Good day, bad day: building an index of individual flourishing at work

At a time when the workplace industry is searching for alternative metrics to capture the new dynamics of working life, Chicago-based architect David Dewane has devised a proposal for an index of ‘human flourishing’ at work which he will present at the WORKTECH Chicago 2025 conference on 15 July.

The new metric is provisionally named the Collins Score in honour of the business writer Jim Collins, who famously scored each working day over 35 years of career with a rating on a scale of -2 ,-1, 0, +1, +2 based on how he subjectively perceived how things had gone that day. Collins also meticulously recorded his basic activities and how much time he spent each day on highly concentrated ‘deep work’.

Dewane, who is Chief Experience Officer (Physical Space) at Geniant and Adjunct Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, adopted these practices himself and has now evolved them into a measurement tool for employees to track how much they are flourishing at work and how much they are languishing. He envisages creating a digital version of the tool and is looking to the WORKTECH community to help him co-develop it.

Metric for experience

Dewane explains the importance of the project: ‘The Collins Scores could help provide a relatively raw metric that could be useful both to individuals to help take control of their own flourishing, but it could also be mined by social scientists and workplace designers for indicators of what types of interventions in the workplace move the needle on employee experience.’

In his paper, Dewane uses the analogy of designing a high-performance ‘zero energy’ building – taking logical steps reduce energy use, for example – to describe how one might go about designing a high-performance ‘+2 office’; in other words, an office designed in such a way as to give employees the best shot at having +2 day every time they showed up at work. Enabling people to get into ‘flow’ or ‘deep work’ is clearly part of the equation.

David Dewane will be speaking at WORKTECH Chicago at mHUB, Tuesday 15 July 2025. More details on the conference here. To read David Dewane’s outline paper, access the proposal here.

David Dwane is Chief Experience Officer (Physical Space) at Genient. He has a background in ecologically and socially equitable design and trained at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas. This foundation in applied research has allowed him to contribute to projects on the cutting edge of environmental sustainability and public interest design. With a wide-ranging career with years in teaching and architecture, he has held the title of architect, publisher, journalist, and educator. In addition, he's found time as an entrepreneur, co-founding the popular Mouse Book Club, a modern take on classic literature.