Green is the colour of today’s workplace

The modern office is starting to look more like a rainforest than a place of business. Amazon’s new Seattle headquarters has 40,000 plants. Down the coast, every other floor in Samsung’s 21⁄ 2- year-old San Jose office space is a garden. Alibaba wants all employees in its Hangzhou workplace to be no more than a one-minute walk from an outdoor green space.

In a bid to keep workers happy, productive — and in the office for as long as possible — companies have flocked to all sorts of design trends over the years. Last decade it was kegs and ping pong tables; now Mother Nature is in vogue.

The trend, called “biophilia”, is based on the idea that humans have an innate connection to nature. “We see it as returning to what our bodies and our brains need,” says Ryan Mullenix, a design partner at NBBJ, the architecture firm that worked on the new Amazon office.

Because the wilderness is our natural habitat, biophilia advocates say, we feel more at ease there than in a sterile office.

Research has found that offices which are outfitted to look more like the natural world lead to happier, healthier and more productive employees.

Another way to look at it: if we have to be stuck inside all day without a minute to go out and get some fresh air, why not make our time in the sterile office as pleasant as possible?

Creating a nature-infused workplace isn’t as simple as buying a few thousand ferns. (Amazon hired a full-time horticulturist for its hypergreen space.)

Healthy buildings have been on the rise for at least a few years. In 2014, two former Goldman Sachs partners launched the Well Building Standard, a set of guidelines for designing buildings to make people happier, healthier and more productive. Buildings that have clean air, an emphasis on walkability and healthy food — and meet a series of other criteria in seven categories — can achieve Well certification. The International Well Building Institute lists 545 office buildings around the world that qualify.

Many offices haven’t gone full Well but have borrowed elements of the healthy building lifestyle. Plant walls aren’t an uncommon site in offices these days. Some companies have expressed interest in having an on-site aviary, says NBBJ’s Mullenix.