If It’s Good Enough For Facebook

Facebook employees looking for a break from sitting hunched over a computer don’t need to venture far from the company’s new office space. They just need to walk upstairs — to the roof.

A 9-acre green roof sits atop the tech firm’s new Frank Gehry-designed building across from its main headquarters, filled with a plethora of native trees and flowers, lawn furniture, white boards, viewing decks and a half-mile walking trail overlooking the city’s marshlands. It’s more like a park than the top of an office and big enough to accommodate a large number of the 2,800 employees who are expected to eventually fill up the newly opened building, even on a warm summer’s day.

Boosting Concentration

A recent article in the Daily Mail has also highlighted a University of Melbourne study which has found that that the installation of a green roof can also help to improve the levels of concentration of employees.

The article explained:

Students who glanced at an image of a flowering meadow green roof in the middle of a boring task, did much better than those who looked at a bare concrete roof picture, a study has found.

The University of Melbourne research, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, involved 150 students pressing numbers repeatedly flashed on a computer screen, unless it was the number three. 

Midway through the task, they had a 40-second break when half looked at the green roof and the rest at the concrete one. The first group made significantly less errors and showed superior concentration on the rest of the task compared to the others, said lead researcher Dr Kate Lee.

The green roof boosted the mental resources controlling attention. So just a moment of green could provide a boost for tired workers, she said.

“We know that green roofs are great for the environment but now we can say that they boost attention too,” she said.

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