Does an open-plan office actually work? A workplace gap analysis: importance and perceived support of key activities

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to investigate the performance of open-plan office layouts and to identify occupants’ concerns in existing open-plan office layouts. Design/methodology/approach Workplace activity questionnaire (WAQ) was administered in the form of an online survey in March 2019, as part of a design briefing process for the expansion of the office facilities located in Bangalore, India, for a Fortune 100 software technology company. A total of 4,810 questionnaires were distributed and 3,877 responses were received (80.6% response rate). After that, 849 incomplete responses were eliminated from the analysis, resulting in a final sample size of 3,028. The questionnaire included 11 key activities conducted by the office workers and established the gap between the workers’ perceived importance and support from their existing facilities using a five-point Likert scale. Findings The findings of this study provide strong evidence that different physical environments influence the satisfaction of occupants. An improvement of the facilities, especially by enabling areas for quiet working, should be prioritized in relation to the other activities surveyed. Also, office workers perceived significantly different support levels for quiet working depending on their department, while there was no significant difference between the workers of different buildings. Research limitations/implications Individual demographic information was not collected because of the possibility of personal identification. There was also a lack of objective environmental measures, such as temperature and noise level. Thus, the quality of indoor environments was unknown. In this study, some respondents mentioned dissatisfaction with indoor environmental quality, including noise, temperature and air quality in their comments. Originality/value In the programming stage of a workplace design process, the WAQ survey tool has value because it renders important insight into the perception of a live workplace, which can then be used to determine priorities for a design effort. It clearly identifies the areas to focus on, ask questions about and develop improvements. Validating its reliability will enhance its credibility and confidence in its use. In addition, the large sample size provides statistical advantages in the data analysis, providing a higher likelihood to find a true positive of the findings of the study. Also, having a relatively high response rate provides an advantage of mitigating the risk of having non-response bias in the analysis.

Does working from home work? Experience of working from home and the value of hybrid workplace post-COVID-19

“…For example, a significant difference in satisfaction was found in teleconferencing, showing the lowest satisfaction in corporate offices. This is possibly because workers sometimes had difficulty finding an adequately equipped space with technology for teleconferencing in their office buildings (Chacon Vega et al , 2020). Evidently, there was also a preference for home offices for refreshment.…”

“…The types were adopted from Chacon Vega et al's (2020) Workplace Activity Questionnaire (WAQ) and revised corresponding to a working-from-home situation: this study excluded “greeting visitors” and “storing belongings and filing,” separated “teleconferencing and videoconferencing” into “teleconferencing (audio only)” and “teleconferencing (both audio and video),” changed “training in the workplace” to “getting trained” and “training others” and added “routine work.” The questions asked the satisfaction level with the company and home office for each activity using a five-point Likert scale (1: Very low, 5: Very high).…”

“…Individuals who worked in the open-plan workplace setting reported a lack of environmental support for their quiet working. The results also indicated the different needs of office environments depending on activities: for instance, the R&D department spending much time on individual, focused work required the highest needs of quiet working spaces compared to other departments (Chacon Vega et al , 2020). Dutcher (2012) experimented with individual dull and concentration tasks, such as typing provided letters and a tic-tac-toe game, respectively, to investigate the productivity in corporate offices and teleworking environments.…”

“…To investigate how the physical work environment supports activities in the office, Chacon Vega et al (2020) conducted a study of three commercial offices that identify occupants’ perceived environmental supports for 11 key activities, such as formal meetings, quiet working, socializing, training and eating, in open-plan layouts including workstations, training, rooms and meetings rooms. Individuals who worked in the open-plan workplace setting reported a lack of environmental support for their quiet working.…”

How teachers’ expectations influence their experiences with activity-based workplaces in higher education

“…A much-introduced flexible office concept is the ABW (Nappi and Eddial, 2021). Commonly, the ABW has an unassigned open-plan configuration (Chacon Vega et al , 2020) in which the office is divided in zones based on users’ activities instead of users’ ownership (Kingma, 2018; Rolfö et al , 2018). Also, in the field of higher education, the ABW is increasingly implemented (Muhonen and Berthelsen, 2021; Backhouse et al , 2019).…”