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The purpose of this paper is to compare different employee perceptions of the success of one change: a move to new offices and an open-plan design.

In sum, 25 interviews were carried out in a New Zealand law firm that six months earlier had moved to new premises.

Contrary to academic and practitioner reports that open-plan offices are disliked, participants appreciated the new office space. A well-planned and highly participative program of change management led to positive perceptions of aesthetic design, open communication, collegiality, egalitarianism and inclusiveness.

Given the small sample used in one organization, the study highlights the need for more research into the processes and outcomes of office space changes.

The roles of communication and culture, in particular, collegiality and egalitarianism, were salient factors in a complex web of causes and consequences in this context of change.

This paper aims to explore how users respond to office design through their use of space. Intentions for how office spaces should be used can be not only understood as sociomaterial scripts that are inscribed into the architecture by designers but also communicated through organisational change processes. The paper elaborates on how users de-script office spaces, that is, how they respond to these scripts through use.

The paper draws on a case study of an office design intervention in a public organisation. Taking a sociomaterial approach, the paper uses the concepts of scripting and de-scripting to analyse the data.

The findings show that users subscribe to, repair, resist or re-script design scripts. This suggests that users can enact agency in use through creative acts of appropriation. Further, both materiality and user participation play equivocal roles in user responses.

The paper is based on a single case study where the design process was studied retrospectively. The case is regarded as typical of contemporary office design processes, but more studies that follow projects from design into use are needed.

This suggests that design solutions should be better adapted to the work practices instead of applying generic concepts to specific situations and that design and use should be understood as overlapping processes.

The originality of this study lies in linking aspects of the design process with user responses and in taking a sociomaterial approach to examine design and use.

This study aims to critically evaluate the COVID-19 and future post-COVID-19 impacts on office design, location and functioning with respect to government and community occupational health and safety expectations. It aims to assess how office efficiency and cost control agendas intersect with corporate social accountability.

Theoretically informed by governmentality and social accountability through action, it thematically examines research literature and Web-based professional and business reports. It undertakes a timely analysis of historical office trends and emerging practice discourse during the COVID-19 global pandemic's early phase.

COVID-19 has induced a transition to teleworking, impending office design and configuration reversals and office working protocol re-engineering. Management strategies reflect prioritisation choices between occupational health and safety versus financial returns. Beyond formal accountability reports, office management strategy and rationales will become physically observable and accountable to office staff and other parties.

Future research must determine the balance of office change strategies employed and their evident focus on occupational health and safety or cost control and financial returns. Further investigation can reveal the relationship between formal reporting and observed activities.

Organisations face strategic decisions concerning both their balancing of employee and public health and safety against capital expenditure and operation cost commitments to COVID-19 transmission prevention. They also face strategic accountability decisions as to the visibility and correspondence between their observable actions and their formal social responsibility reporting.

Organisations have continued scientific management office cost reduction strategies under the guise of innovative office designs. This historic trend will be tested by a pandemic, which calls for control of its spread, including radical changes to the office at potentially significant cost.

This paper presents one of few office studies in the accounting research literature, recognising it as central to contemporary organisational functioning and revealing the office cost control tradition as a challenge for employee and community health and safety.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the phenomenon of activity-based working (ABW), an office design and management system that has emerged in the past 20 years. It investigates its manifest and underlying agendas with a view to determining its degree of cost management focus and scientific management foundations.

The paper uses historical and website analysis methodologies for investigating historical office management philosophies and practices, as well as contemporary office design and management philosophies and related ABW practices and discourse. These are examined through the theoretical lenses of governmentality and impression management theories.

Despite a rhetoric of staff empowerment, ABW’s dominant agenda is overhead cost reduction and operating cost management. This reflects scientific management principles of early twentieth-century office design and management. Cost efficiencies and productivity emerge as key ABW output foci. While ABW adopters and advocates present ABW as a desirable staff satisfaction and operations facilitator, the cost agenda nonetheless commands centre stage.

Accounting research into the office and its processes is much needed. This has been largely neglected in favour of line management and factory floor costing and accountability systems. In a world dominated by service industries, the office as a centre of organisational and economic activity merits researchers’ greater attention.

Contemporary office design and functioning developments merit greater recourse to and acknowledgement of their historic roots. Then, practitioners can better design and implement systems that build on past knowledge and learnings. While such innovations as ABW may carry potential for improved organisational performance, care is needed with respect to their balancing of agendas and suitability for their institutional and cultural environments.

Organisational work has become a dominant part of social life in most economies today. Such innovations as ABW must be considered in terms of the societal culture into which they are introduced: how they reflect and adapt to that culture and what impacts they may also have on the culture itself. This includes dimensions such as organisational and self-control, as well as personal and organisational accountability.

This study presents itself as one of the very few refereed research studies of ABW currently available in the accounting, management or property research literatures. It also represents one of the very few studies of the office in the accounting research literature internationally.

Significant changes in business practice mean that the design of the physical working environment is now being used to add value to business performance. Businesses, stimulated by the potential of information technology and goaded by international competition, are seeing corporate real estate as more than a matter of simply accommodating themselves in the most efficient way. They are using building projects to add value to their core activities. They are using the design process to accelerate programmes of technological and cultural change. Three case studies are used to illustrate the new importance of design. The strategic implication of these experiences are that users, at all levels in business life, having become accustomed to radical changes in the design process, and increasingly used to the responsiveness of ecommerce, are likely to become increasingly impatient with old economy versions of office design, construction, and real estate practice.

The purpose of this paper is to present an environmental psychological case study regarding an office design change. The employees of the researched company had the chance to decide whether to stay in the classic open office set-up or to switch to a shared desk supplemented by a one-day-a-week home office possibility. The authors examined the development of participants’ territorial behaviour and place attachment.

The given organizational situation is a quasi-experimental design; the variables were examined via questionnaire in a longitudinal model. Quantitative measurement was supplemented with focus group discussions.

The degree of personalization (a type of territorial behaviour) decreased significantly not only among those who lost their permanent workstations – as we expected – but also in the entire population. Workplace attachment stagnated for the entire population, but workstation attachment showed a significant decrease among those who switched to the shared desk.

The limitations and the advantages are also followed by the nature of a case study: high ecological validity with relatively low sample size.

Redesigning an office is never just an economic or interior design issue, but a psychological one. This paper provides practical environmental psychological insights into implementing office designs without permanent individual workstations.

This paper presents the environmental psychological background of shared desk design implementation. The authors point out the significance of repressing personalization behaviour and as per the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to introduce the concept of workstation attachment.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the relationship between office redesign and employee productivity; and second to highlight the impact of privacy on work productivity across different generations.

This study examines open-office policy more comprehensively by integrating socio-behavioral and physical aspects of the office, and by using a mixed-method approach that incorporates most significant change, factor analysis and hierarchical regression analysis. Using a census method, the respondents were all consultants and trainers in an educational institution who were experiencing office design changes from a combi, cellular-like office to a more open, non-territorial office.

Three variables emerged as impacts of office redesign perceived by respondents: friendship, collaboration and privacy. Collaboration and privacy exert a positive influence on work productivity, while friendship does not. The relationship between privacy and work productivity is stronger for the Generation Y than for senior employees, namely, the Baby Boomers and Generation X.

This study examines the impacts of office redesign in one organization. Future studies should advance the findings by empirically testing the theoretical model in broader contexts. Future studies could also enrich the literature by bringing cultural aspects into the discussion and comparing Asian-based and European or Western-based findings.

For Gen Y employees who prefer freedom, mobility and flexibility to personalization in their workplace, the open office could be a better solution for organizations that aim for both work productivity and efficiency.

This study provides an empirical value by using a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative research. This study further contrasts the different perspectives of an office redesign between younger and older generations.

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.

This paper discusses office design in the ‘new economy’. Office buildings of dot.com companies seem to be dominated by colourful materials, luxurious facilities such as gyms or lounge areas and gimmicks such as jukeboxes and pool tables. Employees ‘float’ around in these offices wherever and whenever they want. Such work environments seem very attractive and productive. Still, the meaning and relevance of such ‘fun offices’ can be questioned. In this paper the authors try to explain where this informal and casual office style comes from, relating it to labour market developments and changes in organisational culture. Secondly, they discuss the merits of ‘fun’ office design. How does it affect people’s creativity, their ideas about work and the distinction between work and private life?

Despite discussions about the universal work station, there is increasing workplace dynamics in US organisations. These dynamics include space configuration changes, space enclosure changes, changes in occupant density and increasing equipment density. At the same time, building infrastructures have not evolved to meet these demands, with little flexibility in the heating, ventilation and air‐conditioning (HVAC), lighting, or electrical/telecommunication systems of new or existing office buildings. This paper examines the effects of organisational workplace dynamics and building infrastructure flexibility on the environmental and technical quality of offices. Resulting from extensive field studies in US buildings, the authors contend that there are numerous statistically significant issues for the design and management of buildings for the dynamic organisation. The study identified numerous factors that affect thermal, air, lighting and technical quality in offices. In relation to infrastructure, for example, occupants who work in office areas provided with greater cooling capacity and more supply air volume, and combined with smaller HVAC zones, appeared to have higher levels of thermal satisfaction. Those who work in areas with higher outlet densities gave higher technical quality ratings; and those provided with relocatable outlets (raised floor and furniture based) gave significantly higher technical satisfaction ratings than those provided with least‐first‐cost ‘tombstones’. In relation to organisational dynamics, increasing occupant densities in existing buildings are related to more thermal and air quality complaints, more complaints about outlet accessibility, as well as more complaints about inadequate light levels on work surfaces. This paper will outline the major findings of a study linking organisational dynamics with building infrastructure, moving towards the definition of innovations in facility design that will more effectively support dynamic organisations.