Color & Employees’ Health

By Denise Turner, ASID, CID, CMG

Color Turners

Although often overlooked in the workday bustle, the colors of your office can impact your co-workers’ and employees’ health and productivity. Scientists have known that colors in our environment can affect our health by stimulating the nervous system and influencing the body’s physiology and mental states.

Here are some tips for utilizing color to decrease stress, improve morale, and reduce employees’ sick days. 

Color studies show that people are less stressed, more confident and have improved productivity when working in offices that are either painted blue or have blue furniture in them. Blues and greens are also ideal colors for environments that require quiet and extended concentration and high visual acuity.

Blues and greens radiate a calming effect. They are perfect for high stress environments such as hospitals, airports and courthouses. Additionally, cool colors are a great antidote for hypertensive, agitated, or anxious individuals and are preferred by those in professions which require a calm environment and visual precision, such as doctors, teachers, and yoga instructors.

Yellows and reds are ideal colors for environments in which creative activity and socialization is desired. These colors are also highly effective at combating depression.

On the other hand, inappropriate or incompatible colors can have adverse effects on your personnel’s moods. For example, pure white interiors can cause eye strain and headaches, especially when combined with fluorescent lighting. So, if you choose to paint your interior white, go for an off-white. It’s much easier on the eyes.

Using color to highlight important information can help your customers stay safe. Yellow is the first color that our eyes see. When it’s joined with black, the two become the universal color combination for “warning.” Nature uses yellow warning signs on the world’s most poisonous creatures. Likewise, street warning signs and school buses are in OSHA yellow.

In business, important technical information, warning signs, and safety notices are more likely to be remembered if they’re in color. This can help decrease accidents and expensive insurance claims.

Have you ever spent a ton of precious time drowning in a sea of black and white paperwork? Research shows that the 1.5 hours you and your employee spend reading black and white documents can be reduced to 0.5 just by adding color. By capitalizing on color, you’ll significantly improve your company’s efficiency and it’ll free you up to focus on more important things, like billable hours.

What do you need to see before before going into a stressful situation? According to a research paper published by the International Journal of Architectural Research, viewing nature for 10 minutes prior to experiencing a mental stressor has shown to stimulate heart rate variability and parasympathetic activity (i.e. regulation of internal organs and glands that support digestion and other activities that occur when the body is at rest) (Brown, Barton & Gladwell, 2013).

What if a mental stressor comes unexpectedly? Viewing a forest scene for 20 minutes after a mental stressor has shown to return cerebral blood flow and brain activity to a relaxed state (Tsunetsugu & Miyazaki, 2005). 

Denise Turner-masterfully navigates two worlds of color. As an international, award-winning interior designer and colorist, she helps businesses to drive sales with color. As a ColorTherapy expert and Energy Medicine healer, she utilizes color to empower others to heal themselves and their families. Turner is an ASID (American Society of Interior Designers) professional member, Certified Interior Designer, former CMG (Color Marketing Group) Board of Director, former ASID chapter president, and UCLA graduate.
denise@Colorturners.com 
www.colorturners.com 
https://www.facebook.com/denise.turner.188478