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In today’s rapidly evolving work landscape, the design of office spaces is a crucial concern for organizations. Companies are redefining offices as collaboration hubs to entice employees back to in-person work. However, the understanding of how employees choose their workspaces, especially for collaborative activities, and how this should inform office design is lacking. Workers’ collaborative activity patterns can help better understand workspace choice behavior (WCB). In two studies, this paper aims to explore which characteristics of collaborative activities to consider when reshaping offices.

Data collected in a cross-sectional study design at a research institution (n = 285) and a university (n = 352) were used for confirmatory factor analyses and regression analysis.

The first study shows that collaborative activities can be classified into three distinct types: coordinative activities (planned and formal), deep collaboration (planned and complex) and spontaneous communication (informal and short encounters). The second study revalidates this classification and reveals patterns impacting WCB. Frequency and location preference of spontaneous communication and work environment satisfaction are strong predictors of on-site work. Personal characteristics like gender, age, managerial position or commute time are less consequential than assumed.

The results pinpoint guidelines for office designers and leaders in shaping effective workspaces and policies.

This paper provides new insights into classifying collaborative activities and personal characteristics, activity characteristics and environmental factors influencing WCB.

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.

The purpose of this case study is to investigate how the personnel in an organization experienced the process of change when moving from private offices to an activity-based office (ABO) and how their perceptions of change were associated with changes in their satisfaction with the work environment a year after relocation.

A comparative pre-post study design and mixed methods were used. Survey data was obtained from 154 employees before the relocation and 146 after the relocation. The data on the 105 employees who responded to both surveys were statistically analyzed. Representatives of different units were interviewed (n = 17) and documentary material was analyzed as complementary material.

The personnel’s criticisms concerned the reasons for the change, their opportunities to influence the office design and the extent to which their views were taken into account. Environmental satisfaction decreased after moving to the ABO. The personnel’s ratings of the workplace change process before the relocation were associated with the later change in environmental satisfaction. Based on logistic regression, the degree of agreement with management’s reasons for the change was the strongest predictor of the change in environmental satisfaction.

Organizations that move from private offices to an ABO should invest in high-quality change management and simultaneously develop both work and facilities. Special attention should be paid to clarifying the rationale for the change to the employees and to providing them with opportunities to influence during the change. Organizations should continue to monitor user experiences and evaluate the effects of the change after the office redesign and should take corrective action as needed.

This empirical case study is unique as it combined qualitative and quantitative methods and investigated the process of relocation and its outcomes in a one-year follow-up. This approach captured the importance of managing change and assessing the long-term effects of office redesign when moving from private offices to an ABO.

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.

Process redesign refers to the intentional change of business processes. While process redesign methods provide structure to redesign projects, they provide limited support during the actual creation of to-be processes. More specifically, existing approaches hardly develop an ontological perspective on what can be changed from a process design point of view, and they provide limited procedural guidance on how to derive possible process design alternatives. This paper aims to provide structured guidance during the to-be process creation.

Using design space exploration as a theoretical lens, the authors develop a conceptual model of the design space for business processes, which facilitates the systematic exploration of design alternatives along different dimensions. The authors utilized an established method for taxonomy development for constructing the conceptual model. First, the authors derived design dimensions for business processes and underlying characteristics through a literature review. Second, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with professional process experts. Third, the authors evaluated their artifact through three real-world applications.

The authors identified 19 business process design dimensions that are grouped into different layers and specified by underlying characteristics. Guiding questions and illustrative real-world examples help to deploy these design dimensions in practice. Taken together, the design dimensions form the “Business Process Design Space” (BPD-Space).

Practitioners can use the BPD-Space to explore, question and rethink business processes in various respects.

The BPD-Space complements existing approaches by explicating process design dimensions. It abstracts from specific process flows and representations of processes and supports an unconstrained exploration of various alternative process designs.

Our study centered on activity-based workspaces (ABWs), unassigned open-plan configurations where users’ activities determine the workplace. These workspaces are conceived and shaped by accommodation professionals (APs) like managers and architects and are loaded with their ideas, ideals, norms and values; therefore, they are normative and hegemonic. Previous research has largely failed to consider how APs’ spatial conceptions materialize in the workplace. To address this omission, we adopted a narrative approach to study APs’ impact during the conceptualization stage.

The data were collected via a 10-year at-home ethnographic study at a Dutch university, including observations, interviews, documents and reports. Studying the researchers’ organization allowed for a longitudinal research approach and participative observations. The data focused on the narrative techniques of APs when establishing an ABW.

In introducing ABWs, APs resorted to two principal narrative strategies. Firstly, the ABW concept was lauded as a solution to a host of existing problems. Yet, in the face of shortcomings, lecturers were often blamed.

Despite the considerable influence of APs on both the physical layout of workspaces and the nature of academic labor, there is little insight into their conceptions of the academic workspace. Our research contributes a novel perspective by revealing how APs’ workspace conceptions drive the narratives that underpin the roll-out of ABWs and how they construct narratives of success and failure.

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.”

The purpose of the paper is to present a service design (SD)-based methodology developed to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) undertake organisational change.

This research used the design science research methodology, which enabled the creation of the Service Design for Organisational Change (SD4OCh) methodology. A real case study of a small service company specialised in neuropsychological disorders was used for the definition and validation of SD4OCh.

The main outcome of this study is the SD4OCh methodology, which is based on three key stages: diagnosis (knowing where to begin by detecting the organisation's strengths and weaknesses), innovation (improving the structure/processes and designing/redesigning services by employing a customer-centric approach), and implementation (enabling the definition of the route towards organisational change). There is also a transversal evaluation stage, which quantifies the organisational changes.

This study adds valuable knowledge to the service science research field and contributes to the awareness of the usefulness of SD theory within companies, especially those which are small and medium-sized, since those companies lack the tools and methods required to tackle organisational change, signifying that the challenges the companies confront are different to those of larger companies.

Although this is a SD-based research, the SD4OCh methodology was developed in order to enable companies to make holistic changes, namely, to innovate their services, structure, and processes, thus supporting and guiding organisational change.

The study refers to a health-care organization engaged in adopting “home health care” as a new object of activity. This study aims to explore how the reconfiguration of the object influences the transformative perspective, affecting not just a service but a broader approach and meaning behind patient care. It also investigates the main contradictions at play and the levers to support inter-organizational learning while facing the new challenges and change processes.

The work is based on a qualitative and ethnographic methodology directed to examine cultural, practical and socio-material aspects. The activity theory is assumed as a powerful approach to understand collective learning and distributed agency processes.

The renewal of the new object of work is analyzed as a trigger for shifts in representations, cultural processes and collective support implemented by the organization. Three agentic trajectories – technical, dialogical and collaborative agency – were cultivated by the management to deliver home health care through joint exercises of coordination and control, dialogical spaces and collaborative process.

The data collection was disrupted by the pandemic. A follow-up study would be beneficial to inquire how the learning processes shifted or were influenced by the contextual changes.

This contribution provides a practical framework for health-care organizations aiming to navigate and explore the physiological tensions and contradictions emerging when the object of work is changed.

The paper develops the field of intra- and inter-organizational learning by presenting an intertwined and structural connection between these processes and the renewing of the object of work. It advises that processes of transformation must be handled with attention to the critical and collective dynamics that accompany sustainable and situated changes.

The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the state of extant academic research on workplace innovation (WI) by proposing a comprehensive conceptual framework and outlining research traditions on the phenomenon.

This paper systematically reviewed the literature published over the past 20 years, basing on a predefined research protocol. The dimensions of WI were explored with the help of thematic synthesis, while the research perspectives were studied by means of textual narrative synthesis.

The analysis suggests that there exist four research traditions on WI – built container, humanized landscape, socio-material macro-actor, and polyadic network – and each of them comprises its own set of assumptions, foci of study, and ontological bases. The findings suggest that WI is a heterogeneous process of renovation occurring in eight different dimensions, namely work system, workplace democracy, high-tech application, workplace boundaries, workspaces, people practices, workplace experience, and workplace culture. The analysis showed that over years the meaning of innovation within these dimensions changed, therefore it is argued that research should account for the variability of these categories.

The paper includes implications for developing and implementing WI programs. Moreover, it discusses the role of HR in the WI process.

This paper for the first time systematically reviews literature on the topic of WI, clarifies the concept and discusses directions and implications for the future research.