Having a plant on your desk can provide you with benefits that go beyond aesthetics. Having a real plant on your desk can essentially infuse a sense of life into your home office. This transforms stale, stagnant, walled up urban environments into something that is more natural, alive, and breathing.
You may have seen displays of office greenery that serve to transform workplace satisfaction and productivity. However, just having a few plants, or even one, on your desk can make a difference. Rest assured that there are low-light, low-maintenance plants for your desk that are far easier to manage and maintain. Even if your desk lacks exposure to natural light, plants like the ZZ plant, snake plant, and Pothos are hardy; they could thrive with little water or light.
Without further ado, let’s go ahead and explore the benefits of having a plant on your desk.
1. Plants promote stress relief from work
Unlike a space that lacks extraneous decorations, including plants in your workspace can improve your quality of life. Plants can stimulate responses in us which are uncommon in the built-up urban environment, as they introduce feelings of existence, being present, and relaxation.
Conducted in the Netherlands and the U.K, three field experiments unanimously found that plants result in better workplace satisfaction. In another study of 444 employees, it was found that having natural elements in the office, such as sunlight and plants, related negatively to depressed mood and anxiety. Instead, these natural elements resulted in better workplace satisfaction and organizational commitment. Thus, if you are feeling unmotivated about your work, do not belittle plants — having them around may actually improve your day-to-day attitude and outlook.
Do not worry about a plant adding clutter to your desk – it can do more good than harm on a daily basis.
2. Plants are a productivity ‘hack’
When we think of working productively, we can be obsessed with numbers, efficiency, and science. This corresponds to a mechanical and systematic view of space and the furniture involved, such that we would design a productive workspace to be orderly, organized, and clean.
Likewise, lean office management principles also call for the removal of extraneous “clutter” and office landscaping such as plants, in order to flexibly accommodate changing work functions and groups of workers in the office.
Yet, studies of plants in the workplace have found that enriching a clean and ‘lean’ office with plants could boost productivity by 15%.
A greener workspace, interestingly, renders employees more cognitively, emotionally, and physically involved in their work. This shows that “cleaner” desks are not necessarily more productive as compared to a desk that includes natural elements like plants. Go ahead and get some low-maintenance plants in order to enjoy working more and producing better results.
Think about how much more work you can get done if you found a way to improve your daily productivity by 15%. It seems that the trade-offs of buying and maintaining a few simple desk plants are worth it.
3. Attention and mood are improved with an actual plant
It is good to look out of the window at greenery when taking breaks. However, not everyone’s desk is located near a window.
Fortunately, a desk plant — one that is physically on your desk — could boost your attention levels in ways that other visual stimuli could not.
When twenty-three elementary students were shown an artificial plant, a photograph of a plant, or no plant at all, they did not respond as well as when presented with an actual plant to look at.
Viewing an actual plant stimulated improvements in attention and concentration levels, through the reduction of theta waves of the frontal lobe. Besides, viewing actual plants has a positive effect on the students’ mood states — promoting relaxation and comfort. This shows that the benefits are not only psychological, but physiological.
This corresponds to what 10 UK studies, involving 1252 subjects, have found across the board — every green workspace has positive impacts in self-esteem and mood. When water is involved, outcomes are even better. Age also matters, as the boost in self-esteem is more significant for younger participants.
The next time you work on a task requiring high attention to detail, be sure to have a plant sitting visibly on your desk.
4. Cleaner air quality may be possible with certain plants
Did you know that working in an indoors environment can be detrimental to your health? As indoor workers, we tend to overlook this fact, belittle it, and think that there is nothing we can do about it.
The truth is that households and offices are potential sources of toxic pollutants. A wide range of items including your office furniture, walls, rugs, and clothing can release gases or particles into the air.
The health effects that are commonly linked with such pollutants are headaches, eye irritation, colds, sore throats, respiratory issues, and fatigue.
What makes indoor pollution much worse is the use of bad practices in our indoor workspaces, such as poor air ventilation — tightly shut doors and windows can limit outdoor air which is needed to transport the air pollutants out of your room.
Is cleaner air quality possible with plants? The less well ventilated your workspace is, the greater the effectiveness of houseplants in removing volatile organic compounds from the air.
When working from home, this is significant if you work mainly in a smaller, confined space, shut off from other occupants in your home.
Yet, the type of plants matter. An assessment of 50 houseplants found that the 10 best houseplant air cleaners include dracaenas and peace lilies. Besides being easy to grow and maintain, dracaenas and peace lilies are also small enough to serve as desk plants, and they are both relatively low light and low maintenance plants.
5. Plants Can Reduce Sick Days
Unsurprisingly, with the qualities plants add to our indoor environments, plants could reduce the risks of falling ill.
Workers in offices that have worse lighting and views of nature recorded more sick leave hours. Both daylighting and views of nature caused a 6.5% impact on sick leave use.
Therefore, a plant on your desk can boost your overall wellbeing. Of course, having natural light does wonders, but good lighting is likewise associated with productivity and wellbeing.
If your desk is not located next to a window, consider pairing up your desk plant with the creative use of a daylight lamp. A good daylight lamp mimics a bright sunny day and provides glare-free light therapy. Therefore, it would add sufficient care to your eyes. Not only does it deliver mood-enhancing natural light, but such a daylight lamp functions as an attractive accessory for your desk.
Essentially, design a workspace for your best interests; keep your desk space well-lit and well-ventilated.
6. A plant adds green color aesthetic which supports wellbeing
Aesthetics make your room more aesthetically pleasing to work in. If your room is small or designed to accommodate multiple uses, it can be really hard to balance function and aesthetics — but plants provide a quick, convenient hack.
A desk plant adds the color green to your workspace. Believe it or not, colors impact our productivity and the way we perform professionally. As for the colour green, researchers have found that it creates a calming atmosphere. The color green brings balance and harmony into our built-up modern offices, desks and workspaces.
If your desk space is lacking the color green, a desk plant offers the perfect addition. Of course, more plants would correspond to more green. The number of plants is a factor you can experiment with — use it to observe changes in your moods, thoughts, and behaviour.
Summary
Here, we have backed up six ways that a desk plant can realistically benefit you. Trying out some of these ideas is the best way to explore what works best for you. As long as you obtain a low-maintenance plant, there should be little to worry about.