I spent almost a decade in a Munich office. It faced south and had a very large window. So there was plenty of light coming in, which should have been enough, but what I saw through that window was a parking lot and a dominant concrete building across the street. Behind it, just visible above the roofline of the opposite building, was a group of trees, and I could really only see the tops, how they moved in the wind. That was my daily reminder that nature existed, but it was only reachable for me after work and on weekends.
I kept catching myself staring dreamily at those trees. Every day the same view and every day the same gap between where I was sitting and where I wanted to be. The seasons and the weather offered just enough variety that I still believed in this place. But the gap never closed.
It sounds like a small thing, but it wasn’t. It was a constant, low-grade tension that never let up. The trees were right there, but I couldn’t even grasp them with my eyes enough for them to become part of my surroundings. So I sat behind glass and looked at a parking lot. And the building opposite. But that was a concrete block with windows. On the top floor a gym provided some variety, especially in the evenings when the lights were on. But over the years I got too used to always seeing the same people in it.
Over the years I also worked in other spaces. Some felt noticeably different. I could work there and leave without carrying that tension home.
The Building That Works Against You
Every year, American companies lose 190 billion dollars to burnout. And those are just the healthcare costs. Add lost productivity, turnover and absenteeism, and the real number is probably three times higher. I have no idea how you’d extrapolate further.
What was also interesting was that entire industries formed around this problem and profited handsomely: wellness apps, resilience training, executive coaching, mental health days. There’s clearly no shortage of creativity when it comes to profitably treating the symptoms.
But nobody talks about the building and the office space inside it where a person sits who is suffering from these symptoms.
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. It wasn’t just the view alone, it was also the constellation of how the surrounding buildings were arranged and how my office with its large window was directly exposed to all of it. No HR department was responsible for me, and my tension couldn’t be fixed with any meditation app either. It was constantly there.
This Is Not Just My Experience
Ihab Elzeyadi at the University of Oregon studied employees in an administrative building in 2011 (Elzeyadi, 2011). Those with a view of trees and landscape took 16% fewer sick days than those without. The quality of the view was a decisive factor for absenteeism, not the workload and not the management style. It was the view of nature that brought the sick days down.
All of this is well researched. Yet when buildings get made, hardly anyone thinks about it.
What a room does to the body has been studied for a long time. Start with light. In 2014 Boubekri compared office workers with and without windows, and the ones with windows slept on average 46 minutes longer per night (Boubekri et al., 2014, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine). A small study, but the gap was clear, and it ran through sleep, mood and focus.
Then the view outside. Back in 1991 Roger Ulrich showed that blood pressure and muscle tension settle faster after a stressful moment when you look at nature instead of a street. You do not need a forest outside the window. Even a plant on the desk measurably lowers the stress response (Lohr et al., 1996, Journal of Environmental Horticulture).
Sound is where it gets unpleasant. Noise is the most common complaint in open-plan offices, which Kim and de Dear counted across more than 40,000 respondents in 2013 (Journal of Environmental Psychology). Nature sounds turn it around: Alvarsson found the body recovered 9 to 37 percent faster than under office noise (Alvarsson et al., 2010).
Nobody notices the air until thinking slows down. In 2012 Satish measured how decision-making drops with poor ventilation, almost to a standstill at high CO2 (Satish et al., 2012, Environmental Health Perspectives). The finding is contested, but the direction is plausible.
And whoever has nowhere to retreat to burns out faster (Laurence et al., 2013).
All of this has been in the literature for decades.
Why Nobody Can See This
When a company wants to address burnout, the HR departments have to get involved. And they think in programs. The building itself is not their department.
By the time anyone asks about the physical environment, the building obviously already exists. The decisions that matter were made years earlier by people who never thought about stress. Where the windows are, how high the ceilings are, what you see when you look up.
Facility management also comes too late. They can add plants and acoustic panels, but they can’t move the windows.
The real decision happens before the architect. The moment the fundamental decision is made that a building should be built. That’s when the question should be asked: what should this building do to the people inside it? Ideally even before the site decision, because the site shapes how the building and its surroundings affect people.
Two Scenarios
New construction: If you plan for people from the start, the cost difference is minimal. Good orientation costs the same as bad orientation. The view is a planning decision, not a direct cost factor.
The result can be a building that prevents problems at the root. Turnover drops, sick days drop, leases run longer. The returns follow.
Existing buildings: Now you pay twice. Once for the original design, once to fix it. Most companies end up here sooner or later if they planned wrong. And wrong planning is avoidable if you use the right data and have the right planners.
The Math
The average professional services employee generates 572,000 dollars per year. Lost time from stress-related absence and distraction costs about 17,000 dollars per employee. That’s 3% of productive capacity that simply evaporates.
A 200-person office losing 3% burns 3.4 million dollars per year.
Elzeyadi found that a better view alone recovers 11 hours per employee per year. For 200 employees, that’s 605,000 dollars per year.
The Gap
I always have to think about my office with the large window in the middle of Munich. The light was really great and maybe the reason I lasted so long in it. But the view was a serious problem because it showed me every day where I couldn’t be. Like a constant quiet interference that I carried home as a stress factor every evening. I knew that nobody had thought of me when this building was planned. But someone had decided it exactly that way. A shame. Because it would not have been complicated.