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This paper aims to explore the relationship between satisfaction with buildings, facilities and services and perceived productivity support and to test whether the findings from a similar study of Batenburg and Van der Voordt (2008) are confirmed in a repeat study after 10 years with more recent data.

Data were traced from a database with data on user satisfaction and perceived productivity support. These data were collected through the work environment diagnostic tool WODI light. The data include responses from 25,947 respondents and 191 organisations that have been analysed by stepwise multiple-regression analyses.

In total 38% of the variation of office employees’ satisfaction with support of productivity can be explained by employee satisfaction with facilities, the organisation, current work processes and personal- and job-related characteristics. The most important predictor of self-assessed support of productivity is employee satisfaction with facilities. In particular, psychological aspects, i.e. opportunities to concentrate and to communicate, privacy, level of openness, and functionality, comfort and diversity of the workplaces are very important. The findings confirm that employee satisfaction with facilities correlates significantly with perceived productivity support. Other factors that are not included in the data set, such as intrinsic motivation, labour circumstances and human resource management may have an impact as well.

This research provides a clear insight in the relation between employee satisfaction with facilities and the perceived support of productivity, based on survey data collected over almost 10 years in 191 organisations.

Although a large number of studies have examined the relationship between the physical work environment and employee performance, the relationship between employee well-being and facility management (FM) has received limited attention. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between FM services and employee well-being in terms of job satisfaction, satisfaction with the workplace, job affect and engagement within the context of the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, distinguishing between soft FM services and hard FM services.

The analysis is based on the responses of 1,390 employees, who responded to all the relevant items used in this analysis. In addition to the linear estimations, the research uses an instrumental variable (IV) estimation, the Lewbel IV estimator (Lewbel, 2012), to establish a causal relationship between FM services and employee well-being.

The findings of this paper suggest that there is a positive relationship between the FM index and the four well-being proxies. In addition, the findings indicate that the effect of soft FM on employee well-being is generally weaker than the effect of hard FM, especially with regard to job affect and engagement.

The current research treats FM services as a resource instead of a cost and goes beyond the financial value of FM by providing a quantitative analysis on the added value of FM services in terms of employee well-being. Most importantly, this study incorporates FM services in the JD-R model and uses an alternative approach to linear regression and traditional IV regression to solve for endogeneity issues.

This paper aims to investigate how facilities management (FM) and corporate real estate management (CREM) can add value to organisations by contributing to improved productivity of knowledge workers, and to explore interrelationships between productivity, employee satisfaction and other value parameters.

This is a literature research of possible contributions of FM and CREM to improved labour productivity in relation to five activity areas of FM/CREM (portfolio management, project management, space and workplace management, property management and service management) and a first exploration of interrelationships between productivity and other value parameters.

The findings indicate that FM and CREM most directly can contribute to productivity by space and workplace management that supports different types of work and organisational activities. Portfolio and project management can mostly contribute by providing appropriate locations, adjacency relations between different parts of the organisation and supporting process flow and logistics. Property management can contribute to productivity by ensuring business continuity and comfortable indoor climate. Service management can contribute by relieving staff from trivial tasks by efficient services and by providing exiting experiences. Productivity shows to be mainly positively related to satisfaction; insights into interrelationships with other value parameters are still limited.

The results can be used to obtain a deeper understanding of how FM and CREM can add value to organisations by contributing to improved labour productivity. Practitioners can find inspiration on how to contribute to labour productivity and additional benefits within specific activity areas of FM and CREM. The exploration of interrelationships between productivity and other values can be used as input to a future research agenda.

The paper adds new insights to the growing body of knowledge about how FM/CREM can contribute to increased labour productivity and how other value parameters may be interrelated with productivity.

This paper aims to explore the added value of healthy workplaces for employees and organizations, in particular regarding employee satisfaction, labour productivity and facility cost.

The paper is based on a narrative review of journal papers and other sources covering the fields of building research, corporate real estate management, facilities management, environmental psychology and ergonomics.

The review supports the assumption of positive impacts of appropriate building characteristics on health, satisfaction and productivity. Correlations between these impacts are still underexposed. Data on cost and economic benefits of healthy workplace characteristics is limited, and mainly regard reduced sickness absence. The discussed papers indicate that investing in healthy work environments is cost-effective.

The findings contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationships between physical characteristics of the environment and health, satisfaction, productivity and costs. These insights can be used to assess work environments on these topics, and to identify appropriate interventions in value-adding management of buildings and facilities.

The purpose of this paper was to extend the current knowledge on the impacts of activity-based workplaces (ABWs) on productivity in knowledge work. It offers more background information that is needed to properly evaluate ABWs’ suitability for different organisations. In the results section, ABWs are compared to the cellular and open-plan office types.

This study was conducted using a survey method with 5,841 respondents. The data were collected between 2015 and 2019 from 32 public-sector organisations.

The findings of this paper reveal that ABWs offer clear advantages over the other office types but requires careful design and well-implemented solutions. The superiority between ABWs and cellular offices also depends on workers’ profiles and needs and is not for everyone.

For practitioners, this paper offers valuable information to compare the three office types: ABW, cellular and open-plan. It also highlights the importance of careful planning and good implementation, which are both essential to making the ABW environment productive for employees. Finally, this paper clearly provides evidence that ABWs and open-plan offices differ in their facilities and productivity.

This paper included a unique and large sample with open variables, which are fairly rare in ABW-related papers. It also provides evidence that ABWs, when implemented correctly, seem to be an excellent option for some work profiles.

This paper aims to determine the advantages and disadvantages associated with integrating a coworking environment into the real estate portfolios of large office-based organizations. The study discusses both external and internal coworking solutions.

This paper is a literature review and qualitative research based on 12 semistructured interviews with high-level real estate practitioners, including users, suppliers and consultants.

The authors examined the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating coworking environments into the real estate portfolios of large organizations from the four perspectives of Krumm et al. (2000). These perspectives were operationalized through the 12 real estate added value parameters of Jensen and Van der Voordt (2017). The findings show that improved adaptability is the greatest advantage of external coworking solutions (facility management perspective). The most significant advantage of internal coworking is related to stimulation of innovation, creativity and knowledge sharing (general management perspective). The disadvantages of external and internal coworking partly overlap and are mainly the negative effect on the corporate culture (general management perspective).

The findings contribute to the understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating both external and internal coworking solutions from multiple perspectives and allow to compare them. The authors developed and tested an operationalization of the four perspectives of Krumm (2000) through the 12 added values of Jensen and Van der Voordt (2017). Opinions and perceptions of professionals regarding internal and external coworking models are presented in a framework and related to earlier findings.

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between career development and productivity of the university staff with the mediating role of self-regulation.

The research approach is quantitative-relational and is based on structural equation modeling (SEM). The population consisted of the staff of two Iranian universities in 2018 out of which 331 participants were selected using Cochran's formula and a proportionate stratified random sampling method. To gather data, the self-regulation questionnaire (SRQ), the career development questionnaire (CDQ) and a researcher-made employees' productivity questionnaire (EPQ) were used. In terms of reliability, Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the instruments was found to be 0.97, 0.84 and 0.88, respectively. Face and content validity were confirmed by a group of field experts.

The findings indicated that the staff’s self-regulation had a positive and significant effect on individual, organizational and environmental productivity factors. In addition, self-regulation had the ability to predict those factors. It was found that self-regulation had a mediating role in the relationship between career development and staff productivity. According to the results, educational institutions, especially universities, can provide their staff with the opportunity to exploit their full potentials through reinforcing their self-regulation and increasing their productivity.

Higher self-regulation capacity among university staff helps them liberate their potential energy for disinterested selfless service to the society. Higher self-regulation capacities allow individuals to increase the energy resource for self-regulation and contribute to the productivity and quality of life. The statistical population of the quantitative section is confined only to the staff working at Iranian universities. Therefore, our results should be cautiously generalized to universities in other countries.

Our findings can help in empowering human resources and consequently improving education and research processes.

Universities play a decisive role in the economic growth and development of countries because of their diverse services in the production and distribution of science and knowledge.

This study was conducted on university’s staff productivity, while most previous researches have been conducted in industrial enterprises. Thus, the present study seeks to fill this research gap by means of providing new perspectives and information on the factors affecting staff productivity and the relationship between research variables in higher education institutions.

The purpose of this study is to pilot test the effectiveness of the experience sampling approach for measuring employee satisfaction with the workplace environment. Additionally, the authors also aimed to explore, which aspects of environmental comfort have the strongest impact on momentary well-being and productivity.

In total, 15 knowledge workers in an open-plan office environment were sent a brief survey (measuring environmental comfort, momentary well-being and perceived productivity) each day over an 11-day study period and provided 78 individual survey responses in total.

All but one of the measures on the survey had low test-retest reliability, indicating that employees’ experiences of environmental comfort varied significantly each time they completed the survey. Additionally, higher environmental comfort was associated with improved well-being and productivity.

The results suggest that an experience sampling approach to the workplace occupant survey is justified to better capture the temporal variability in experiences of environmental comfort. The results also suggest that improving environmental comfort, particularly by reducing the level of distractions, will enable employees to work more productively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first field study which has attempted to directly address limitations in traditional occupant surveys by using an experience sampling approach rather than a one-time-only questionnaire.

This study aims to explore an emerging collection of smart building technologies, known as smart workplace solutions (SWS), in the context of facilities management (FM).

This study is based on semi-structured interviews with facility managers in Finland, Norway and Sweden who have deployed SWSs in their organizations. SWS features, based on empirical data from a previous study, were also used to further analyse the interviews.

It analyses the benefits that SWSs bring from the facility management point of view. It is clear that the impetus for change and for deploying SWS in the context of FM is primarily driven by cost savings related to reductions in office space.

This research has been conducted with a focus on office buildings only. However, other building types can learn from the benefits that facility managers receive in the area of user-centred smart buildings.

SWSs are often seen as employee experience solutions that are only related to “soft” elements such as collaboration, innovation and learning. Understanding the FM business case can help make a more practical case for their deployment.

SWSs are an emerging area, and this study has collected data from facility managers who use them daily.

Organisational strategy becomes reality by connecting organisation’s resources and capabilities in daily operations, and physical workspace is one of the environments in which this takes place. This study aims to explore to what extent factors required for successful strategy implementation are considered when designing, using and managing workspaces of knowledge-intensive organisations.

For the study, managers in 25 large and medium-sized knowledge-intensive organisations were interviewed. The semi-structured interviews focused on organisation’s strategy, strategy implementation practices and workspace design and management. To form a comprehensive framework of strategy implementation success factors for the study, the factors of 11 frameworks were analysed, grouped and renamed.

Current workspace design, usage and management mainly support human-related strategy implementation factors. However, both organisation- and human-related factors are needed for the strategy implementation to be successful. Therefore, the organisations studied may have unused potential in their workspaces to ensure strategy-aligned operations and behaviour.

Due to the potential imbalance between organisation- and human-related strategy implementation factors, a more holistic, organisational-level approach to workspace design, usage and management is recommended to ensure the success of strategy implementation.

Workspaces have extensively been studied from individual strategy implementation factors’ as well as employees’ perspectives. Prior to this work, there are only few studies exploring workspace in the holistic, strategy implementation context.