The work environment pilot: An experiment to determine the optimal office design for a technology company

Abstract

Over the past few decades many corporate organisations have moved to open-plan office designs, mostly due to financial and logistical benefits. However, recent studies have found significant drawbacks to open plan offices and it is unclear how office designs can facilitate the best work output and company culture. Current design practice aims to optimise efficiency of space, but no previous research has tested the effect of office design experimentally in a working office. This paper describes an experiment comparing four different office designs (Open-plan, Zoned open-plan, Activity based, and Team offices) against a suite of wellbeing and productivity metrics in a real world technology company. Results suggest that two very different designs (Zoned open-plan and Team offices) perform well compared to Open-plan office designs. Zoned open-plan and Team office designs improved employee satisfaction, enjoyment, flow, and productivity, while Activity based and Open-plan designs performed poorly by comparison. The Open-plan office design was rated more poorly by employees, had higher levels of unsafe noise, and once employees no longer had to be in the Open-plan office design of the experiment, they spent more time at their desks.

Concentration with Fitness Leads to More Work Productivity

“…These factors can affect work engagement and productivity. [17][18][19] Work engagement is a condition where the worker absorbed in their work with dedication and having a fulfilling-work-related state of mind. 2 Another internal factor is the neural factor such as cortisol level.…”

Designing Post-Digital Hybrid Workplaces

“…Here, Manca (2022, 344) focuses on how "to reterritorialize the previously localized sociabilities". This idea of requiring stability through more obvious territories and boundaries of groups is also resonated in a review of 30 years of workplace literature conducted by Forooraghi et al (2020) and implied by a study conducted with a technology company by Pitchforth et al (2020). Pitchforth et al (2020) examined the effects of four types of layouts on wellbeing and productivity.…”

“…This idea of requiring stability through more obvious territories and boundaries of groups is also resonated in a review of 30 years of workplace literature conducted by Forooraghi et al (2020) and implied by a study conducted with a technology company by Pitchforth et al (2020). Pitchforth et al (2020) examined the effects of four types of layouts on wellbeing and productivity. The four layouts included: the open-plan office; the activity-based office which is essentially an open-plan office that has activity-centred zones that are not preassigned to specific employees; the zoned open-plan office, which is an office with added privacy compared to the open-plan format; and the team office, which is similar to the cubicle office, situating small teams in one enclosure.…”

„Rewaloryzacja” centrum miasta: tendencje lokalizacyjne przedsiębiorstw technologicznych w skali mikro na przykładzie Warszawy = “Revalorisation” of the city centre: location trends among micro scale technology companies as exemplified by Warsaw

“…Wśród elementów lokalnego środowiska istotnych dla przedsiębiorstw technologicznych wskazuje się przede wszystkim na cechy budynku i jego otoczenia (Kiroff, 2019). W tym pierwszym przypadku rośnie znaczenie elastycznych przestrzeni pracy tworzących warunki do pracy zespołowej (Pitchforth et al, 2020). Natomiast pożądaną cechą otoczenia tych budynków jest wielofunkcyjność, co decyduje o rozwoju obszarów łączących funkcje biurowe, handlowe, rozrywkowe i mieszkaniowe (np.…”