Office Design Features and Future Organizational Change toward Supporting Sustainability

Abstract

Organizational change, influenced by such factors as economics, information and communications technologies (ICTs), and users’ wellbeing, is essential for organizational effectiveness, productivity, and sustainability. Thus, there has been a call for urgent changes in workplace design features to respond to future change. This study is concerned with defining the level of change in design features that is needed in existing Saudi governmental workplaces to cope with future visions of sustainability, as well as controlling the cost of such redesigning. It is hypothesized that future challenges related to economics, ICTs, and users’ wellbeing would have a significant impact on the need to change existing workplace design features. Administrator workplaces in three buildings of Saudi organizations and their representative economic, ICT, and wellbeing trends were considered (n = 104, 95, 96). The average level of change in design features in each building was observed and reported. The most changed design features in buildings affected by economic, ICT, and wellbeing trends were minimizing of luxury workplaces, minimizing storage space, and improving thermal/lighting conditions, respectively. However, the most changed design features that were common to all three buildings were spatial and furniture layouts and minimizing storage space.