Search results

This paper highlights the importance of user satisfaction in office renovation. A user-focussed renovation approach can enhance user satisfaction in offices and their functional quality while meeting energy performance goals. The purpose of this paper is to investigate users’ needs and the physical and psychological factors affecting user satisfaction, as input to office renovation projects.

The selected articles are collected from Scopus, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar. Searching was limited to the main key terms of office, work environment, and user satisfaction and comfort. The important factors were searched through empirical-based international literature mainly. Based hereupon, a guide will be developed for the analysis and evaluation of user satisfaction in office renovations.

From a comprehensive overview, the findings present ten main factors to increase user satisfaction in office renovation. These are associated with physical and psychological satisfaction and comfort. In addition, the influential factors were categorised into three levels based on needs theories to organise the hierarchy of priorities.

This research adds to the body of knowledge about which factors are important for user satisfaction, based on what previous research has found in that field. This is important to improve the sustainability in use.

User satisfaction is often studied through separate aspects: health and indoor climate vs functionality and productivity. This paper examines overall user satisfaction of workplaces by integrating the perspectives of physical and psychological conditions, and by providing insight into the priority of satisfaction factors.

Commonly used rent indices are based on average developments or expert opinions. Such indices often suffer from compositional biases or low data coverage. The purpose of this paper is to overcome these challenges using the authors' approach.

The authors construct a quality-adjusted rent index for the office market in Oslo using detailed data from 14,171 rental contracts.

The authors show that compositional biases can have a large impact on rental price developments. By adding building-fixed effects to a standard hedonic regression model, the authors show that the explanatory power increases considerably. Furthermore, indices excluding location-specific information, or which include less granular location controls than at the building level, portray quite a different picture of rent developments than indices that do take this into account. The authors also exploit information on contract signature date and find that a more timely detection of turning points can be achieved by using the signature date instead of the more typically used start date of the lease.

The study is confined to Norwegian data, and an avenue for future research would be to explore if similar results are obtained for other countries. A weakness with the paper is that authors' do not observe quality changes over time, such as renovation. Controlling for time-varying and unit-specific attributes in hedonic models for the commercial real estate (CRE) market would be useful to purge indices further for compositional effects and unobserved heterogeneity. While the authors do control for building-fixed effects, there are additional variations within a building (floor, view, sunlight, etc.) that the authors do not capture. Studies that could control for this would certainly be welcome, both in order to estimate the value of such amenities and to see how it affects estimated rent developments. Another promising avenue for future research is to link data on rental contracts in the CRE market with firm-specific information in order to explore how firm profitability and liquidity may affect rental contracts.

The authors show that the hedonic index yields a sharper fall in rents after the global financial crisis and more muted developments in the period between 2013 and 2015 than the average rent index. The results show that rents have followed their estimated equilibrium closely and have re-adjusted quickly in periods of deviation. From a financial stability perspective, the risk of a sharp fall in rents is reduced because rents often are in line with their fundamentals.

The authors find that a more timely detection of turning points can be achieved by using information on the signature date. This is an important finding. The financial system is heavily exposed toward CRE, and timely detection of turning points is critical for policymakers.

The financial system is heavily exposed toward the commercial real estate market and timely detection of turning points is of major importance to policymakers. Finally, the authors use our quality-adjusted rent index as the dependent variable in an error correction model. The authors find that employment and stock of offices are important explanatory variables. Moreover, the results show that rents have followed their estimated equilibrium path.

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.

This paper aims to explore the meaning of smart office environments from a user perspective by investigating user preferences and expectations.

Eleven semi-structured interviews with the users after moving into a smart office building of a Dutch Municipality and an observation as complementary data were conducted. The data were analysed based on the grounded theory and thematic analysis, combining a reflexive approach to the literature review.

Two main themes were revealed addressing user expectations and preferences for smart office environments: “enhanced interaction” with the social and physical office environment and “sense-making” of the smart concept (or smartness). Within these themes, basic and smart office aspects were identified and classified based on their association with smart office concepts or technology.

The findings reveal the meaning of the smart office concepts from a user perspective by highlighting the importance of user experience on enhanced interaction and sense-making of the smart office concept, equipped with basic and smart aspects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to qualitatively examine drivers underlying the meaning of smart office concepts from a user point of view. Organisations, environmental psychologists, designers and managers can use the findings of this study to develop guidelines for a successful smart office design.

The application of circular building adaptability (CBA) in adaptive reuse becomes an effective action for resource efficiency, long-lasting usability of the built environment and the sped-up transition to a circular economy (CE). This paper aims to explore to which extent CBA-related strategies are applied in adaptive reuse projects, considering enablers and obstacles.

A stepwise theory-practice-oriented approach was followed. Multiple-case studies of five circular adaptive reuse projects in The Netherlands were investigated, using archival research and in-depth interviews. A cross-case analysis of the findings was deductively conducted, to find and replicate common patterns.

The study revealed that configuration flexibility, product dismantlability and material reversibility were applied across the case studies, whereas functional convertibility and building maintainability were less applied. Low cost of material reuse, collaboration among team members and organisational motivation were frequently observed enabling factors. Lack of information, technical complexities, lack of circularity expertise and infeasibility of innovative circular solutions were frequently observed obstacles to applying CBA.

This paper provides practitioners with a set of CBA strategies that have been applied in the real world, facilitating the application of CBA in future adaptive reuse projects. Moreover, this set of strategies provides policymakers with tools for developing supportive regulations or amending existing regulations for facilitating CE through adaptive reuse.

This study provides empirical evidence on the application of CBA in different real-life contexts. It provides scholars and practitioners with a starting point for further developing guiding or decision-making tools for CBA in adaptive reuse.

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 present shift and change in the human lifestyle across the world are undeniable. Currently, individuals spend a substantial amount of time indoors due to the global COVID-19 pandemic that strikes the entire world. This change in human lifestyle has devastating effects on human health and productivity. As a result, the influence of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) on the health and productivity of building users becomes a critical field of research that requires immediate attention. As a result, the purpose of this study is to review the state-of-the-art literature by establishing a connection between the factors that influence health and productivity in any given indoor environment.

The methodology involves a thorough review of selected published journals from 1983 to 2021, and the result was analysed through content analysis. The search included journal articles, books and conference proceedings on the critical factors influencing IEQ and their impact on building occupants, which was sourced from different databases such as ScienceDirect, Taylor, GoogleScholar and Web of Science.

The findings from the 90 selected articles revealed four critical factors influencing the quality of the indoor environment and are categorised into; indoor air quality, indoor thermal comfort, visual comfort and acoustic comfort. The findings suggested that when developing a system for controlling the quality of the indoor environment, the indoor air quality, indoor thermal comfort, visual comfort and acoustic comfort should be taken into account.

The indoor environment deeply impacts the health of individuals in their living and work environments. Industry must have a moral responsibility to provide health facilities in which people and workers feel satisfies and give conditions for prosperity. Addressing these essential aspects will not only help the decision-making process of construction professionals but also encourages innovative construction techniques that will enhance the satisfaction, wellness and performance of building occupants.