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The purpose of this study is to explore which factors may explain the high or low percentages of satisfied employees in offices with shared activity-based workplaces.

The paper compares data on employee satisfaction from two cases with remarkably high satisfaction scores and two cases with significantly lower satisfaction scores (total N = 930), all of the same organisation. These cases were selected from a database with employee responses to a standardised questionnaire in 52 flexible work environments. In the four case studies, also group interviews were conducted.

Overall, there are large differences in employee satisfaction between cases with, at first sight, a similar activity-based office concept. The main differences between the best and worst cases regard employee satisfaction with the interior design, level of openness, subdivision of space, number and diversity of work places and accessibility of the building. Employee satisfaction shows to be influenced by many physical characteristics of the work environment and by the implementation process. Satisfaction with the organisation may have an impact as well.

Almost all cases regard Dutch organisations. Due to the lack of quantitative scales to define the physical characteristics of the work environment, the study is mainly descriptive and explorative and does not include advanced multivariate statistical analyses.

The data revealed clear critical success factors including a supportive spatial layout to facilitate communication and concentration, attractive architectural design, ergonomic furniture, appropriate storage facilities and coping with psychological and physical needs, such as privacy, thermal comfort, daylight and view. Critical process factors are the commitment of managers, a balance between a top-down and a bottom-up approach and clear instructions on how to use activity-based workplaces.

The study connects descriptive research with inductive reasoning to explore why employees may be satisfied or dissatisfied with flex offices. It is based on a combination of quantitative survey data from 52 cases and a closer look at two best cases and two worst cases based on qualitative data from interviews and personal observations. The study has high practical value due to the integral approach that incorporates many items of the physical environment and context factors like the implementation process.

This study aims to systematically evaluate the psychological factors of independent versus interdependent self-construal, self-evaluation motives of enhancement versus verification, and the mediating role of bridging and bonding social capital on consumers' positive and negative brand-related electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) sharing with in-group and out-group audiences.

The online survey was conducted with young adult consumers in the Netherlands (N = 322). Multiple regression analysis with PROCESS was used to test the hypotheses.

Consumers with independent self-construal are more likely to share negative eWOM, particularly via social messengers with in-group members. These consumers, however, tend to share positive eWOM on companies' social media accounts that reach out-group audiences including online strangers. Additionally, self-evaluation was the key motivation driving positive eWOM sharing with in-groups, while bridging social capital mediated the effects of self-construal on sharing negative eWOM.

The paper provides a more holistic understanding of the factors impacting the valence and intended audience for eWOM sharing. The findings advance eWOM research by differentiating positive and negative eWOM sharing in the context of intergroup communication.

All previous research seldom considered the proliferation process from the perspective of consumers or from a negative perspective to examine the desire for revenge and negative word of mouth (WOM) caused by deficiencies in innovative products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate consumers’ subsequent behaviors after they have outward and inward negative emotions such as anger and regret. The objective of this study is to explore the different effects of customers’ anger and regret on desire for revenge and negative WOM.

This research uses structural equation modeling to analyze 226 samples.

The results showed that regret has significant and positive effects on desire for revenge and negative WOM but anger has only a significant and positive effect on desire for revenge. Moreover, desire for revenge has a significant and positive effect on negative WOM. In addition, the desire for revenge plays a crucial mediator between anger and negative WOM as well as regret and negative WOM.

Corporations can use tangled emotions among consumers to predict the development of the desire for revenge and immediately implement remedies for deficiencies to prevent consumers from developing the desire for revenge and spreading negative WOM regarding the corporation or product, or engaging in other revenge behaviors. Corporations can easily detect and prevent the path between anger and revenge behaviors simply based on the desire for revenge. In contrast to the outward negative behavior that is anger, regret is implicit and internal.

This study explored two negative emotions of affect (anger and regret) based on affection and conation/action of the tricomponent attitude model and their different effects on consumers’ revenge behaviors such as desire for revenge and negative WOM. The contributions of this research are to clarify the different relationships between outward negative emotion (anger) and desire for revenge/negative WOM as well as inward negative emotion (regret) and desire for revenge/negative WOM.

The purpose of this study is to describe the success story of a software company, Adobe, in redesigning the workplace environment from cubicles to a connected collaborative workplace, which helped the organization optimize workplace usage. The goals were to design an innovative work environment to optimize the usage of the office portfolio, improve workplace service quality and infrastructure facilities of the portfolio, increase employee productivity, reduce technology costs, engage employees in a better way to enhance employee satisfaction, align workplace design with the brand, mobilize technology and enable a globalized workforce to facilitate higher productivity.

An exploratory research design method was adopted using the purposive sampling technique to collect data through semi-structured interviews with a team of nine property professionals from the operations team responsible for workspace redesign at Adobe in India.

The main observations of the corporate real estate (CRE) manager were on what value parameters drive workplace redesign and how different software companies were creating strategies to manage workplace design or redesign change for optimal use of the organization portfolio. To discuss the CRE strategies of global software leaders, IBM and SAP were pointed out in this case.

The number of interviews were limited. The related parameters for workplace transformation are not necessarily complete. However, the parameters are regarded to include the most important aspects of workplace redesign.

This study provides useful insights into how benchmarking in the workplace transformation function of the CRE industry can be applied to address portfolio-related challenges, divergent employee needs and improve workspace usability following energy-efficient policies. Practitioners can use this study as a guide to develop more effective workspace designs.

This study may guide other firms on successful workspace design initiatives that may overcome many obstacles in the workplace transformation process to have their intended impact on workplace efficiency and employee satisfaction. The case can be used as an inspiration for developing specific user-focused innovative workspace design in practice.

Adopting the theoretical background of the person–environment fit theory, this study adds to the understanding of the operational model of a digitally connected workspace designed as per real estate needs and strategies to manage the CRE portfolio of the company.

Office workspace is more than a place but one of the essential resources in business organizations. In recent years, research in office workspace management has become an increasingly important scholarly focus. However, there is a dearth of bibliometric studies to date on the subject. This study aims to explore a scientometric analysis of office workspace field.

The title/abstract/keyword search method was used to extract related papers from 1990 to 2018. A total of 1,670 papers published in Scopus were obtained and subjected to scientometric data analysis techniques via CiteSpace software.

The results revealed the active research institutions and countries, influential authors, important journals, representative references and research hotspots in this field.

While this study focused on office workspace management, the findings hold useful implications for the built environment in general and facility management in particular, being a sector that encompasses multiple disciplines involving building, office assets, people, processes and technology, which enable effective functioning of the built facilities.

This is probably the most comprehensive scientometric analysis of the office workspace field ever conducted. This study adds to the so far limited knowledge in the field and provides insights for future research.

There is a strong prerequisite for organizations to analyze customer review behavior to evaluate the competitive business environment. The purpose of this study is to analyze and predict customer reviews of halal restaurants using machine learning (ML) approaches.

The authors collected customer review data from the Yelp website. The authors filtered the reviews of only halal restaurants from the original data set. Following cleaning, the filtered review texts were classified as positive, neutral or negative sentiments, and those sentiments were scored using the AFINN and VADER sentiment algorithms. Also, the current study applies four machine learning methods to classify each review toward halal restaurants into its sentiment class.

The experiment showed that most of the customer reviews toward halal restaurants were positive. The authors also discovered that all of the methods (decision tree, linear support vector machine, logistic regression and random forest classifier) can correctly classify the review text into sentiment class, but logistic regression outperforms the others in terms of accuracy.

The results facilitate halal restaurateurs in identifying customer review behavior.

Sentiment and emotions, according to appraisal theory, form the basis for all interactions, facilitating cognitive functions and supporting prospective customers in making sense of experiences. Emotion theory also describes human affective states that determine motives and actions. The study looks at how potential customers might react to a halal restaurant’s consensus on social media based on reviewers’ opinions of halal restaurants because emotions can be conveyed through reviews.

This study applies machine learning approaches to analyze and predict customer sentiment based on the review texts toward halal restaurants.

Many organizations in Hong Kong have witnessed a reduction in average space usage due to high occupancy costs. New working practices (NWPs) are viewed as a reform tool to manage expensive real estate around the world. However, it is unclear whether NWPs influence office space usage in business organizations in Hong Kong. This study, therefore, aims to evaluate if the average space reduction in office firms is caused by the NWPs in the finance, insurance, real estate and business (FIREB) firms.

A total of 20 NWPs were initially derived from the extant literature. A questionnaire survey was conducted with listed FIREB firms in Hong Kong to assess the impact of the identified NWPs on space usage. The data collected from the questionnaire survey were analysed using descriptive, explorative factor analysis (EFA) and partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the effects of NWPs on average space usage.

Results revealed that four major NWP factors influence average space usage. Three of these factors, namely, “flexible arrangement”, “multitasking knowledge workers” and “teamwork and communication”, influence space usage positively. Even though the effect of the fourth factor “training and networking” was significant, it does not reflect a positive influence on space usage. Business organizations can focus more on the implementation of NWPs to cushion the effects of the high cost of occupancy.

The research provides new knowledge to the limited literature on the effect of NWPs in FIREB firms and enriches the growing body of international literature on how today’s competitive global business organizations should revisit their workplace strategies to accommodate the rising agile workforce and NWPs. The findings offer new insights into the ongoing debate on the impact of information and communication technology-enabled NWPs on space usage. From the real estate perspective, the findings should inform policymaking towards the better planning ahead of office properties to accommodate NWPs, helping Hong Kong to remain competitive as a key financial centre.

The purpose of this paper is to map and describe findings from research conducted in workspaces designed to support activity-based working (ABW) over the past 10 years (2010–2020) with a view of informing post-COVID workplaces of the positive and negative attributes of ABW.

Scopus was used as the search engine for this review. Papers which reported findings related to ABW and performed field study in ABW workspaces with adult occupants were included. Out of the 442 initial papers, 40 papers were included following iterative title and abstract and full text review process and consideration of inclusion and exclusion criteria. These papers were divided into three groupings (organizational, human and physical environment) based on their major focus. Positive and negative effects of ABW environments on occupants are discussed within these three topics in consideration of the implications for the post-COVID workplace.

Although the included studies were inclined to be either more positive (i.e. interior design) or negative (i.e. indoor environmental quality, productivity, distraction and privacy) in relation to various attributes of ABW, no single effect of ABW environments on occupants was in full agreement between the studies. The shortcomings of ABW environments are more related to how this way of working is implemented and how occupants use it, rather than the concept itself. A partial uptake of ABW leads to occupants’ dissatisfaction, lower productivity and lower well-being, while a holistic approach increases the chance of success. It is hypothesised that many currently reported negative aspects of the ABW concept might diminish overtime as ABW evolves and as new challenges arise. A continuous post-occupancy evaluation after relocation to an ABW-supportive environment can inform the organization about the changing needs and preference of the occupants; hence, the organization can tailor the ABW solution to the arising needs. The inter-connection between the three key ABW pillars (organizational, human and physical environment) is crucial to the success of this concept specifically in the context of the post-COVID-19 workplace.

This paper highlights the key shortcomings and limitations of studies produced over the past decade and identifies keys gaps in the current body of literature. It provides a new insight on how findings related to open-plan offices designed to support ABW can be categorized on the three big heading of organizational, physical and human-related aspects, and further investigates the positive and negatives outcomes reported on ABW under these headings. It also discusses how the findings arising from this literature review can inform the post-COVID workplace.