Indoor environment quality and work performance in “green” office buildings in the Middle East

Abstract

Globally, a primary concern is whether green office buildings perform as promised in terms of providing better indoor environment quality (IEQ) for employees, which may affect their satisfaction and work performance. In the Middle East, although there has been renewed interest in green building design, post occupancy evaluation of performance has never been conducted to-date, and evidence of actual occupant perception in green and non-green buildings is still ambiguous. Hence, we present the first study on IEQ performance in the Middle East. We show that Jordan can be taken as a representative example and systematically compare five "green" office buildings (representing 71% of all green-certified office buildings) against eight comparable conventional office buildings (CBs). Detailed bi-lingual survey data on perceived IEQ (n = 502) and work performance are accompanied by high-resolution continuous physical measurements of air temperature + relative humidity (n = 83) and CO2 concentrations (n = 21) with periodic measurements of mean radiant temperature and air speed, covering two typical summers and one typical winter. Results show both buildings types comply with design standards for indoor CO2 levels, while thermal comfort in green buildings is better than in CBs. However, CBs have a higher overall occupant satisfaction of IEQ. Work performance measured as absolute and relative absenteeism was slightly higher in CBs, with no significant differences in relative and absolute presenteeism between the two buildings types. These findings challenge the notion that green buildings improve occupant satisfaction and work performance over CBs and suggest the need for a better understanding of the performance-satisfaction gap.

Enhanced Indoor Environmental Quality and the Link to Individual Productivity and Organisational Performance: A Scoping Review

“…Green buildings generally resulted in higher job satisfaction and superior individual productivity assessments when compared to conventional buildings; however, some conventional buildings outperformed some green buildings in these metrics (Newsham et al, 2017). Elnaklah et al (2020) compared green and conventional buildings in terms of various IEQ factors and found that comfort was superior in green buildings, however individual productivity was slightly higher in conventional buildings, and there was no significant difference in absenteeism and presenteeism in either building type. It was established by Lee et al (2020) that regardless of a green refurbishment or a new green building, the results were the same in IEQ user satisfaction and experienced health symptoms.…”

“…Absenteeism and presenteeism are viewed as potential indicators of productivity (Roelofsen, 2002;Danielsson and Bodin, 2008;Thatcher and Milner, 2012;Agha-Hossien et al, 2013;Thatcher and Milner, 2014b;2014a;Elnaklah et al, 2020). Self-assessed productivity is another approach to determining productivity levels, where respondents were asked to rate their perceived productivity on a scale from 0-to 100% within the context of their full capacity (KPIs) (Thatcher and Milner, 2012).…”

Integration of Indoor Air Quality Prediction into Healthy Building Design

“…After gathering the inputs of airflow matrix, ambient air pollutant level, and indoor source/sink data, the Air pollutant module calculates multizone air pollutant concentrations using the state-space method [79]. For the simulation of each air pollutant, Equation (1) can be rewritten as Equations ( 7) and (8), which are as follows:…”

“…Hence, healthy building design is an emerging need in the field of architecture and building engineering, especially in the face of increasing episodes of pandemics and climate events. The design of a healthy building requires comprehensive consideration of elements that are associated with human well-being and performance [5][6][7][8]. Among the factors, indoor air quality (IAQ) plays a crucial role in achieving healthy buildings [9].…”

Challenges of Green Office Implementation: A Case Study in Penang, Malaysia

“…After filtering "office building" and "English only journal articles", only 32 articles were listed. Most of these articles were related to the engineering field (21 articles) with the main focus on indoor environmental quality (see Elnaklah, Fosas, & Natarajan, 2020;Lin, Liu, Wang, Pei, & Davies, 2016) and energy consumption (see Geng, Lin, & Zhu, 2020;Yau & Lim, 2016;Zhou, Cai, & Xu, 2020). Screening of abstracts resulted in only five articles related to challenges in green office implementation with three articles focusing on developed countries (see Adomßent, Grahl, & Spira, 2019;Pulaski & Horman, 2005;Uusi-Rauva & Heikkurinen, 2013), while the rest were from China with a narrow focus on green rating (Zuo, Xia, Chen, Pullen, & Skitmore, 2016) and office interior (Gou, 2016).…”