Polly Barker

Desk sharing is one recent trend that has brought health downsides - and not just because of the stress of spending the first hour of your working day pacing the office floor looking for somewhere to park your laptop. Unless a desk is properly cleaned after each use, there's a greater risk of picking up germs and bugs from the various previous users.

Penson cited the aforementioned Bristol insurance company here, which suspected that desk sharing had bumped its sickness rate up to a high of 20 per cent of the workforce.

It is now talking about introducing 'amazing gardens and football pitches' to keep staff active and happy. 'The numbers support the argument we use as designers,' he says.

Adryan Francis Bell

Pomeroy, however, questioned whether all these facilities actually achieve their providers' objectives - or are even used: 'I'm going to be cynical again on this one. We've done a lot of studies...looking at places with well-being amenities. Those facilities are very poorly used.' Giving over space that isn't well used also impacts on the bottom line, she suggested. And culture plays a key part in supporting (or inhibiting) healthy behaviour. She said: 'If your line manager is going to look down their nose because you're disappearing off to the gym for a pilates class, it doesn't matter what the HR manager comes up with. Culturally this makes a difference.'

Staffing is a far greater cost to a company than space, however. And even the most conservative institutions have managed to justify enlightened workplace design, such as Camden Council, for which Bennetts Associates has just finished a scheme in King's Cross. Bennetts Associates' architect Ben Hopkins said: 'The [new] Camden office is quite progressive. It's very much about providing really nice spaces for staff .' But he admits that 'because they brought so many people together into one building, it's a win-win for them. They could get away with doing a slightly nicer building'. In contrast, a recent scheme for a huge, budget-slashed public institution that Bennetts designed was a great deal more back to basics, he admitted.

The growth of lifestyle companies - such as Google and Yahoo, which appear to want their employees to conduct their entire lives on the 'campus' floor - has played a part in driving innovative and supportive workspaces.

Penson said: 'When you look at things such as recruiting new talent, businesses are now competing more and more to be the next best lifestyle company. That is another spin to this. Five years ago, it was the most sustainable. Now it's the one which offers the most desirable lifestyle. It's all a bit of a race.' Sustainability is still an important driver, but that combination of health and well-being is possibly even better thought, because the push for sustainability covers both the social and the environmental.

Heath suggested: 'Health and well-being offer tangible benefits. Not just a sense of doing the right thing. [It] goes right down to how staff feel when they walk in the door; how stressed they are at a desk, and even how they feel when they get home in the evening.'

But how much can design actually achieve in resolving these problems? No matter how many coffee bars, breakout spaces, football fields or internal gardens a company provides, if the general atmosphere is toxic, it won't matter a jot.

Said Penson: 'For me it's not about physical buildings. [This is] one of the big things we've taken JLR through: we say forget the buildings and look at internal politics and how much stress that causes for people. The chemistry of that [as one of the stress factors at work] is way more powerful than an element such as lighting. When you get the chemistry right within an organisation, then productivity soars. Fabric is important but the core of it is chemistry between people. If you can remove that stress and strain everything gets better. That, for me, is where the buildings fit in. Some organisations are realising that there is a problem and actually tackling that.'

Design has long been used to reinforce office hierarchies, with many an office junior dreaming of the day when they move up through the ranks to have their own private office or suite. And there are still plenty of companies that want to keep it that way.

Pomeroy has seen plenty of this in her company's space analyses: 'When we study an organisation, we look at the impact of the space and how well or not that matches the appropriate hierarchy within the organisation.