The psychology behind office design(1)

When you choose a job, you choose a way of life. Work has a significant impact on our lives, while at the same time the quality of our working environment profoundly affects our health and well-being.

In recent years, especially in open plan office environments, there has been an increasing focus on the impact of workplace design on employee productivity and satisfaction. The impact of the workplace has both physical aspects and our psychological response to these spaces. Understanding the connection between the built environment and how our brains process the information we gather from the world around us is an important aspect of designing a successful workplace, and understanding how to optimise the spatial and social characteristics of the work environment to improve well-being and productivity is key to this.

Today, workplace design has entered a new paradigm in which 'agile' and 'flexible' have become commonplace terms. While these more mobile ways of working have emerged, especially with the rapid development of technology. Employees can work in different areas of a building, in different types of space, or even choose to work in different locations in a region or city. Such flexible working strategies have also become an important advantage for companies to attract talent and compete for new talent.

These emerging ways of working also reflect another trend, from a real estate perspective, to improve office utilisation in order to maximise the use of floor space.

Flexible working is driven by the rise of knowledge-based jobs. They have a diversity of work tasks and activities, switching between multiple tasks and work activities during a typical working day. A study by the British Council of office identifies the changing nature of work routines and the instability of office structures as one of the most influential trends in current office design.

Another variant of flexible working is Activity Based Working ABW, which aims to provide a variety of working environments within an office to support different work tasks. Users can then choose the space that best suits the task they are performing, or the type of space they prefer to work in. Although flexible or agile workplaces are often designed to be as minimal and standardised as possible to accommodate fluctuations and changes in staff numbers. The aim is to provide employees with greater control and comfort in a flexible and agile workplace, and to promote collaboration and productivity. In addition, the customised workplace solutions offered under the ABW workplace approach have influenced the way people perceive their environment.

With the establishment of the ABW workplace, we now need to ask ourselves, "Do we know enough about the different factors that contribute to successful workplace design to better implement the ABW office design?" Also, do we know enough about the extent to which personal preferences or personality can influence workplace success?"