This is a space to share our ideas. Our ideas about work: how work gets done, the place work should occupy in our lives, and how to make work better. At HumanCentric, one of our core beliefs is that work is a central part of life, a uniquely human way to contribute to our world. We believe that “work” is not a four-letter word.
Of course, work isn’t everything either. Health, family and friends, arts, community, and many other things are also crucial aspects of life. But we believe that work is a critical component of a life well-lived. The key, and the constant struggle, is to make each individual component of life healthy and properly balanced with the others. We’ve chosen to focus on making work the best that it can be, and making sure it has a beneficial impact on the other aspects as well.
The Connection between work and well being
There is a growing body of fascinating research on the connection between work and a person’s overall wellbeing. In the book Well Being, based on a massive global study of the wellbeing of thousands of individuals in more than 150 countries, the authors identified five general areas of wellbeing: career, social, financial, physical, and community. The authors prioritized the chapters based on impact: the aspects of life that had the highest statistical impact on an individual’s wellbeing were listed first, followed by the less impactful (but still important) ones.
Of all the aspects of wellbeing, career wellbeing was listed first. Not because it’s most important from a philosophical perspective, but because having high career wellbeing was the most likely predictor of a person’s overall wellbeing score.
We also know this on an intuitive level: People who are suffering in their career wellbeing likely have high levels of stress and low levels of work engagement, which impacts their social and family wellbeing, their physical health, and is less likely to succeed financially.
At HumanCentric, we believe that focusing on the design of work - both the structure of how work gets done and the physical work environment - can have a tremendously positive impact on our world.
In this journal, we’ll be sharing tips about how to design a workspace that works for you. About how to have a productive, ergonomic, and beautiful workspace - and about why focusing on all three aspects is important and beneficial. Having extensive knowledge in any one of these areas is rare, and the combination of all of them even more so.
We’ll also be sharing our thoughts about work. We’re a fully remote team: our core product design team is based in the Chicago area, and we have team members from Canada, Argentina, Mexico, China, and more. But our work philosophy is more about how we work than where we work from. We’ve been told that we have a unique work culture and perspective, and we hope that sharing our ideas helps others create a better work environment for their teams as well.
We care deeply about improving the way the world works, and hope you can join us in creating a better work experience for yourself and the people you know.
