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This paper aims to explore the impact of workplaces, which support concentration and communication, and self-management practices on individual and team productivity. The underlying hypothesis is that the impact of these variables on the two levels of productivity (individual and team) and the two dimensions of productivity (quantity and quality) may be different.

The paper is based on survey data from 998 Finnish knowledge workers. Factor analysis was used to test the dimensions of the conceptual model. Insights into the impact of workplaces for concentration and communications and self-management practices on productivity were obtained by multiple-regression analyses.

The findings show that self-management practices have a larger impact on the quality and quantity of individual output and the quantity of team output than workplaces for communication and concentration. Improving self-management skills is key to increase all productivity dimensions and in particular the quality of the output.

This paper contributes to a better understanding of the impact of workplace characteristics and self-management practices on different levels and dimensions of productivity. It offers valuable lessons for managers, as they are able to recognize how productivity can be approached from several perspectives. Different dimensions can be enhanced using different workplace settings. For example, the quantitative output of employees can be increased by adding more space for concentration, while quantitative team productivity can be increased by providing appropriate space for collaboration. An important means to enhance a higher quality of the output is to improve self-management skills. The findings also suggest that collaboration between different disciplines – corporate management, corporate real estate management, human resource management and IT – is needed to optimize individual and team productivity.

This paper explores work environment experiences of Finnish office workers and connects both workplace appraisal and work practices to perceived productivity support, on individual level and team level. It also adds insights into the different impacts on quantity and quality.

As corporations change their way of working, the importance of corporate real estate (CRE) management has increased. Hence, there is a need to structure the existing knowledge and to identify the latest developments in CRE research. This paper aims to identify the major developments and changed paradigms in CRE research in 2005-2015.

A systematic literature review is conducted, including papers from seven journals. In three sequential scans, papers were identified for the final analysis, keeping 99 of 1,667 papers.

Based on nine identified developments, two paradigm shifts were found. The shift from cost minimisation to value delivery was identified. Besides solving current problems, value delivery aims to capture the future value and prevent future problems. The second paradigm shift is from buildings to people. Before the shift, buildings refer to value delivery as a transaction, while the shift to people highlights the aim to provide value-in-use.

This paper focusses on corporate offices, excluding retail, health care, education, publicly owned facilities, etc. This research is limited to CRE research. Therefore, the results are applicable to CRE research but do not cover the developments in practice.

For practitioners, this paper offers a possibility to develop their RE strategies by reflecting their current practices with the identified developments and paradigms in the CRE literature. This paper suggests to conduct a similar research in practice to compare the underlying paradigms.

This paper is based on a systematic literature study, and summarises developments in CRE research over the past 10 years.

It is widely recognized that interior office space can affect health in several ways. Strategic and evidence-based design, including explicit design objectives, well-chosen design solutions and evaluation of results, aid realization of desired health effects. Therefore, this paper aims to identify possibly effective interior design strategies and accompanying design solutions and to provide examples of effectiveness measures.

A literature sample of 59 peer-reviewed papers published across disciplines was used to collect examples of workplace design features that have positively influenced workers’ well-being. The papers were grouped by their health objective and design scope successively and their theoretical assumptions, measures and findings were analyzed.

Four main workplace design strategies were identified. Design for comfort aims at reducing or preventing health complaints, discomfort and stress, following a pathogenic approach. It has the longest tradition and is the most frequently addressed in the included papers. The other three take a salutogenic approach, promoting health by increasing resources for coping with demands through positive design. Design for restoration supports physical and mental recovery through connections with nature. Design for social well-being facilitates social cohesion and feelings of belonging. Design for healthy behavior aims at nudging physical activity in the workplace.

By drawing complementary perspectives and offering examples of design solutions and effectiveness measures, this paper encourages workplace designers, managers and researchers to take a transdisciplinary and evidence-based approach to healthy workplaces. It also serves as a starting point for future empirical research.

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.

Since corporate real estate management (CREM) emerged in the 1990s, it has been modelled in many ways. The Delft model views the corporate real estate management function as a coordinator of four distinct accommodation perspectives. Although the model has been used in education and practice for years, there is no consensus on its interpretation and application, and various versions circulate. This paper aims to first reconstruct the history of the conceptualisation of the Delft CREM model and then seeks to develop an understanding of its nature that provides clearer interpretations of the model.

Because the developers of the Delft CREM model did not maintain archives, the reconstruction of the model’s genesis is based on the developers’ publications from 1985 to 2015 and eight semi-structured interviews conducted with these developers in 2017 and 2018. The collected information, which was by its very nature incomplete and imperfect, was triangulated, contextualised and assembled chronologically. This served as the basis for an analysis of the model’s nature, which in turn generated a list of practical implications for its future application.

The historical reconstruction revealed two parallel but distinct lines of reasoning, whose resulting models appear similar but are distinct. One line of reasoning models CRE viewpoints, while the other models CRE management activities, i.e. the first line of reasoning models CREM across the organisation, while the second models CREM within the function. These two lines of thought have converged in the research-through-design approach of the developers, which evolved against the backdrop of a growing interest in the contribution of organisational resources to organisational objectives and the emergence of the demand-supply model in management practices in general and in the built environment in particular.

The research is limited to reconstructing the genesis and analysing the nature of the Delft CREM model. It is not intended to provide a conclusive narrative, update the model or compare it to other CREM models. As is typical in oral history, it is based on imperfect documentary evidence and imperfect recollections. The reconstruction and analysis are stepping stones towards a more precise interpretation and application of the model in both research and practice, and may eventually contribute to its evolution. When using the model, it is recommended to (1) be clear about whether the model applies to the CREM department, the entire organisation or the organisation’s environment; (2) be clear about what is being modelled (activities, viewpoints or something else); and (3) use labels that reflect the selections made in (1) and (2).

The value of this paper lies in the historical reconstruction of the intentions of the developers of the four-view scheme, including the detailed analysis of its consecutive graphical representations and the investigation of its relationship with the seminal strategic alignment model.

New ways of working challenge workplace management: increasing mobility and diminishing organizational boundaries require re-evaluation of both workplace design and service delivery. However, structures and processes of workplace management are still traditional, and managers, together with outsourced facility service providers, often do not succeed at fulfilling the needs of mobile employees. The aforementioned changes stimulate discussions in many areas in both industry and academy. Nevertheless, workplace literature from business perspective seems to be scarce. In this paper, the focus is on workplace service offering for mobile knowledge workers. This paper aims to study the current state of workplace servitization. To answer this, the authors identify value offering elements that are used in office business market to deliver workplace as a service.

This study follows multiple case study methodology including five case studies. Primary data were collected through interviews with workplace service providers. Secondary data included observations and publicly available data. The authors took business model design approach to study selected business offerings.

The results indicate that workplace business models include elements of servitization on various levels. Physical space is no longer the central offering in the office business; instead, it acts as a component on which the service portfolio is built. The highest value from workplace comes from experience-related service offerings.

Academically, research contributes to the workplace management studies by providing servitization perspective to a topic previously approached with a more technical and psychological point of view. This study can also support service providers and customer organizations in their quest to make service provision more flexible and experience-oriented.

Global megatrends such as urbanization and ageing of the population result in fast-paced demographic changes, which pose different types of challenges for different regions. While many rural municipalities bear the burden of under-used buildings, cities are in a hurry to develop new ones to meet new space demands. The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential of relocatable modular buildings to address these challenges, following the principles of circular economy, while at the same time offering usability.

This multiple case study explores existing relocatable modular health-care buildings in Finland. The case buildings host hospital support functions, imaging services, a health-care centre and a care home. The primary data comprise 21 semi-structured interviews and observation during factory and site visits.

Based on the findings, relocatable modular buildings have many benefits and provide a viable option for cities and municipalities struggling to meet their fluctuating space demands. Some challenges were also identified, mainly derived from the dimensional restrictions of the modules.

This research contributes to the emerging body of knowledge on circular economy in the built environment. More specifically, the research provides a very concrete example of circularity and details a framework for usable and relocatable modular buildings. In conclusion, relocatable modular buildings could solve the challenges posed by quickly changing demographics in different types of regions and deliver both usability and circularity.

The need to understand work processes and end-users has become an issue in corporate real estate and workplace management. Flexible work practices and technological advancement allow end-users to move outside the building boundaries. This influences workplace management to become more service-oriented and demand-driven, and better serve the needs of end-users. For that, this paper aims to investigate the ways in which new workplace services support the knowledge creation processes of mobile workers.

This study is exploratory and follows a multiple-case study strategy. Literature is reviewed on workplace and knowledge theories, and the market analysis consists of data from 57 firms that offer services to support the mobile knowledge worker.

Workplace services were categorized into three new groups that support knowledge creation processes for the mobile knowledge worker in various work environments. The analysis indicated that new services are driven by technological development and community formation around the physical or virtual place.

The proposed service groups can be examined as new business opportunities by workplace service providers, and the results suggest that the CRE managers should re-think their service portfolios, boost their collaboration with the service providers and invest in building a community.

This paper categorizes workplace services from a mobile knowledge worker perspective and follows a service-oriented approach to workplace management.

Adaptability is an inherent quality in building circularity, as adaptability can physically facilitate the reversibility of materials in a closed-reversible chain, also called “loops”. Nevertheless, positioning adaptability in circularity-oriented models could overlook some of the contextual considerations that contribute to the utility for the built environment. This paper reconceptualises building adaptability to incorporate circularity, in order to facilitate for the resource loops whilst preserving the long-lasting functionality in buildings.

An integrative literature review on adaptability and circularity of buildings was conducted using systematic search approach. From the initial database of 4631 publications, 104 publications were included for the final analysis. A comparative analysis of definitions and determinants of both concepts was conducted to reconceptualise circular building adaptability.

The findings of the literature study show that incorporating circularity and adaptability is possible through 10 design and operation determinants, namely configuration flexibility, product dismantlability, asset multi-usability, design regularity, functional convertibility, material reversibility, building maintainability, resource recovery, volume scalability, and asset refit-ability. The study concludes that considering the defined determinants in a holistic manner could simultaneously facilitate: building resilience to contextual changes, creation of asset value, and elimination of waste generation.

This paper expands the relevant bodies of literature by providing a novel way of perceiving building adaptability, incorporating circularity. The practical value of this paper lies in the discussion of potential strategies that can be proactively or reactively employed to operationalise circular building adaptability.

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.