Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

Whereas the new business year gets underway, we're sliding feet first into the work environment.

Okay, one, two, three.

Whoa!

I'm getting stunk a little bit.

Or is it time to bring a pooch into the office?

So as you all know, whoever has low leather chihuahua gets to talk.

If she prefers me, then none of you get to talk.

We'll see how it goes.

That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC.

For some years now, it's been fashionable in the tech world especially to introduce fun stuff into the office, bean bags, ping pong tables, that kind of thing.

At the same time, there's been a growing industry looking at the science of the workplace, how best to get the best from employees as they click, tap or otherwise plow their furrow in the modern office

environment. Looking at all of this for us today is Elizabeth Hotson. Hi Elizabeth. Hi. And you have been,

what have you been doing precisely? You've been talking to people about how best to design an office

for the 21st century. Well, I haven't. I haven't just been talking to them.

I've been visiting a lot.

And I mean, I think when people describe an office environment,

they might think of Q because they might think of open plan.

But what you might not consider is that some offices nowadays have,

well, apparently more leisure equipment than they do staplers, pens and photocopiers.

I've seen slides, dartboard, a back cave, just about everything designed to, I guess, make the workplace more fun.

And in fact, the first thing I did was to throw myself down the huge indoor slide in the West London offices of cloud computing company Rackspace.

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