As cities grow and workspaces become more vertical, reconnecting with nature can be a challenge. Thayla Bizarro, a facility coordinator from São Paulo, Brazil, joins us to explore the role of biophilia in the workplace and how FM teams can help bring nature back into the built environment.
The human being has an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other life forms. But with the growth of cities and the verticalization of living and working spaces, how can the facilities teams help to regain this connection? Today, Thayla Bizarro a facility coordinator based out of São Paulo, Brazil aims to answer that questions and discusses the importance of biophilia in the workplace.
Hello everyone. Wherever you are, I hope you are safe, you are well and you are happy. I am Thayla Bizarro. I am a facility coordinator. I've been working with corporate solutions for the past seven years, and I'm a Brazilian based in Sao Paulo City and state. And I would like today to talk to you a little bit about biophilia and workplace.
So for those who doesn't know, philia, in Greek means love, and bio means nature. So basically the term biophilia means love to living beings. Knowing that I would like you to make a reflection. So please close your eyes and think about a place you wanna go on your vacations. When you want to get some rest, you need to relax, you want to stay calm. What is the first place that comes into your mind?
I might be wrong, but I could bet you are thinking about waterfalls, nature, a lot of green art, blue, if your favorite place are beach, or maybe mountains, but I can bet you are, you thought about nature because that's actually our nature. That's where we came from.
So that's where we think about when we want something calm and unfortunately the urbanization leaves us. Away from it. It takes us to other places and we don't often see trees or animals or rivers on a daily, our daily basis. So they studies about this subject. They figured out that hospitals that has windows turn to a park, to trees and windows that are turned to buildings to concrete.
They have different impacts on the patients. The patients that looks to greens, they have probability to get well faster than the other people. Because it makes well to our hearts, to our minds, and that's the importance of biophilia in design and architecture sector.
We figured this out during pandemic whenever we had. to stay closer into our homes. Think that never happened before. How many people you know that started buying plants to their homes, and how many other people left the big cities to live in the countryside or to live somewhere more calm? Because that's what we look for, even though it's not conscious. We are seeking that on a daily basis.
So that's the importance of it and the importance to bring it to our daily basis back. And there's a lot of ways to do it. So architectures are starting to work with it inside offices as well. You can see carpets that has green just pertaining like it's grass.
You can see offices that are implementing a lot of different types of plants or giving cocktails or succulents to their employees to live at their desks. Because this green brings us positivity, it makes us feel calm, feel relaxed. It makes it, it is. For our health, and there is a huge importance in it for us as facility managers, we need to prioritize bringing green inside our spaces so people can feel welcome, they can feel home somehow. And I can tell you, I've tried this at the office I work at recently.
So the office reopened this year. And by the time it reopened, we implemented a lot of different plants and we have so many plants that are indoor and don't require direct light of the sun, and we have a use a those.
Different types of those, but we have implemented many plants. Before, let's say we would have only five plants inside one floor, and right now we have like over 20 plants and we did a general refresh, but I can tell you. People are always thanking me about the plants. A lot of people came to say they bring light, they bring life to their space, they bring colors and they feel, they start feeling like home. So whenever we are talking about. Workplace solutions and we want to work on our hospitality for employees.
That's the key, making people feel like they're at home and somehow nature is our home. It's very important to bring it to our spaces. Please, if this helps you spread this with her friends, with her families, so they can also bring this life to their back, to their life lives. Thank you so much for your time.