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This paper aims to illustrate the extensive benefits of qualitative data analysis as a rarely undertaken process in post-occupancy evaluation surveys. As a result, there is limited evidence of what occupants say about their buildings, especially for operational parameters, as opposed to how they rate them. While quantitative analyses provide useful information on how workers feel about workplace operational factors, qualitative analyses provide richer information on what aspects of the workplace workers identify as influential to their comfort, well-being and productivity.

The authors analysed 6,938 comments from office buildings worldwide on workers’ perception of workplace operational factors: design, storage, needs, space at desks and storage in their work environments. These factors were analysed based on the buildings’ design intent and use, and the associated comments were coded into positive, negative and balanced comments. The authors used a combination of coding, descriptive analysis, content analysis and word cloud to dissect the comments.

The findings showed that whereas workers rated these operational factors favourably, there were significantly more negative comments about each factor. Also, the Chi-square test showed a significant association (p < 0.01) between the satisfaction scale and the type of comments received for all the operational factors. This means that when a factor is rated high in the satisfaction score (5–7), there were fewer negative and more positive comments and vice versa. The word cloud analysis highlighted vital aspects of the office environment the workers mostly commented on, such as open plan design, natural lighting, space and windows, toilets, facilities, kitchens, meeting room booking systems, storage and furniture.

This study highlights the importance of dissecting building occupants’ comments as integral to building performance monitoring and measurement. These emphasise the richness and value of respondents’ comments and the importance of critically analysing them. A limitation is that only 6,938 comments were viable for analysis because most comments were either incomplete with no meaning or were not provided. This underlines the importance of encouraging respondents to comment and express their feelings in questionnaire surveys. Also, the building use studies questionnaire data set presents extensive opportunities for further analyses of interrelationships between demographics, building characteristics and environmental and operational factors.

The findings from this study can be applied to future projects and facility management to maintain and improve office buildings throughout their life cycle. Also, these findings are essential in predicting the requirements of future workplaces for robust workplace designs and management.

The authors identified specific comments on the performance of workplaces across the globe, showing similarities and differences between sustainable, conventional, commercial and institutional buildings. Specifically, the analysis showed that office workers’ comments do not always corroborate the ratings they give their buildings. There was a significantly higher percentage of negative comments than positive comments despite the high satisfaction scores of the operational factors.

Meetings with colleagues are an essential activity in workplace collaboration. The iterative nature of collaborative work demands spaces that team members can access quickly and easily. Creating suitable meeting spaces will become more critical if the hybrid work model continues and the workplace environment becomes the hub for face-to-face collaborative time, learning and training. Workspace and fit-out is expensive so it is crucial that the investment in meeting spaces supports employees’ collaboration activities.

This paper presents a case study of a corporate organisation undertaken in New Zealand to investigate how employees from two business units use their workspace to collaborate within their own team and across other teams in their organisation. The study uses ethnographic techniques, including participant observation and in-depth face-to-face interviews.

The findings show that the frequency and nature of small group work in collaboration was underestimated in the initial planning of the new workspace. Although participants found the design and fit-out of the formal meeting rooms supportive of collaborative work, the meeting rooms were in high demand, and it was difficult to find a room at short notice. The breakout spaces were confusing because they lacked key design attributes identified by the participants as conducive to small group work. Design shortfalls together with fit-out features perceived as supportive of collaborative work are identified.

The research reports on employees’ perceptions and experiences across two functionally diverse business units, reflecting their different needs and concerns.

One key to improving team‐based software development is to support the developers’ ability to work together. Sets out one site’s response to this challenge. Developers at this site have a facility, which we will call the “team room”, allowing team members to work together. This is a computer‐supported meeting room that arose from the voluntary, and reflective, efforts of software developers to make it easier for them to work together. The team room’s popularity shows up in its extensive use for meetings and its acceptance as an integral part of software development at this site. When people use the team room, they work on a shared screen, making it easier to work together. Because they can work together, meetings become a time of work, not a pause between work sessions. Explains how these positive work outcomes have had some unexpected effects. For example, developers at this site now rely on room use to help deal with intra‐group conflict, so that the team room has become a buffer to social interaction, serving as a conduit for action.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the influences of the colours red and blue on perceived well being, social cohesion and productivity in complex real life work conditions during regular meetings.

In total, seven regular government teams held seven regular meetings in red, blue and reference meeting rooms. In literature it is often mentioned that red is a warm and blue a cool colour. To be able to test the warmth and coldness effects the authors have amplified the warm and cold qualities with light colour and colour of the table top desk. The employees were asked to complete questionnaires concerning perceived well being, social cohesion and productivity. In total, 52 subjects completed three questionnaires, at the start, the end and two or three days after the meeting. Data were analysed with SPSS 16.

The findings did not show any effects of the red and blue environment on perceived well being, social cohesion and productivity. The authors assume the processes in real life work situations are too complex to measure influences.

The research focuses on individual perceptions and did not measure actual well being, social cohesion and productivity.

Practical implications are that statements frequently mentioned in literature concerning influences of red and blue might be not valid in real life meeting settings. New ways of testing the impact of colours should be reconsidered. Because lab situations are too simplified and artificial, the authors suggest testing influences of colour in an isolated setting in relation to art.

The originality of this research concerns testing colour influences in complex real life work settings, such as meetings.

Research into the library as place investigates the role of public library buildings as destinations, physical places where people go for various reasons ranging from making use of the library's resources and services or seeking to fulfill an information or reading need to less easily identified reasons that may include using the library's building as a place to make social or business contacts, to build or reinforce community or political ties, or to create or reinforce a personal identity. This study asks: How are one rural US public library system's newly constructed buildings functioning as places? The answer is derived from answers to sub-questions about adult library users, user, and staff perceptions of library use, and observed use of library facilities. The findings are contextualized using a framework built of theories from human geography, sociology, and information studies.

This case study replicates a mixed-methods case study conducted at the main public libraries in Toronto and Vancouver in the late1990s and first reproduced in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2006. It tests methods used in large urban settings in a rural, small-town environment. This study also expands on its antecedents by using thematic analysis to determine which conceptualizations of the role of the public library as place are most relevant to the community under investigation.

The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data collected via surveys and interviews of adult library users, interviews of library public service staff members, structured observations of people using the libraries, and analysis of selected administrative documents. The five sets of data are triangulated to answer the research sub-questions.

Thematic analysis grounded in the conceptual framework finds that public realm theory best contextualizes the relationships that develop between library staff members and adult library users over time. The study finds that the libraries serve their communities as informational places and as familiarized locales rather than as third places, and that the libraries facilitate the generation of social capital for their users.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the spatial intervention of open-plan offices in a university, the consequential change in work practices of faculty members and how these practices appropriate the designed space.

The authors executed a two-year longitudinal ethnographic study following the case of the science faculty, which moved from a traditional office setting to open-plan offices. The authors studied the space and interviewed staff before, during and after the introduction of open-plan offices.

Findings show that the new spatial setting triggered staff members to attribute certain meanings and practices of adaptation which were, partly, unintended by the design of the open-plan offices.

This paper contributes empirically grounded insights into the (un)intended consequences of a spatial intervention in terms of how staff members, far from being passive, attribute meaning and alter their work practices leading to unprecedented organizational changes.

For change consultants, facility managers and university managers the outcomes of this paper are highly relevant.

Large budgets are spent on new office concepts at universities but the authors do know little about the relation between spatial (re)design and organizational change.

The introduction of new office concepts, spatial redesign and co-location is for many academics highly emotional.

Meeting rooms, training areas and conference rooms are the places where people come face‐to‐face with clients or colleagues and where the ideas and decisions which power an organisation are meant to be made. Two good reasons, you might think, for making sure that the lighting in such places enhances their appearance and atmosphere. Yet they are often relegated to the basements and cores of office buildings, with no windows and a lighting scheme more suited to open plan areas with at least some access to natural light. How often have we all sat around tables looking at the shadows under the eyes of the people opposite, trying to avoid the glare of the light fitting just above them or fighting off sleep for sheer lack of visual stimulation.

Workplace space utilization data reveals patterns of space usage, the occupants’ presence and mobility within the office building. Nowadays, emerging technology such as smart sensors and devices can revolutionize the measurement of space utilization data, which is originally dominated by human observers with paper and pencil. However, these novel instruments are often used in an old fashion, which restricts the exploitation of their full potential. This study aims to shed new light on the benefits and limits of using smart technology in measuring space utilization data and discusses the challenges and opportunities in analyzing the data measured by smart sensors.

First, the literature regarding common methods and previous studies about office space utilization measurement was reviewed. Then, a data set consisting of space utilization data collected through Passive Infra-Red sensors for 35 meeting rooms in a bank building was carefully evaluated. Finally, the space utilization results based on methods calculated in two different granularities were compared.

The number of occupied hours calculated at an hour level was 1.32-hour larger than that calculated at a minute level. As both results show the concept of space utilization, which was the amount of time that the space was occupied, this paper revealed a gap between the two space utilization calculation methods and further discussed the issues and challenges for future space utilization data analysis and benchmarking.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study critically addressing office space utilization issues by comparing calculation methods in different granularity.

The purpose of this paper is to figure out the impacts of soft innovation in the city hotels in general, whereas the focus is on figuring out if there exists a difference in vitality on the components of soft innovation among the hotel categories, as 4 stars, 5 stars and boutique hotels in Izmir, Turkey.

The first part is related to a detailed literature review on the soft innovation components as color, sound, light, scent and decoration. Literature review is followed by a qualitative research where expert information on the research topic is collected. Judgmental sampling is used to identify experts’ views where in-depth semi-structured interviews are conducted with 12 hotel managers in Izmir city. The soft innovation hotel application areas taken into consideration are: lobby and reception, rooms, restaurant, bar and ballroom areas, meeting and congress halls, SPA and pools, gardens and landscape and other exterior hotel architecture.

The findings of the research reveal the sample hotel managers’ views as all the soft innovation applications are important for all city hotels regardless of their category, meaning that soft innovation may lead to better marketing results. Thus, according to hotel managers, soft innovation offerings have a potential for better customer satisfaction as positive feedback. However, the vitality degree among components changes according to the hotel’s category. For boutique hotels the most important component is found to be the decoration of the hotel, whereas for 4 stars hotels it is light and for 5 stars hotels it is scent.

The results of this study give relatively limited information because only managers’ point of view are shown. In the research, customers’ perceptions on soft innovation based interviews with the top management of the hotels studied takes place, indicating which may not be the case to reflect the real perception of customers. Therefore, for further researches, it is recommended for the other researches to take into consideration of customers’ point of views as well. Also, time limitation, sample size and application of only qualitative research may be stated as the limitations for this study. Quantitative research applies to customers on the same topic and problem statement is recommended for further studies related to city hotels’ soft innovation applications.

Motivation of this study is to understand how soft innovation can change hotels’ atmosphere and make it more attractive from the managers’ perceptions. According to hotel managers’ views, soft innovation applications may lead to higher customer satisfaction, but the level of investment among the components may change according to the city hotel’s category. Research implications indicate that hotel managers may optimize the effectiveness of their soft innovation efforts by taking into consideration their hotel type, application areas and innovation category as decoration, color, scent, sound and light. According to hotel managers, decoration-related soft innovation is more important to boutique hotels, lighting-related soft innovation is an effective investment for 4 stars hotels and scent-related soft innovation is a suitable investment for 5 stars hotels.

The originality of the study lies in the analysis of the components of soft innovation as a means for effective city hotel marketing and innovative management applications. Though it is a very suitable industry for implementation, improvement and development, there are limited studies on soft innovation applications in the hotel industry.