Comfort in the Workplace

Is it long and skinny like a snake or round and thick like a tree? Is it a neutral state—the “absence of awareness?” Or is it a positive sense of ease and contentment? Is it a noun (comforter), or is it a verb (to comfort)? Is it an outcome or a process?

Most people can recognize comfort when they feel it, but they tend to describe the feeling in similes and metaphors, as “like an 80-degree day with a slight breeze,” or “like lying in bed on a rainy day with nowhere to go.” Comfort is a slippery concept, having evaded watertight and universal definition for many years in disciplines, such as nursing, that are all about delivering comfort.

In the workplace, the notion of comfort is woven within the fabric of the headliner issues, such as ergonomics and acoustics, as perhaps a by-product of the right chair or a good sound management system based on the frequency of the human voice. Often, however, the goal in these cases is not so much to produce comfort as to avoid the cost of discomfort and lost productivity from, say, repetitive stress injury. As a positive feeling of ease and well-being, comfort, if it is mentioned at all, is a happy accident. However, if comfort in its most holistic sense were a goal rather than a “nice to have” option, not only would it address the headliner issues, but it would also touch other areas that affect the bottom line, such as productivity and commitment to the organization.

Worker comfort directly affects important predictors of operational efficiency, such as productivity, job satisfaction, retention, well-being, and at its most basic level, of course, worker health.¹ So it makes sense to approach comfort from a holistic perspective and to attend to the factors that make people comfortable in the workplace. Rather than viewing comfort as one of many desirable outcomes, perhaps this more holistic notion of comfort might itself become the focus.

How the Professionals Define It

Long before business executives and facility managers pondered the significance of comfort, nurses have sought to evoke it in patients and to define it for their discipline. In her 1859 Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale recognized that patients who were comfortable tended to regain health. Over a century later, research verified that “comfortable patients heal faster, cope better, become rehabilitated more thoroughly, and die more peacefully than do the uncomfortable.”²

Comfort, however, is a subjective state: It can’t be inserted in an IV or prescribed as a pill. It is what the patient (or worker) says it is. “Comfort measures are not comfort measures unless the patient perceives them as comforting.”³

Not only is it subjective, but it is also dynamic and changeable. I may be comfortable now, but if the temperature drops ten degrees, I will be uncomfortable. Dynamic and changeable, comfort is filtered through perception, personality, and past experience. When the temperature drops ten degrees, I may feel more uncomfortable than you because I am more sensitive to cold, and besides, there was that frostbite incident when I was 12….

And not only is comfort subjective, dynamic, changeable, and filtered uniquely, it is also holistic—the body is influenced by the mind, which is affected by the emotions. Psychological discomfort, such as anxiety, may affect physical health, and conversely, if I am shivering with cold, I may be wondering anxiously if that bus will ever come or if I am at the wrong stop. And if I am shivering in my workstation, I certainly won’t be working very efficiently, and I may be considering another job as well.

In her Comfort Theory⁴ model, Katharine Kolcaba, PhD, RN, identifies three states of comfort: relief, which is the alleviation of discomfort; ease, which is a neutral state of contentment; and renewal (later changed to transcendence), which refers to the active, hopeful aspect of comfort in the sense of its root word, confortare, meaning “to strengthen.” Since the days of Florence Nightingale healthcare has come to depend much more on technology and pharmaceuticals, with the result that finely tuned attention to patient comfort has suffered since the days when comfort was often all there was to give.

As in healthcare, comfort in the workplace is awkwardly conceived and poorly defined. It may be mentioned tangentially in studies and surveys as one of several outcomes (it’s always good to make people more comfortable), but it hasn’t received much attention in its own right, nor is its significance well understood.