Some like it slow

Obviously, you might already be a bit tired as you came to work by bike, which only took an extra half an hour (and by the way it was raining). For lunch you won’t have pizza or steak and chips delivered to the office, but you’ll walk down those very same stairs and to walk for another half-mile to get yourself a vegan burger. Your employer isn’t going to be angry with you at all after you’ve been absent for an hour, or when you’ve been playing table football with his assistant. She’s more concerned about your life/work balance. Anyway, in the Bloomberg building in London designed by Norman Foster and built at a cost of a mere billion pounds, the corridors have been laid out so that to get anywhere you have to take a long walk. Instead of the dubious virtues of escalators you will find long passageways that are meant to delicately prod people into moving their butts. Everyone knows that sitting at a desk is a modern plague – or, if you want to put it another way, ‘sitting is the new smoking’. And because this modern speed of life thing is cutting us off from nature too, the building is filled with lots of natural materials, plants, light, filtered air and water and even nice views from the windows (as far as is possible in London) to give you something to stare at other than your computer.

I had a boss fifteen years ago who didn’t care where we worked. When you came in at 2 pm to the office, he just would smile and say, “good afternoon.” It made absolutely no difference to him what you’d been doing that morning. However, he would change into Mr Hyde whenever a deadline approached. If you wer reduced to spluttering out excuses he was as relentless as Deputy US Marshal Samuel Gerard, as played by Tommy Lee Jones in ‘The Fugitive’. Some liked this style of management, others did not but in any case you had the feeling that the only limitation that your professional life imposed on your freedom was the deadline hanging over your head. Of course, this was not a time when offices typically had chill-out zones, but today’s ‘activity based working’ was already in vogue. If you wanted somewhere quiet to work, you went to a bar across the street where no-one would go during the day, so you could gather your thoughts.

Some tell me that the most creative people like to relax – and relax a lot. No, it’s not because they’re lazy, but because they have their best ideas when they rest. And no self-respecting creative type is going to get to work before he or she knows what they are going to do. I have a friend, who has – what we might call – a greater than average need for rest. Once, when he was working for a corporation, he noticed a lockable storage room and he started to regularly sneak in for a nap around lunch time. This was quite some time ago, but unfortunately for him he was way ahead of his time, so when somebody spotted him sprawled out on a pile of waste paper, he was fired. These days he could count on more understanding from his boss and would probably be swinging in a hammock, accompanied by the gentle sound of waves and the distant calls of seagulls while breathing in the fragrant scents of the pine forest – and for those less clued-up about modern life, there would be a bright neon sign with the words ‘do not disturb!’ blazing outside the door. I saw a similar room in the Brain Embassy at the Adgar Park complex in Ochota some time ago. This is, of course, nothing special anymore because such facilities, including rooms for meditation, relaxation and gymnastics, are now available almost everywhere across the modern office sector. Monika Dębska-Pastakia, the head of Knight Frank in Poland, told me recently that when she worked for John Lewis department stores in the UK at the end of 80s, many people would go to a quiet room during the long break once a day and have a half-hour power nap. This all came much later to the CEE region and only because employers have started competing fiercely for talent. Unemployment has decreased significantly, the market has matured and, as a result, as Knight Frank's director once again explained, that’s why we the workers can now enjoy such pleasant conditions. So, let’s keep it that way and remember to always take life ‘despacito!’ ν