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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.

The workplace concept represents the convergence of three disciplines: Facilities management, information technology and human resources. Concepts such as knowledge work and human capital drive the shift in professional focus from ‘place’ to ‘workplace’. The responsibilities of facility managers extend beyond operating issues to the more fundamental goals of providing highperforming and sustainable workplaces. Accordingly, the performance measurement paradigm must also be shifted from measuring facilities to measuring workplaces, using models and measures that recognise the importance and interdependence of facilities, information technology and human resources. This paper discusses initial efforts to measure innovative workplaces, provides an example of an organisation committed to providing its customers with innovative workplaces, and concludes that the measurement of innovative workplaces itself requires innovative and ‘out of the box’ techniques. New measurement paradigms are critical, however, not for ‘proving’ the case for the implementation of these innovative workspace solutions, but for evaluating and comparing evolving workplace approaches already under way.

This study aims to identify research gaps on workplace relocation, through investigating and critiquing the published literature, in the facilities management (FM) and real estate management (REM) domains, over three decades.

An extensive literature review was conducted, using academic search engines, using qualitative analysis software, in the domains of FM and REM, on workplace relocation, from 1990 to 2020, chronologically. The paper proposes future research directions through a maturity matrix.

Several gaps in workplace relocation research were identified, including the need for a wide-ranging coverage of workplace relocation lifecycle, a review and assessment of factors affecting workplace relocation over its lifecycle, studies on large organizations mobility, studies of international experiences on workplace relocation, absence of a holistic framework for the workplace relocation process and digital tools and solutions to facilitate the processes. A three levels maturity matrix for future research, proposing the adoption of qualitative, quantitative and applications research approaches, was presented.

This study enlists a chronological comprehension of knowledge obtained from the review of the internationally published literature. The research investigated and identified gaps, gripping for future research efforts.

This study reviews 30 years of published literature on workplace relocation and proposes topics for advancing future research, collectively.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that influence effective workplace designs for knowledge workers.

During spring 2016, the employees in a large institution for research and higher education, a large consultancy company and a medium-sized consultancy company (in total 4367 employees) in Norway received invitations to participate in an anonymous online survey about workplaces and facilities. In all, 1,670 employees answered the survey (38.2 per cent response rate). The data have been analyzed with IBM SPSS version 23, among others through use of exploratory factor analysis and two-way ANOVA.

Most respondents at the institution for research and higher education have cell offices. Most respondents in the two consultancy companies have open and flexible offices. This paper indicate the respondents’ preferences or perception of their workstation and the workplace’s fit for their tasks is affected both by the respondents’ type of office and how much time they spend at their workstation during the week. There are also possible age or generation effects.

One methodical weakness in the present paper is that two-way ANOVA has been applied on survey data. Experiments are usually arranged to provide almost equal numbers of observations in each category. This is usually not possible with survey data. However, despite this weakness, the present paper provides several findings that challenge some of the workplace research’s taken for givens.

The present paper indicates that facility managers and others responsible for office and workplace design are advised to take the employees’ tasks and work patterns into consideration when designing workplaces and providing offices and workstations to their end-users. The present paper also indicates that employees require different kinds of support facilities and services depending on what kind of offices and workplaces they have.

This is a large N empirical study among knowledge workers in three organizations, one public administration and two private enterprises. The present paper indicate that provision of offices and workstations with supporting facilities should be differentiated according to the end-users’ work tasks and work patterns.

The aim of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the provision of sustainable and flexible office workplace in built‐facilities, and further, classify these factors under several categories, where commonalities are shared.

The author has analyzed the published literature for the purpose of reviewing the origin of office workplace design and the reasons that promoted the development of flexible workplace in office‐based environments. A sum of 18 factors for facilitating the provision of the flexible workplace were identified. These factors were classified under four categories, including planning of the building, layout of the physical workplace, information technology networking, and building service systems.

The survey of literature has revealed that there is no comprehensive overview of factors that designers, developers, investors, facility managers, and planners can use to provide sustainable and flexible workplace facilities, where flexibility relates to the concept of the physical layout and functional opportunities of the workspace. Based on a study of the literature, 18 factors for facilitating the provision of the flexible workplace have been identified.

Designing a sustainable office work environment is as challenging a task today as ever. New ways of working have arisen and new technologies are being introduced into office work activities. This paper presents advice to designers, planners and real estate developers to consider the concept of designing flexible workplaces to meet the emergence of new technologies and the increase in business competition.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between satisfaction with buildings, facilities and services and perceived productivity support and to test whether the findings from a similar study of Batenburg and Van der Voordt (2008) are confirmed in a repeat study after 10 years with more recent data.

Data were traced from a database with data on user satisfaction and perceived productivity support. These data were collected through the work environment diagnostic tool WODI light. The data include responses from 25,947 respondents and 191 organisations that have been analysed by stepwise multiple-regression analyses.

In total 38% of the variation of office employees’ satisfaction with support of productivity can be explained by employee satisfaction with facilities, the organisation, current work processes and personal- and job-related characteristics. The most important predictor of self-assessed support of productivity is employee satisfaction with facilities. In particular, psychological aspects, i.e. opportunities to concentrate and to communicate, privacy, level of openness, and functionality, comfort and diversity of the workplaces are very important. The findings confirm that employee satisfaction with facilities correlates significantly with perceived productivity support. Other factors that are not included in the data set, such as intrinsic motivation, labour circumstances and human resource management may have an impact as well.

This research provides a clear insight in the relation between employee satisfaction with facilities and the perceived support of productivity, based on survey data collected over almost 10 years in 191 organisations.

This study aims to examine the key components to facilitate flexible work arrangement (FWA) and the issues and challenges arisen in preparing the workplace for FWA during Covid-19, and to recommend better approach of FWA implementation in workplace.

This study adopted extensive literature review and case studies approach using interviews and observations to determine the key components to facilitate FWA and the issues and challenges arisen in preparing the workplace for FWA during Covid-19, and to recommend better approach of FWA implementation in workplace. Three offices that owning FWA experience during Covid-19 and featuring flexible workspace concepts, elements and layouts in Klang Valley, Malaysia were chosen as case studies.

Findings have suggested that there are four components required to form flexible workspace for FWA adoption, such as open plan workspace design, task-oriented space, hot desking policy and IT infrastructure. Interestingly, the interview findings do not support the idea that the flexible furniture can facilitate FWA; instead, they believe that versatile, acoustical and aesthetical furniture may be installed when necessary. Among the issues and challenges faced were rearranging and designing open office plan layout, hot desk relocation and reconfiguration of spaces where people may congregate. Lastly, this research recommends that innovative planning software and tools, smart technology and apps, modern IT technology and infrastructure, and digital apps can be introduced to the workplace to help FM manage and monitor the facilities operations, workplace situations and occupancy rates.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, FWA such as “Work From Home” and remote working have become the mainstream in the workplace, affecting how the workplace looks and feels as flexible working is fundamentally related to the flexible workspace. From Facilities Management (FM) perspective, FWA is the biggest consequence of Covid-19, but it also presents opportunities and certain challenges to incorporate a new office environment and employees’ needs in terms of FWA into the corporate culture.

Corporate real estate (CRE) is a costly and risky asset in need of more rigorous evaluation methods to support strategic decision making for portfolio and asset management. Especially the indirect added value on organizational revenues is hard to quantify, while it is gaining importance. The purpose of this paper is to describe a quantitative technique that predicts office use as input for CRE management (CREM) decisions.

After a literature study to identify relevant aspects influencing office use in modern work environments, a Bayesian belief network (BN) is constructed from a large database of 80,907 observations of office use in three organizations in Belgium and the Netherlands. Next specific evidence from future scenarios of organizational change is entered to discuss the application of BN for CRE decision-making processes.

This study showed that the use of activity-based offices might be influenced by a complex network of office design variables and user characteristics. The use of the predicting possibilities of a BN model can help CRE managers identify employee behaviour inside their offices. That information is valuable input for future workplace decisions and strategic CREM activities.

This study provides CRE managers with a model to gain knowledge on office use to get a better grip on how to add value with activity-based office concepts. The results obtained through using such a model can help support decision making on their office layouts.

Bayesian BNs have not been used in this area of research before. This paper provides both academics and practitioners with valuable insights in the possibilities of this methodology for the field.

This paper aims to illustrate the extensive benefits of qualitative data analysis as a rarely undertaken process in post-occupancy evaluation surveys. As a result, there is limited evidence of what occupants say about their buildings, especially for operational parameters, as opposed to how they rate them. While quantitative analyses provide useful information on how workers feel about workplace operational factors, qualitative analyses provide richer information on what aspects of the workplace workers identify as influential to their comfort, well-being and productivity.

The authors analysed 6,938 comments from office buildings worldwide on workers’ perception of workplace operational factors: design, storage, needs, space at desks and storage in their work environments. These factors were analysed based on the buildings’ design intent and use, and the associated comments were coded into positive, negative and balanced comments. The authors used a combination of coding, descriptive analysis, content analysis and word cloud to dissect the comments.

The findings showed that whereas workers rated these operational factors favourably, there were significantly more negative comments about each factor. Also, the Chi-square test showed a significant association (p < 0.01) between the satisfaction scale and the type of comments received for all the operational factors. This means that when a factor is rated high in the satisfaction score (5–7), there were fewer negative and more positive comments and vice versa. The word cloud analysis highlighted vital aspects of the office environment the workers mostly commented on, such as open plan design, natural lighting, space and windows, toilets, facilities, kitchens, meeting room booking systems, storage and furniture.

This study highlights the importance of dissecting building occupants’ comments as integral to building performance monitoring and measurement. These emphasise the richness and value of respondents’ comments and the importance of critically analysing them. A limitation is that only 6,938 comments were viable for analysis because most comments were either incomplete with no meaning or were not provided. This underlines the importance of encouraging respondents to comment and express their feelings in questionnaire surveys. Also, the building use studies questionnaire data set presents extensive opportunities for further analyses of interrelationships between demographics, building characteristics and environmental and operational factors.

The findings from this study can be applied to future projects and facility management to maintain and improve office buildings throughout their life cycle. Also, these findings are essential in predicting the requirements of future workplaces for robust workplace designs and management.

The authors identified specific comments on the performance of workplaces across the globe, showing similarities and differences between sustainable, conventional, commercial and institutional buildings. Specifically, the analysis showed that office workers’ comments do not always corroborate the ratings they give their buildings. There was a significantly higher percentage of negative comments than positive comments despite the high satisfaction scores of the operational factors.

This paper aims to demonstrate that it is important to have a methodological process that is reflexive and flexible to achieve fluid interactions that add rigour and energy to the overall process of a built environment project.

This paper outlines the Prospective through Scenarios futures process used in a study called the “Workplace of the Future”. It also discusses how and why the methodology evolves over the course of the project with participant feedback as the main source of information for the analysis.

Change is the one factor in the Prospective through Scenarios methodological development that ensures the participants to think deeply and laterally in a futures process, from which a value‐driven process is achieved.

Novel futures techniques have been applied to a discipline that is usually reactive and quantitative – workplace provision and facilities management.