The Room Nobody Talks About
For years, I worked in an office in Munich. I had a large window. Plenty of light came in. That should have been enough.
But what I saw through that window was concrete. A parking lot. The building across the street. And behind it, just visible above the roofline, a group of trees. The tops of them. Swaying.
I found myself staring at those trees. I wanted to be there, not here. I wanted nature, not this. Every day, the same view: concrete in the foreground, trees in the distance. Reality versus longing. That gap never closed.
It sounds small. It wasn’t. That gap was stress. A constant, low-grade tension that never let up. I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was reminded of that every time I looked up. The trees were right there, but I couldn’t reach them. I was stuck behind glass, looking at a parking lot.
I worked in other rooms over the years. Some felt different. I could work there and leave afterward without carrying anything home. No tension. No gap between where I was and where I wanted to be.
The Room Nobody Talks About
Every year, American companies lose $190 billion to burnout. That’s healthcare costs alone. Add lost productivity, turnover, and absenteeism, and the real number is probably three times higher.
The response has been predictable: wellness apps, resilience training, manager coaching, mental health days. An entire industry exists to treat the symptoms.
But nobody talks about the room.
My window in Munich had good light. By most standards, it was a decent office. But the view created a tension I carried every day. That’s not in any HR program. That’s not something a meditation app can fix.
This Is Not Just My Experience
A study at the University of Oregon tracked employees in an administrative building. Those with a view of trees and landscape took 16% fewer sick days than those without. The quality of the view was the primary predictor of absenteeism. Not workload. Not management style. The view.
At Sherwin-Williams, a workplace redesign with better daylight, improved acoustics, and access to nature reduced absenteeism by 44%.
Roger Ulrich’s research on stress recovery and nature views dates to 1991. The data has been there for over thirty years.
Here is what the science shows:
Daylight improves sleep, mood, and cognitive performance. Employees with windows sleep 46 minutes longer per night.
Views to nature reduce cortisol and speed stress recovery. Even a plant on a desk measurably reduces anxiety.
Acoustic control is the biggest complaint in open offices. Nature sounds accelerate stress recovery by 37% compared to white noise.
Air quality directly affects thinking. Poor ventilation can cut decision-making performance by half.
Spatial control—having somewhere to retreat—correlates with lower emotional exhaustion across every study that measures it.
This is building science. It has been sitting in journals for decades while companies spend billions on apps.
Why Nobody Sees It
When a company wants to address burnout, they call HR. HR thinks in programs. The building is not their department.
By the time anyone asks about the physical environment, the building already exists. The decisions that matter—where the windows go, how high the ceilings are, what you see when you look up—were made years earlier by people who never thought about stress.
Facility management comes in too late. They can add plants and acoustic panels. They cannot move the windows.
The real decision happens before the architect. When someone says: we need a building. That is when the question should be asked: what should this building do to the people inside it?
This question is almost never asked.
Two Scenarios
New construction: If you design for humans from the start, the cost difference is minimal. Good orientation costs the same as bad orientation. Views are a planning decision, not a budget item.
The result is a building that prevents problems. Lower turnover. Fewer sick days. Tenants who stay. The return compounds for decades.
Existing buildings: Now you pay twice. Once for the original design, once to fix it. Most companies are here. They spend on wellness programs while the building works against them.
The Math
The average professional services employee generates $572,000 per year. Lost time from stress-related absence and distraction costs about $17,000 per employee. That’s 3% of productive capacity, gone.
A 200-person office losing 3% burns $3.4 million per year.
The Oregon study found that better views alone recovered 11 hours per employee annually. For 200 people, that’s $605,000 in recaptured value. Every year.
But no one connects the building budget to the wellness budget. They sit in different spreadsheets.
The Gap
I think about that window in Munich. The light was fine. The view was the problem. Not because it was ugly, but because it showed me where I wasn’t.
That daily reminder. The trees I couldn’t reach. That was stress. Not dramatic, not acute. Just a constant low hum I carried home every night.
Some rooms create that gap. Some don’t. We know how to build the ones that don’t. We’ve known for decades.
$190 billion in burnout costs, and nobody asks what the room is doing to the people inside it.