Biophillia - noun

A love of life and the living world; the affinity of human beings for other life forms

So what’s this got to do with offices?

Being near plants can boost your employees. Here’s how:

1. Being in Nature tends to correlate with physical activity, which obviously promotes health.

2. Nature activities often implies socializing, e.g., in the form of walking together or sitting in a park with friends. Building social networks has a well-documented potential for improving health.

3. Nature offers temporary escape from everyday routines and demands.
Other experiments have looked at the effect of plants on task performance or self-reported alertness. The idea is that the presence of indoor plants may help restore attention by relaxing the subjects and help them recover from mental fatigue.

A decrease in health complaints, such as tiredness and coughing, has been reported in office and hospital workers when plants were added to the work environment.

This positive outcome in these experiments is either an improvement in air quality, or that a more pleasant visual environment affected the amount of health complaints.