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Employees’ satisfaction and productivity is one of the main interests of employers. Psychological comfort can cause dissatisfaction with their work. Thus, it is important to understand what factors contribute to employees’ satisfaction in workplaces. The purpose of this paper is to identify the weight of contribution of each design parameter on increasing psychological satisfaction.

The study included 579 employees in five offices in The Netherlands through an online survey. The typologies of offices vary in terms of office layouts, orientations and façade. Additionally, a parameter of desk location was included as this factor may be associated with user satisfaction. Kruskal–Wallis H test, categorical regression, and logistic regression analyses were performed to examine the impact of these design parameters on psychological user satisfaction.

The results revealed the impact of design parameters on the psychological satisfaction. The parameters of office layouts and desk locations were the significant predictor factors for the probability of satisfaction variables (e.g. privacy, concentration, communication, social contact and territoriality). The parameters for optimal satisfaction were found in cellular office, north-west oriented workstation and 4 m away from a window.

Psychological comfort is an inevitable aspect in user satisfaction studies. This paper, therefore, measures and predicts the relationship between design factors and employees’ satisfaction through case studies in The Netherlands. The findings help designers, architects, planners and facility managers to develop user-focussed office design principles supporting employees’ work performance.

This paper aims to explore, which characteristics of activity-based offices are related to the position of workers on the burnout – engagement continuum.

Literature review and an online survey amongst knowledge workers in the Netherlands, which provided data of 184 respondents from 14 organisations. The data has been analysed by descriptive statistics, bivariate analyses, factor analyses and path analysis, to test the conceptual model.

Five physical work environment constructs were identified of which three showed to have significant relations with employees’ position on one of the three dimensions of the burnout – engagement continuum. Distraction has a direct and indirect (through overload) negative relation with the individual strain (meaning increased exhaustion). Office comfort has indirect positive relations (through recognition and appreciation) with the interpersonal strain (meaning increased involvement). The possibility for teleworking has an indirect positive relation (through control) on the self-evaluation strain (meaning increased efficacy).

The findings show that in the design and management of a healthy physical work environment, corporate real estate managers and human resource managers should particularly pay attention to lowering distraction, providing comfortable workplaces and considering the option of teleworking to some extent.

This paper provides new insights into the impact of distinct activity-based workplace characteristics on workers’ position on the burnout – engagement continuum.

This study aims to examine the links between office types (cellular, shared-room, small and medium-sized open-plan) and employees' subjective well-being regarding cognitive and affective evaluations and the role perceived noise levels at work has on the aforementioned associations.

A survey with measures of office types, perceived noise levels at work and the investigated facets of subjective well-being (cognitive vs affective) was distributed to employees working as real estate agents in Sweden. In total, 271 useable surveys were returned and were analyzed using analyses of variance (ANOVAs) and a regression-based model mirroring a test of moderated mediation.

A significant difference was found between office types on the well-being dimension related to cognitive, but not affective, evaluations. Employees working in cellular and shared-room offices reported significantly higher ratings on this dimension than employees working in open-plan offices, and employees in medium-sized open-plan offices reported significantly lower cognitive evaluation scores than employees working in all other office types. This pattern of results was mediated by perceived noise levels at work, with employees in open-plan (vs cellular and shared-room) offices reporting less satisfactory noise perceptions and, in turn, lower well-being scores, especially regarding the cognitive (vs affective) dimension.

This is one of the first studies to compare the relative impact of office types on both cognitive and affective well-being dimensions while simultaneously testing and providing empirical support for the presumed process explaining the link between such aspects.

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.

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.

Triggered by public concerns over office workplace safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study sheds light on the office workplace environment and aims to investigate how organisations respond to forces from the external environment (impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic) and how they modify their office workplace management strategically and operationally to suit the stakeholders’ needs and future development in the post COVID-19 period.

A desktop study was conducted to provide the framework for the in-depth interviews with five corporate real estate (CRE) managers and three workplace consultants. Thematic analysis including coding technique was adopted to analyse the qualitative data.

The findings show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the intended and implemented office workplace modifications are mainly related to two types of risk control: administrative control and personal protection. At a strategic level, organisations react to the external forces by re-modelling their businesses and working towards re-orienting their CRE strategies, such as portfolio transformation, agile portfolio strategies and redesign of the office workplace, etc.

This is a topical and timely study that presents the general practice of office workplace modification during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the related CRE management (CREM) strategies developed for the new normal. The findings obtained through in-depth interviews have well supported the CREM strategic alignment theory. It is foreseen that office workplace management will encounter other challenges due to uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of this study provide a practical lens to look at the future changes of office workplace environment.

This study aims to find ways to bridge the gap between workplace design and research. Exploring the design process from general design aims to site-specific design makes the process visible to support workplace design research.

Participatory design methods were used to understand employees’ needs and preferences in work-related situations to support the design process. The design process was divided into three phases. The office was temporarily refurbished for the intervention study, and evaluation data was collected with qualitative methods.

Participatory design-generated data revealed typical knowledge work needs, such as the need for privacy, interaction, exposure and preferences for the atmosphere in the workspaces during different situations. The authors identified the following key points to obtain design data: design aims, affordance design and site-specific multidimensional design. An intervention study in a small organisation revealed that lack of activity-supporting spaces created undesirable overlaps for focused work, collaborative work and client communication.

The findings of this paper are explorative and limited to a small knowledge work company. The present approach identifies valuable data collection points in different design phases of workplace design processes. Sharing knowledge from practice to research and vice versa could inform research and improve workplace design.

This study makes the workplace design phases more visible. It supports finding new ways to study the connection between the user-needs and workplaces; and understanding how different design solutions impact workplace experiences, such as satisfaction. This study also brings focus to understanding the versatile needs of small organisations and their workplace design.