaces and you come in, it’s just an amazing, super thoughtfully designed office. But if people come in and don’t know that they can use the cafeteria or think that conference room is just for executives or are worried that, hey, I just started working here and maybe this person who’s been here for 10 years always takes that hot desk, those are all things that are making people feel less agency and less competence.

Chris Congdon

Yeah, you know, what you’re talking about reminds me of when we opened this really beautiful work cafe. It was intended to be a space that not only provided nutrition, but there were working areas there and places for people to do meetings and to gather. And I remember vividly when our CEO at the time first sat down in one of the spaces and held a meeting there, that it was a great form of communication to everybody because we went, oh, We are allowed to have meetings away from conference rooms. We can sit here and have coffee with each other.

It was a novel concept at the time. But I think it speaks to what you’re talking about, Leidy, this idea that you need to know that you’ve got permission to use spaces, otherwise they just sit there empty, right?

Leidy Klotz

Yes, exactly. I knew I was going to love this conversation. I’m so excited.

That was, I just wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It’ll probably be out by the time this comes out. But one of the examples I use is like, oh, what can leaders do? And it’s like, well, leaders can lead by example and show that this space can actually be used for this thing. And then I was sitting there thinking, man, I wonder if anybody’s ever done that. So maybe I can go back and modify the article and say, but when you think about the access to space, right? That meeting and that permission that was given is worth millions of dollars, right?

Chris Congdon

Yeah. Well, trust me, you wouldn’t have wanted to use the space the way it was before. So it really was a worthwhile investment. But that takes me to another kind of nuance of our conversation that I wanted to talk about, which is just this idea that our surroundings shape our behavior, maybe even more than we realize.

And you use the phrase a good place, and I would love to hear more about what does a good place enable people to do that, say, for example, a bad place doesn’t?

Leidy Klotz

I like the, I mean, the more than we realize framing is interesting because you think that… of course, we must notice these places. We’re in them, they’re 3D, they’re affecting all of our senses.

But it is so true that we just move through spaces and don’t necessarily pay attention to them. It’s like, where’s the nearest fire extinguisher, right, in your office? And I wrote about this. I read the research about it, and I still have no idea where the closest fire extinguisher is to my office.

And these are things that are designed to be noticeable. And so we’re moving through this world clearly not necessarily noticing everything. And there are things like mechanical sound from a HVAC system, for example, that could be rattling. You don’t even notice it. And the end of the day, you’re more stressed out because you’ve had this like ambient noise that you didn’t even know you were experiencing. The same with kind of off-gassing carpets or any of these kind of like intrusive smells.

So that’s our space influencing us and we’re not paying attention. And if we just kind of, and if we did pay attention, we’d be able to fix it relatively quickly. So I think that to me the first way to deal with this kind of hidden influence is just to become more aware of the spaces that we’re in.

And that’s just the negative side of it, right? These are potentially negative things that are happening, but there’s also amazing things to notice in our spaces, right? I mean, if you talk about this, well-designed space that you had the meeting in. I mean, that’s human ingenuity. It’s kind of artistic. It’s a way to, you know, it’s something to look at and marvel at that, oh, people did this. And yet we’re kind of stuck on our screens and those are two-dimensional and you can’t do the same thing for us that our surroundings can.

So this noticing, this being engaged and doing it intentionally is both a way to see bad things that might be impacting us and we don’t notice, but it’s also a way to see things that might bring us joy and beauty and meaning that we’re missing out on because we’re just moving through the world without paying attention.

Chris Congdon

I think that’s such a good insight, and sometimes maybe we’ve got our faces down on a screen too much, but I also think sometimes we just take our physical surroundings kind of for granted.

And like you don’t always stop and notice and go, wow, you know, why do I keep going back to this place? Well, maybe there’s something that… I love about it, but I never really thought to articulate the fact that I’ve got this great view, or there’s this beautiful wood surface, or whatever it is that makes me feel better when I’m in certain spaces. So… I think it’s great for us to start trying to notice that more and pay more attention to it.

Leidy Klotz

Yeah, can I add on that? I mean, I think that’s exactly right. And it’s getting at, I mean, there’s some general principles, right? Like your example of wood and things that mimic the natural world are going to, generally more, make a better place and views, right?

That’s like our ancestors’ views that there’s an evolutionary basis to that. But there’s also just this element of once you notice and you start to choose the place, the choosing makes you like it more, right? You feel like, oh, I picked this spot. It’s my spot. I like it because there isn’t a view. I mean, I have a writer friend who likes to put her desk facing a wall away from the windows and she just wants it that way, but it’s because she likes it and she chose it, then that’s like the right way to do it for her.

And so I think that In addition to all these kind of general things that help us like a space and help us feel like we’re in a good space, just the act of noticing and deliberately choosing where to put ourselves is going to make us like the space more.

Chris Congdon

Leidy,  are there things where you’d say, you know, again, we were talking about this notion of a good place and some of the things that enable it. But are there telltale signs that you would say of a bad place that maybe we didn’t notice that either and we just accepted it?

Leidy Klotz

I think if it’s, I mean, stealing your attention, maybe. I think, you know, like, I don’t want to say all clutter is bad, but certainly there are places that you go into and the space is so disjointed or disorganized that it’s kind of taking your attention away from what you’re there to accomplish, if that makes sense, right?

I mean, if you’re going to somebody else’s office and you want to meet with them and yet, you can’t pay attention because there are things strewn all over the tables or just because the arrangement isn’t symmetrical or the wayfinding is hard. Anything that kind of takes your attention away from what you’re there to do can be a sign of a bad place.

Chris Congdon

Yeah, for sure. Along those lines, one of the insights that you talk about in your work is this idea of subtraction to make a place better. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Leidy Klotz

Yeah, I mean, and that was, I mean, I wrote a book and came out in 2021 about why we overlook subtraction as a way to make all sorts of things better. And it’s been applied in all sorts of areas, but it came from my background, which is in the built environment.

And so, you know, kind of the genesis of that insight was… things like, here’s a concrete slab that they just finished and didn’t bother putting tiles on. And it actually makes a better surface for this environment, right? And I bring my students in on tours of buildings. We’ll go around campus and look at buildings and look at how they’re designed. And what do you notice about this space? And you have to point out that it’s like, no, what’s making this better is what’s not here, right? It’s these extra finishes that you might see in other spaces.

And I know that that’s not right in all situations, but it’s an example of like we don’t tend to think when we’re trying to take something from how it is to how we want it to be, we tend to think, what can we add? And then we move on before considering, well, maybe we could subtract from what’s already here.

Chris Congdon

Yeah.

Leidy Klotz

So that’s something that applies to spaces as well as everything else.

Chris Congdon

Yeah. There’s a story from the fashion industry that Coco Chanel always said, you know, before you walk out the door, like take just one piece off, one bracelet or one scarf or something. And, you know, it sounds kind of similar in some ways that if you think about walking through a place that just maybe isn’t feeling great, well, you know, maybe you need to take out that pile of boxes that had gotten stacked up and left in place or something like that, right?

Leidy Klotz

Yeah, exactly. I love the Coco. There are examples from all kinds of all different mediums, like writing, omitting needless words, and killing your darlings. And it’s interesting because I think that advice rings counterintuitive but true.

And part of the reason it’s counterintuitive is because of this tendency to add. I mean, there’s no pithy quote about, hey, if you want to look better, add one piece of, one more accessory, right? It’s about taking one away. But yeah, it’s a great example and it’s totally applicable to. the built environment.

Chris Congdon

Yeah. I mean, going back to our ancestors, is there a reason why as human beings, we feel like we’re wired, that we just have to add more stuff, more spaces, more processes?

Leidy Klotz

Yeah, great question. I think it ties back to competence, right? You know, we talked about how competence makes us feel good. And that’s something that we want to help people feel in offices by moving things around. But when you add something, there’s visible evidence of your competence, right?

So if you add a, well, just take it back to the piece of clothing, right? If you add the accessory, then it’s like, okay, well, work must have been done to add this accessory. If you add another paragraph to the e-mail, it looks like you were trying. Whereas if you take things away, you were being competent, you were like effectively interacting with the world around you, but sometimes there’s not the evidence of it.

So if there’s like an evolutionary basis of it, I would think that might be part of it.

There’s these birds, bowerbirds, you might know about them, but they’re the building birds. The male bowerbirds will make nests and they’re really, if you go look at them on the internet, they make different styles and then they decorate them. They’re really intricately designed. And then the female bowerbirds go around and look at the nests and decide which male to mate with based on which nest they like best. And then the female powerbird goes and builds a nest to raise and shelter the young. So the whole point of the first male-built nest is just to show that they can like move stuff around in the world. And it’s, this is competence, right? This is like, hey, I can effectively interact with the world.

And if you think about it, it doesn’t actually provide shelter, but it does show that the genes that you’re tapping into are like effective at doing things that could then transfer to getting food or building or whatever. And this has been extended. It’s not just male bowerbirds, female bowerbirds feel it too, and then bowerbirds to humans, and then from physical task completion to kind of the things that, checking something off your to-do list, for example, makes you feel that dose of competence.

Chris Congdon

Yeah, that’s, I have never heard of this before. I am going to look it up because it just cracks me up that, you’ve got birds building nests just to attract a mate, which in some ways, maybe that’s the way humans work too.

Leidy Klotz

A little bit, yeah, there’s some parallels to house hunters or whatever.

Chris Congdon

Yeah. I’m really interested in your work about kind of bringing back this idea about, you know, physical environment and people’s well-being.

And to me, that feels like it’s such an area that’s overlooked and sometimes under-prioritized. Sometimes there’s financial arguments about space that, well, we don’t have enough money to add these aesthetic elements or whatever it is. And I’m just interested in what you’ve found in terms of the role of physical environments and employee well-being on whatever level.

Leidy Klotz

Yeah.

Chris Congdon

Physical, mental, social.

Leidy Klotz

I think this is going to be preaching to the choir, but it’s just, I don’t think there’s any way to over-invest in it, really. It’s just so critical. I think part of the challenge, and maybe what those of us who know these benefits can do, so I mean, there are just reams of studies showing that people who are in offices that are good places are more productive, right?

19:22-19:45 And then if you think about the capital expenditures for an office project or an office update or just new furniture or whatever, are big, but they’re small compared to all the employees’ salaries. And so if you can do something that gives you the best people, keeps them performing well, keeps them happy, makes them, meets their basic needs, right, then it just, it seems like a no-brainer.

For me, I think part of the problem is that it’s just hard to quantify those benefits sometimes, right? It’s like, if, okay, this person feels 10% more agency, like how is that going to hit the bottom line? And is it 10% more agency or 9% more agency or 11% more agency? And I think we get into this, it’s so much easier to just be like, okay, what’s the electric bill? And that’s a very standard cost. And then you optimize to the things that are easy to measure and certain as opposed to the things that are really important but you may not be able to get an exact measure on.

But I do think if we started to have some kind of metrics of agency and competence and connection, right, you could then, I don’t know, not justify, but then help people understand more about why these expenditures are so important. I don’t know what you think about it? I mean, you have more experience with it in actually trying to make it happen in the real world. I just write about it.

Chris Congdon

I think you’re right. And don’t worry about preaching to the choir because I think we all have a common shared interest in being able to help people who don’t understand some of the things that we do to understand why that investment is so important.

But, you know, I think you’re right in that those things are a good place to start trying to measure. And it is always going to be difficult to try and quantify the business value of, what’s the value of somebody having a great idea? How do you quantify that? How do you measure for that? But yet we know that in those kinds of physical environments, it enables people to create with each other and to interact with each other in ways that might not happen.

So I think, though, what’s becoming so interesting to me and a lot of people is the amount of research that you and others are doing to really try and understand how places make such an important difference.

So one of the things I would like to hear, maybe if you’ve got some specific examples about, is, we’re living in this kind of era of organizations trying to figure out hybrid work. Like how do you manage people that some are coming into the office willingly, some are coming into the office because they’re required to.

And I’m interested if you’ve seen any examples of design decisions that you’d say, well, you know, that’s actually discouraging people from coming to work in the office, I mean, even if it’s unintentional. What are your thoughts on that one?

Leidy Klotz

I think that, I understand that, people need to think about where is best for the work to happen for their employees. And I do understand that there are times when it’s better to have people be in the office. I think the first part of this is just to communicate it really clearly, the rationale behind the decisions, and then also where there’s room for negotiation and where there’s not, right?

I mean, if you know that people are just going to have to be in the office, don’t pretend like it’s a choice, right? And then people will be able to kind of… exercise agency and competence with the things that they do have control over, right?

So for example, you need to be here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but you can choose your commute. You can, you know, have walking meetings. You can, here are the places where you can choose what’s happening in your surroundings. And it seems like the places where you asked for bad examples. So the bad example then would be where it’s just kind of passed down as this is how it’s going to be without any kind of justification for why and acknowledgement of where there is an opportunity for employees to have some say in what’s actually happening. So that’s one.

Chris Congdon

In what you had said earlier about us being more aware of our surroundings, I just wanted to help our audiences by saying If you see this kind of very practical thing, this might actually be hurting you more than helping. Have you seen some of that?

Leidy Klotz

The most practical thing I would say is like, just take this filter of, okay, here are some things that matter, you know, agency, competence, and connection. And then the next time you go into the space, look for things that are blocking that, right? I mean, it could be here. It could be the, people actually, nobody is going to this part of the office. Why is that happening? And you’re going to be way more capable of figuring out why that is. It could just be that, you know, there’s people who don’t feel like they have permission or the lights are off or whatever. But looking for barriers to those things and then trying to remove those barriers is the biggest bang for your buck. And it would be the fastest, I would think.

Chris Congdon

Yeah, I’m always amazed at how many times we’ll hear organizations say things like, we put in some of this casual lounge furniture and nobody’s using it. So what good is this?

But then you look and you see, okay, but you stuck it right in the middle of a bunch of cubicles where you’re out in the middle and there’s, you know, like, why would I ever sit there? You know, because I feel like everybody’s listening to my conversation all the time.

So, you know, that’s the kind of challenge I think we’re all trying to work through and help organizations get better at is noticing like, oh, well, maybe if I had done something different, people would want to sit in that lounge area.

Going back to the conversation about, how we evolved and, how we learned to want to build things with our hands. Something that I had read about in a book about cognitive architecture that I didn’t, I had never heard of before is this idea that human beings are like wall huggers. Like literally we evolved to want to be by like a perimeter of something and have that protection of a wall. Have you heard about that before?

Leidy Klotz

Yeah, I mean, it goes with the prospect and refuge a little bit, right? We want to feel like we’re secure, but we want to be able to see out, right? And so it’s like, again, back to our ancestors, if you can’t see out to anything that’s approaching or sources of food and water, but you’re also kind of sheltered by something.

And yeah, there’s some classic studies of how people behave in courtyards, for example, or public squares, right? It’s this magnificent, magnificent public square and everybody’s like lined up around the outside, right? You want to feel like you have have some sense of security?

Chris Congdon

Yeah, that applies to what we were talking about with that lounge area sitting in the middle without any protection. There’s a reason why humans won’t go and sit there unless you put something around it.

Leidy Klotz

Yeah, and I think the… I mean, we’ve talked a lot about the kind of people designing the space, right? And as if there’s these like royal designers that determine how everything is, but everybody has an input, right? Everybody can.

So I mean, if you’re able to talk to your bosses about how you want the space designed, right? Or maybe the, you know, you couldn’t move those couches to the edges, but if you know this about yourself that you like to be at an edge, you can like take the seat and move it to the edge.

And now you’re empowering yourself to use the space in this I think one thing about, we think about our physical surroundings as something that’s kind of fixed and static. And there are a lot of things we can do, just, we can move things around in them, but we can also move among the spaces to which we have access.

I would say one thing that… I’ve noticed that what’s better about the offices I’ve seen than the ones that before I was a professor that I occupied is that there are way more options in modern offices for types of working spaces to do things. And when you can kind of empower yourself to optimize that for what you’re trying to do. I mean, you talked about ideas earlier, right? I mean, if you know about yourself that you’re more likely to come up with ideas when you’re away from your computer and you’re like free form writing on a desk, then like make that happen. Put yourself in that space where that’s more likely to happen. And then when we’re doing this as employees, that’s a signal to the people who are deciding how the spaces are designed that we need more space like that.

Chris Congdon

Yeah, I love that, just encouraging people to make those conscious decisions. I think sometimes we end up getting, particularly more recently, we end up getting into this mode of going from one virtual meeting to the next. And we realize that we haven’t gotten up to move around, just because we’re going in these half-hour increments. And, I would just love for everybody to stop that. Give yourself a chance to get up.

So before we wrap up today, I do want to leave our audience with just some more of these really kind of practical ideas. Like what if there’s one small change that any team could make this week or this month just to create a better place to work? What would be your advice?

Leidy Klotz

We talked about looking for barriers. I would do that. I would also try to ask yourself if you’re lining up your spaces you’re in with your outcome goals for whatever the task is. So examples for that, it’s like, okay, we’re having a meeting. Have we thoughtfully considered that this is the best space for the meeting or is it just the default? Or I need to do creative work. Have I figured out where the best space is for that creative work? So just aligning the work goal with the space.

Chris Congdon

Yeah, I think that’s good advice because sometimes I know I fall into just what room is available and you take what is open, but actually knowing what you need to accomplish. There might be a better room for it than what happens to be available at the time slot. So maybe you change the equation from thinking about, well, I’m going to schedule the meeting for this time and I’ll take what’s available versus I need to get this kind of work done. I’m going to get the room that’s best suited to that and schedule the meeting around it. It’s just kind of a different way of thinking about it, I suppose.

Leidy Klotz

Definitely.

Chris Congdon

Leidy, it’s just been great to have this conversation with you. I would love to be able to take one of your classes and go with your students and see what things we can subtract from some spaces.

Leidy Klotz

My pleasure.