Personal Control of the Indoor Environment in Offices: Relations with Building Characteristics, Influence on Occupant Perception and Reported Symptoms Related to the Building—The Officair Project

Abstract

Personal control over various indoor environment parameters, especially in the last decades, appear to have a significant role on occupants’ comfort, health and productivity. To reveal this complex relationship, 7441 occupants of 167 recently built or retrofitted office buildings in eight European countries participated in an online survey about personal/health/work data as well as physical/psycho-social information. The relationship between the types of control available over indoor environments and the perceived personal control of the occupants was examined, as well as the combined effect of the control parameters on the perceived comfort using multilevel statistical models. The results indicated that most of the occupants have no or low control on noise. Half of the occupants declared no or low control on ventilation and temperature conditions. Almost one-third of them remarked that they do not have satisfactory levels of control for lighting and shading from sun conditions. The presence of operable windows was shown to influence occupants’ control perception over temperature, ventilation, light and noise. General building characteristics, such as floor number and floor area, office type, etc., helped occupants associate freedom positively with control perception. Combined controlling parameters seem to have a strong relation with overall comfort, as well as with perception regarding amount of privacy, office layout and decoration satisfaction. The results also indicated that occupants with more personal control may have less building-related symptoms. Noise control parameter had the highest impact on the occupants’ overall comfort.

Association of subjective health symptoms with indoor air quality in European office buildings: The OFFICAIR project

“…For the scope of the study, measurements of major indoor air pollutants and recording of occupants’ health complains on questionnaires were simultaneously performed. The present analysis follows and extends our previous work 23‐25 in the aspect of occupant health perception in “modern” office buildings in the frame of OFFICAIR project 26 . Using the OFFICAIR cross‐Europe survey database, this study aims to investigate for the first time the possible associations between chemical compounds and the occupants’ perceived health symptoms in office buildings considering the examined personal characteristics as potential confounders.…”

Indoor gaseous air pollutants determinants in office buildings—The OFFICAIR project

“…The research strategy consisted of three complementary phases: (a) “general survey” (167 buildings, winter of 2011‐2012), using questionnaires and checklists; (b) “detailed study” (37 buildings) with measurements carried out both in summer (2012) and winter (2012‐2013); and (c) “intervention study” (nine buildings) with more detailed measurements (eg, active sampling and online monitoring) carried out before and after an intervention related to the reduction in IAP. Further details on the project strategy and outcomes are reported in the project website (http://www.officair-project.eu) and in project‐related publications …”

“…Further details on the project strategy and outcomes are reported in the project website (www.offic air-proje ct.eu) and in project-related publications. 10,11,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]…”

Special Issue on Indoor Air Quality

“…To be more specific, nine papers discuss the issues of IAQ perception and control as well as thermal comfort. The study of M. Cho [2] focused on revealing the complex relationship between office employees' control over various indoor environment parameters and their comfort, health and productivity. 7441 occupants of 167 recently built or retrofitted office buildings in eight European countries participated in an online survey about personal/health/work data as well as physical/psycho-social information.…”