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This paper aims to explore the impact of COVID-19 on office space in Johannesburg. This study further explores the role of changing work practices in the office sector in South Africa because of the pandemic and its impact on future office space use planning and management.

To understand the footprints that the COVID-19 pandemic has left on the office space market in Johannesburg, this study uses semi-structured interviews, which were administered to corporate office users, and a thematic analysis was adopted to understand the views, perspectives and expectations of office users.

The study showed that space users perceive COVID-19-induced remote working as having benefits, opportunities and challenges. A notable shift in office space utilization has emerged, with employees increasingly opting for roles that permit remote work. This newfound flexibility, accommodating both on-site and remote work, often makes working from home more appealing than traditional office environments that may no longer align with users’ preferences for office spaces.

The study is limited to Johannesburg, South Africa, and may not apply to other African markets. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted, and analysis and results were deduced; this may be considered a limitation of this study.

The pandemic’s impact has brought about irreversible changes, compelling policymakers and business leaders to strategize and prepare. This proactive stance aims to prevent avoidable challenges for employees and companies during future pandemics. A thoughtful approach to the post-pandemic world can usher positive changes in the office and property sector. This includes the coexistence of both remote work and on-site working models.

This paper provides valuable insight into some of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa that are essential for future office space use planning and management. The insights from this study extend the literature and provide novel knowledge based on an office sector in the “global south.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that casting actors with similar facial features in a movie can pose challenges in foreign markets, hindering the audience's ability to recognize and remember characters. Extending developments in the literature on the cross-race effect, we hypothesize that facial similarity – the extent to which the actors starring in a movie share similar facial features – will reduce the country-level box-office performance of US movies in East and South-East Asia (ESEA) countries.

We assembled data from various secondary data sources on US non-animation movies (2012–2021) and their releases in ESEA countries. Combining the data resulted in a cross-section of 2,616 movie-country observations.

Actors' facial similarity in a US movie's cast reduces its box-office performance in ESEA countries. This effect is weakened as immigration in the country, internet penetration in the country and star power increase and strengthened as cast size increases.

This first study on the effects of cast's facial similarity on box-office performance represents a novel extension to the growing literature on the antecedents of movies' box-office performance by being at the intersection of the two literature streams on (1) the box-office effects of cast characteristics and (2) the antecedents, in general, of box-office performance in the ESEA region.

This study examines the relationship between environmental building certification Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM-NL) and office rents in the Dutch office market.

A hedonic price model was used to assess the impact of BREEAM certification on office rents. The study is based on 4,355 rent transactions in the period 2015 to mid-2022, in which 331 transactions took place in certified office buildings and 4,024 transactions in non-certified office buildings.

The results provide empirical evidence on quantitative economic benefits of BREEAM-certified offices in the Netherlands. After controlling for all important office rent determinants, the results show a rental premium for certified office buildings of 10.3% on average. The green premiums highly differ across submarkets and vary between 5.1 and 12.6% in the five largest Dutch cities. Additionally, the results show significant positive correlation between BREEAM-NL label score and rents, whereby better performing buildings generally command higher rents.

The study contributes to the current literature on green building economics by providing, as one of the first, empirical evidence on the existence of financial benefits for BREEAM-certified office buildings in the Dutch office market.

This paper examines rent determinants and their relationship with commercial office property rents.

The method adopted in this study differs from that of previous studies on this topic. Firstly, based on the survey of the viewpoints of experts, Relative Importance Index (RII) analysis was used to identify rent determinants and to rank and ensure their relevance and validity in the Sri Lankan context. Secondly, sampling of data related to 115 office properties collected from property tenants and landlords located within the central built-up area of Colombo City was conducted using a multi-methods approach to carry out an objective hedonic analysis of office rents.

This research utilizes RII and hedonic models to provide insights into determinants and relationships. Both analyses confirm that the three top drivers of commercial office rent are distance from the major town center, availability of parking space and the condition of the property. In addition to these three factors, hedonic models reveal that the age of the property and the availability of a conference hall also play a relevant role in explaining office rents. Given the disparities in the findings of the two methods, further examination was able to confirm that factors such as distance from the major town center, parking availability, age of the property, presence of a conference hall, building condition, floor size, business type and type of building are likely to influence commercial office rent. These findings reflect elements such as the quality, newness and better facilities of different office properties.

This systematic study and analysis of office rent for the guidance of real estate investors can support sound investment decisions, potentially leading to more financially sound property development, reduced public debt levels and improved public-private financing. Further, the research findings offer valuable insights to real estate investors, developers and planners regarding location decisions for office development quality enhancements in future office developments.

This research provides fresh insights into the local scale office market, an area where limited evidence currently exists. Further, the methodology adopted provides evidence that hedonic analysis, supported by a multi-method approach, can mitigate the subjective judgments made by professionals.

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.

The aim of the study is to test the integrated model involving work stress, office clutter and employee performance with the moderating roles of training and self-discipline (SD) after the re-opening of the banks after the COVID-19 wave.

The study used 333 respondents from banking industry, whose responses were recorded using a closed ended questionnaire. The authors used partial least square path anaysis to analyze the data.

Work stress significantly increases office clutter, which harms the employees’ performance. Moreover, SD and training significantly improve employees’ performance by reducing work stress and thereby office clutter. There are various mechanisms through which both these factors reduced stress and office clutter.

The employee’s performance can be enhanced with lower levels of office clutter. The office clutter can be managed through having lower levels of stress and providing people with training and inculcating SD among them. A greater understanding of the factors that count toward office clutter might help bank managers and employees to address the issues related to their performance.

The authors have proposed a new framework involving conservation of resources theory for the employees’ performance. They posit employees’ performance is an organizational resource, which can be conserved as well as enriched both by employers and employees through their own contribution.

Internet of things (IoT) involves the connection of various devices. IoT’s application ranges from wearables: Smart Home Application, Health Care, Smart Offices, Smart Cities, Agriculture, and Industrial Automation. While the number of connected devices grows by the day, so does the number of security risks and vulnerabilities that these devices face. Billions of the connected devices collect and transmit huge volumes of data making Data Security one of the most pressing technical concerns in IoT. Smart Office is one of the increasing IoT applications and Data Security has become today one of the most challenging areas in its application. It is important to identify data security threats. This chapter therefore presents a review of IoT Smart Office Data Security Threats based on existing research done.

Purpose of This Chapter: >The study examines the importance and effect of working over office hours and lengthy commutes on work–life balance because both consume time away from the official working hours. The study utilized perceived organizational support to measure the moderating role of working over office hours, lengthy commutes, and work–family balance.

Design / Methodology / Approach: An inferential statistics cross-sectional study collected data from 437 full-time employees of IT-BPM companies in 5 metropolitan cities in India. The study used the PLS-SEM to examine the hypotheses.

Findings: The results show a negative relationship between working over office hours and lengthy commutes on work–family balance. This study also found the moderating effect of perceived organizational support on working over office hours and lengthy commutes on the work–family balance. Also, the study revealed that half of the respondents spend three hours, and one-fourth of the respondents spend four and half hours working over office hours and lengthy commutes.

Research Limitations: This research is limited to IT-BPM companies in India. Nevertheless, the findings highlight the factors associated with IT-BPM employee work–family balance, and only two factors were identified.

Practical Implications: This study enhances the work–family balance’s theoretical and practical effects. The results provide a competitive benchmark for IT-BPM managers, administrators, and governing bodies of employee well-being.

Originality: To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to adopt extrinsic variables in work–family border theory to measure the work–family balance of IT-BPM employees.

The purpose of this study is to explore public servants’ perspectives on return to office, hybrid work model and digital government. This is done by answering two research questions: what benefits and challenges public servants foresee with return to office and whether hybrid work enables or impedes digital government initiatives.

This research is designed as a mixed methods study of federal and provincial governments in Canada based on the analysis of Reddit data. Research methods include machine-assisted toxicity and sentiment analysis and manual content analysis to identify emerging themes.

The findings highlight public servants’ mostly discussed concerns with return to office. Other notable discussion topics include resistance to the hybrid work model and identifying the ways how it would be operationalized. Some supported return to office.

This study’s limitations are related to using Reddit as the data source and user representation on Reddit. The main implications are its contribution to emerging literature on the future of work and digital government.

This study highlights that perspectives of public servants are paramount for development and implementation of transformational initiatives and offers insights for public sector managers on how to incorporate these into practice while improving the efficiency of digital government initiatives and the system.

This study addresses the gap in literature by seeking to understand the perspectives of public servants in a variety of roles as well as implications of transition to hybrid work on digital government and future of work initiatives.

The Chinese housing market has witnessed rapid growth during the past decade and the significance of housing price forecasting has undoubtedly elevated, becoming an important issue to investors and policymakers. This study aims to examine neural networks (NNs) for office property price index forecasting from 10 major Chinese cities for July 2005–April 2021.

The authors aim at building simple and accurate NNs to contribute to pure technical forecasts of the Chinese office property market. To facilitate the analysis, the authors explore different model settings over algorithms, delays, hidden neurons and data-spitting ratios.

The authors reach a simple NN with three delays and three hidden neurons, which leads to stable performance of about 1.45% average relative root mean square error across the 10 cities for the training, validation and testing phases.

The results could be used on a standalone basis or combined with fundamental forecasts to form perspectives of office property price trends and conduct policy analysis.