Factors Affecting Occupants’ Satisfaction in Governmental Buildings: The Case of the Kingdom of Bahrain

Abstract

Satisfaction is a very important factor in improving productivity and performance in the work environment. This study aims to investigate the levels of occupants’ satisfaction with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in the governmental buildings in the Kingdom of Bahrain and to investigate the impact of occupants’ demographics and building attributes (non-IEQ factors) on these levels. For these purposes, the study used a questionnaire that has 17 indoor environmental quality (IEQ) factors in addition to a group of non-IEQ factors. The questionnaire was distributed by hand or using email to 279 employees in the Bahraini governmental sector. The findings of the study revealed that occupants in the Bahraini governmental buildings are not strongly satisfied with IEQ factors, especially with sound privacy, followed by visual privacy and amount of space, and then noise levels. The findings also showed that for most IEQ factors, men are more satisfied than women are, those who work in enclosed private offices are more satisfied than those who work in open-plan offices, and those who have central air-conditioning at their workplace are more than those who have a wall-mounted air conditioner. The impact of age, nature of work, duration of working in the current building and at the current workstation, weekly working hours, and proximity to the window were also investigated. Accordingly, a group of recommendations was suggested aiming to improve the levels of occupants’ satisfaction.

A Comparative Field Study of Indoor Environment Quality and Work Productivity between Job Types in a Research Institute in Korea

“…Therefore, an increasing number of previous studies are analyzing the IEQ evaluation of residents through correlation with various factors. In previous studies, it was confirmed that the job type was also correlated with the IEQ evaluation of the occupant [ 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 ]. However, because IEQ can obtain different research results depending on buildings and regions, research on various targets and factors should continue, and it is necessary to obtain additional relevant scenarios to analyze correlation data.…”

“…Kamaruzzaman [ 37 ] analyzed the correlation between IEQ and the satisfaction of occupants of office buildings and found that the “managerial staff” had the highest average IEQ score among all occupational groups, which included the “clerical and secretarial”, “professional”, “managerial”, and “other” staff. Albuainain [ 38 ] investigated the level of IEQ satisfaction for government buildings in Bahrain and analyzed its correlations with non-IEQ factors, such as occupational groups. They found that the IEQ satisfaction level was different depending on the occupational group, and that the technical group had the highest IEQ satisfaction among the five occupational groups.…”

Post-Occupancy Evaluation’s (POE) Applications for Improving Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ)

“…On the other hand, the number of paper questionnaires distributed to users (5% of authors) and the number of telephone interviews conducted (1%) in the studies evaluated in this review were marginal. The first tool, as described by the authors in [ 131 , 132 , 133 ], was applied to prefabricated timber houses in the UK, government buildings in the Kingdom of Bahrain, and universities in Cairo (Egypt), respectively. The second, on the other hand, was described by the authors in [ 134 ], in which it was used to understand how facilities’ managers reacted to user feedback and its impact on users’ post-feedback behaviors.…”

HVAC maintainability risks in healthcare facilities: a design optimization perspective

“…They stated that this was achieved by optimizing the HVAC operation based on occupants' feedback. After reviewing similar studies (Albuainain et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2018), the authors observed that occupants might be oblivious to maintenance issues in a facility. Besides, certain studies have investigated building performance evaluation and postoccupancy evaluation, which addressed HVAC systems in health-care facilities (Brambilla and Capolongo, 2019;Dilrukshi et al, 2014;Forouharmajd et al, 2012).…”