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Real estate professionals are recognising the positive impact they can have on their corporation’s competitiveness by providing workplace solutions that enhance individual and team performance. To develop successfully workplace solutions that meet both today’s and tomorrow’s needs of the organisation, the workplace design process must incorporate new ways of thinking about work; include team members who until recently were not involved in workplace design; and provide physical solutions that meet the definition of ‘agile’ (easily adaptable, flexible, and varied) environments. This paper discusses the evolution of work and the changes that have occurred in the workplace in an effort to meet these new workplace needs. The traditional models used for programming and planning the physical environment are no longer effective when dealing with workplaces for today’s knowledge workers. The importance of developing new processes for identifying ‘tomorrows’ workplace requirements; the team members who must be involved to develop and implement these new solutions successfully; and the types of physical environments that must be created in order to enhance workplace and worker performance are all integral in the development of the high performance workplace.

Proposes a model for structuring and integrating the multiple dimensions of the workplace. Discusses the application of the model with respect to the renewal of the Hewlett‐Packard headquarters building. Concludes with a series of points to be considered which cover the needs of the total working community.

This chapter argues for the development of a model of tutor/student interaction, applying experiential theory and using a learning community framework to improve the student learning experience and to enhance the quality of course curriculum and content. A further value is the opportunity for students, to ‘find’ potential solutions to workplace problems and, as public sector managers, to challenge and change workplace practices and attitudes.

This chapter explores the practice of using course participants’ own experiences to inform course content and increase the currency and value of teaching and initiates development of what could eventually become a real co-production process.

The chapter applies an experiential approach to education and learning, contending that this could lead to a potential co-production process. It argues that this combined approach is a useful model by which to examine current workplace issues using the professional experiences of course participants.

The chapter advances the argument put forward in ‘Another Look at Research’ (Oldfield, 2016) by placing experiential learning within the context of a co-production approach to the delivery of education and learning and delineating a distinctive pedagogical approach to mid-career education.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what organisational and management practices used in connection with open space flexible offices create business value. It seeks to identify what consequences this may have for successful real estate practices.

This paper utilises an inductive case study approach. The international telecom company Telenor has implemented open space flexible offices from top to bottom amongst their 35,000 employees. The case description and analysis is based on secondary data, user evaluations and 20 interviews with middle- and top-level managers across levels and functional departments.

The case of Telenor reveals that leadership and organizing issues are important, together with work modes and communication technology, for a productive use of work place design. The paper highlights specifically how the open, transparent, flexible office solution creates business value when used with centralised and standardised organisational management systems and a participative, informal leadership culture.

The study is based on one case, so the findings need to be tested across a representative sample of companies.

Managers need to take both organisational and management issues into consideration when implementing new office space design. This challenges also the existing real estate strategies to include the organisational and management issues in their planning.

The originality and value of the paper lies in the analysis and findings of the Telenor case introducing organizational and management perspectives to real estate issues.

The purpose of this paper is to map and describe findings from research conducted in workspaces designed to support activity-based working (ABW) over the past 10 years (2010–2020) with a view of informing post-COVID workplaces of the positive and negative attributes of ABW.

Scopus was used as the search engine for this review. Papers which reported findings related to ABW and performed field study in ABW workspaces with adult occupants were included. Out of the 442 initial papers, 40 papers were included following iterative title and abstract and full text review process and consideration of inclusion and exclusion criteria. These papers were divided into three groupings (organizational, human and physical environment) based on their major focus. Positive and negative effects of ABW environments on occupants are discussed within these three topics in consideration of the implications for the post-COVID workplace.

Although the included studies were inclined to be either more positive (i.e. interior design) or negative (i.e. indoor environmental quality, productivity, distraction and privacy) in relation to various attributes of ABW, no single effect of ABW environments on occupants was in full agreement between the studies. The shortcomings of ABW environments are more related to how this way of working is implemented and how occupants use it, rather than the concept itself. A partial uptake of ABW leads to occupants’ dissatisfaction, lower productivity and lower well-being, while a holistic approach increases the chance of success. It is hypothesised that many currently reported negative aspects of the ABW concept might diminish overtime as ABW evolves and as new challenges arise. A continuous post-occupancy evaluation after relocation to an ABW-supportive environment can inform the organization about the changing needs and preference of the occupants; hence, the organization can tailor the ABW solution to the arising needs. The inter-connection between the three key ABW pillars (organizational, human and physical environment) is crucial to the success of this concept specifically in the context of the post-COVID-19 workplace.

This paper highlights the key shortcomings and limitations of studies produced over the past decade and identifies keys gaps in the current body of literature. It provides a new insight on how findings related to open-plan offices designed to support ABW can be categorized on the three big heading of organizational, physical and human-related aspects, and further investigates the positive and negatives outcomes reported on ABW under these headings. It also discusses how the findings arising from this literature review can inform the post-COVID workplace.

This paper aims to explore how the scientific literature and company reports have addressed inclusive workplace design and strategies to date.

This paper adopts a scoping review to answer the following question: To what extent is inclusion present in workplace design and related strategies? An analysis of 27 scientific papers and 25 corporate social responsibility reports of the highest-ranked companies in the Great Place to Work global ranking disentangles the main aspects related to workplace design and strategies for promoting inclusion.

This paper opens avenues for four macro-categories of diversity (psycho-physical aspects; cultural aspects; socio-economic conditions; and ability, experience and strengths) to support the development of inclusive workplace design and strategy. Besides, multiple spatial scales emerged as material and immaterial elements of the workplace encountering inclusion and diversity.

Nowadays, the workforce is becoming more diverse. Although diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) has become key to many organizations, it remains unclear how DE&I principles are applied in workspace design and strategies. This scoping review provides a novel perspective on the topic by integrating scientific knowledge and practice-based approaches which still address this matter independently.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether researchers from different disciplines have different requirements for workplaces.

A literature review aimed to understand the academic workplace requirements of different disciplines. The empirical data were gathered by a national survey conducted in Finland. Open-ended questions accumulated answers, which were analysed and clustered.

The analysis implies that the majority of researchers in all the disciplinary categories required places that support both concentration and interaction. When comparing those researchers who asked for a place that only supports either concentration or interaction, the majority of those working in soft-pure disciplines required spaces to support concentration and those in soft-applied disciplines required spaces to support interaction. Researchers from hard disciplines – both applied and pure – consider places supporting concentration or interaction to be equally important.

The weakness of this study is the generalisability, as this survey was conducted in Finland. The analysis emphasised diversity between disciplines without analysing diversity within disciplines.

Facilities and real estate managers can gain a deeper understanding of the academics’ workplace requirements, which in turn can help them to enhance workplace support of productivity at the same time as cutting real estate costs.

This study contributes to the body of research on academic office design.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between empowering leadership and organizational commitment and its effect on job performance and creative work involvement within the expatriate society of the UAE.

The paper suggests a theoretical model derived from survey responses gathered from expatriates used in multinational organizations located in Dubai city in the UAE.

The results show that organizational commitment partially mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and job performance. Furthermore, the results show that organizational commitment partially mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and creative work involvement.

This research adds to the existing body of knowledge on international business by investigating the effects that organizational commitment and empowering leadership have on creative work involvement and job performance of expatriates.

Real estate success is frequently defined within a narrow frame: capacity, budget and time. However, setting the real estate decision within the broader context of the business ‐ leveraging the connections to do more than simply house the workforce ‐ expands the value equation. Understanding how the various components of the business interact and how the facility can help or hinder that collaboration, while remaining cognisant of one‐time and life‐cycle costs, is likely to drive more robust real estate decisions.