Why No Rhino?

How do you make an office space pop these days? Sometimes it seems like we’ve seen it all, and there’s really nothing more we can do short of having a live rhino on the loose or something. That’s not a bad idea, actually. It’d keep people on their toes.

That’s the thing – in the realm of office interior design, Sydney businesses have come to prioritise distracting novelty features over inclusions that actually keep people moving. That’s the whole point of a work-space, isn’t it? And when I say moving, I’m not talking about doing cardio on an elliptical machine with a workstation tacked onto it. I mean moving in the direction of the goals to be met in a given role. 

In my book, doing that demands an element of perceived danger – a bit of stress, if you will. I know that’s controversial in the current mental health landscape, with the incidence of stress-related workplace injuries on the rise. But I’m telling you, a workplace that removes all possible stressors and replaces them with fun diversions also removes the impetus to succeed.

The question to be asked is how this element of danger can be integrated into your average office fitout. Within Sydney, danger isn’t exactly a part of daily life, relatively speaking. There are precious few apex predators around (aside from humans), and nowhere near as many deadly spiders and snakes as backpackers have been led to believe. 

Well, this is why we need to introduce a large, dangerous animal into your average contemporary office. I was originally thinking something like a bear, but now I’m leaning towards a rhino. It might cause just a little less rumpus. We’re not setting out to cause chaos just for the sake of it, are we? We’re just aiming to elicit the best possible work from our teams, and doing that means raising their cortisol levels a bit. Not too much, though.