Influence of dynamic changes of workplace on organisational culture

Challenged by the effects of organisational flexibility and high corporate real estate costs, organisations are increasingly seeking flexibility and operational efficiency in their office spaces. To date, the literature relating to flexible office spaces has focused mainly on their physical characteristics. The full effects of such spaces on human reactions and the corporate culture of organisations are less understood. The objective of this paper is to examine the influence of introducing activity-based working (ABW) on existing organisational culture. It was addressed from the perspective of the management of large corporate organisations. A mixed-method research that included a qualitative approach followed by a quantitative approach was adopted. The first stage included semistructured interviews with 19 large organisations who had introduced flexible layouts. The second stage involved a questionnaire survey of 32 organisations which had experienced office layout changes. Findings identify that the nature of workplace designs has a considerable impact on the corporate culture of an organisation and can be used to leverage and change its culture. Workplace designs directly influence culture by supporting the systems, symbols, engagement/motivation and behaviours of the organisation and employees. However, some differences between the perceptions of public and private organisations were identified. In conclusion, office layouts are artefacts that can either support, or change, the existing organisational culture. Therefore, the critical achievement of workspace design is to integrate the cultures, values and behaviours of organisations to meet their ultimate goals.

Supervised learning-based assessment of office layout satisfaction in academic buildings

Employee satisfaction significantly affects health, well-being and productivity, and office layout plays a dominant role in office psychological satisfaction. However, existing studies have not yet proposed a quantitative evaluation method for office layout satisfaction to assist design decisions. This study conducts a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) process of office layout satisfaction from 1,317 staff members at 3 universities in the Yangtze River Delta, China. The proposed office layout feature network supports the questionnaire design and environmental measurement. Based on the survey data, multiple resampling methods are considered to face the imbalanced dataset problem, and feature selection integrates statistical analysis methods and machine learning algorithms. Nine supervised learning algorithms are tested for office layout satisfaction prediction, and the final predictive model is established based on the random forest algorithm. The predictive model explanation is further integrated with original data analysis to extract the quantified impacts of various building characteristics. The workstation adjustment under the background of COVID-19 in an actual staff office is chosen to be an application scenario of the predictive model. The results show that the workstation distance, room depth and room width-depth ratio are dominant in the evaluation of office layout satisfaction. The proposed predictive model achieves 64.5% accuracy, and the prediction results are interpretable, which promotes its application in office design practice. The data processing methods in this study respond to the common data problems in the POE based opinion collection process. The extracted influence mechanisms of building characteristics can directly support user-centered office design.