The Privacy Communication Trade-off in Open Plan Offices

The essay “Workspace satisfaction: The privacy communication trade-off in open-plan workplaces” makes a solid case for the perspective that working people have of open plan offices and the communication hurdles that such a work environment creates. In summary, the article can be divided into several categories, including but not limited to:

Open-plan offices are widely considered to provide greater communication chances among employees, with interaction being crucial; nevertheless, the idea, although advantageous, has also been shown to be disruptive. Uncontrollable noises and loss of privacy rank among the highest form of complaints in the Centre for Built Environment (CBE) database. The spatial configuration of workplaces is a huge contributor towards a person’s assessment of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) issues hence, the need for studying the trade-off between the two acts as a guide in understanding (IEQ) and factors that affect it be it spatial configuration or communication barriers. Also, the study offers further empirical knowledge on the matter to facilitate future understanding of the issue.

Relevance to Environmental Psychology

The concept of environmental psychology is a multifaceted discipline whose primary focus is gaining an understanding of the interaction between individuals and their surroundings. Workspaces are part of built environment and are characterized by social settings, information flow, and learning attributes as well all of which are a broader context of a person’s surrounding. The study, therefore, is fundamental towards meeting the primary target of environmental psychology and gaining a foothold on workspace and employee interaction.

Research Methods

The article realizes the difficulty in measuring occupant rating in work environment, and also notices the lack of research on previous studies on the influence of office environment towards occupants. The use of CBE’s database is evident across the study; empirical analysis of the paper itself is based on Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) database from the (CBE). The article used occupant survey questionnaire from CBE which is a widely recognized POE tool. CBE’s Occupant satisfaction ratings are based on various IEQ aspects such as office layout, office, furnishing, air quality, lighting, cleanness, and maintenance. Additionally, CBE offers a useful POE tool for all buildings be it hospitals, schools, commercial, residential or industrial thus making the decision for using questionnaires from the database as a POE tool justified.

The analysis of the study is based on office building subset with a total of 42, 764 samples collected in 303 office buildings. Furthermore, the study looked at other demographic factors such as gender, age, and occupation ranging from administrative support, technical, professional, and managerial. Office space is a key focus of the study, and the questionnaire classifies the office layouts into five categories all of which depend on the level of enclosure:

Enclosed private office

Cubicles with high partitions

Open office with no partitions or limited partitions

Cubicles with low partitions

Enclosed shared office

Responses from the questionnaire are as follows; 66.9% of individual responses are from open-plan office layout including cubicles with high partitions, cubicles with low, partition and open office with no partitions or limited partitions. Among the different partitions of open-plan offices, the high-partitioned cubicle is the single most attractive office within the CBE database comprising 37.7% of total occupants. 26.6% of the survey respondents occupied private offices while 6.6% shared single-room offices with co-workers (Kim & de Dear, 2013).

Data Analysis

The study used the percentage of dissatisfied occupants since it can be readily interpreted as an expression of the potential complaints. The results when coupled together with mean satisfaction score is used to quantitatively assess whether occupants in different office designs respond differently to the various IEQ addressed in the CBE questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis is done with overall workspace satisfaction as a dependent variable while the other factors identified in the IEQ are independent variables. This is to explore the importance of various IEQ concerning employees overall assessment on their workspace. Finally, multiple regression analysis is done with dummy variables to estimate the differential impact of attribute performance on overall satisfaction in two ways, that is, when the attribute is perceived as satisfactory or not.

Results of Study

The results of the survey are tabled in three different modes. The first approach is satisfaction with various aspect IEQ where it depicts the mean satisfaction scores for the IEQ questionnaires rated on a seven point scale within the bounds of very dissatisfied (-3) to very satisfied (+3) by occupants from five different office designs (Kim & de Dear, 2013). The second aspect shows the inherent relative importance of different IEQ factors whereby different spatial configurations changes the relative importance of IEQ factors. Finally, the results were also presented based on the estimation of positive and negative impacts of IEQ factors.

Findings Application

One of the many results of the study is the estimation of positive and negative effects of IEQ factors. It is clear that IEQ factors range from place to place with each occupation having different aspects that distinguish them from each other. Occupants in an open plan office layout are found to sometimes favor the cons over the pros, a good example includes when office workers know that even though other office design improves interaction with co-workers but degrades acoustical quality, sound, and visual privacy their satisfaction level decreases. In a real working situation this might be helpful in developing office plans that create an atmosphere of interaction but at the same time increasing visual privacy and acoustical quality. Construction of open plans that bar face to face contact as well as partitioning that reduces sound is a good way to manage occupants’ satisfaction. Acoustical quality, sound and visual capacity within offices do not necessarily imply negative influence. These factors create an opportunity for teamwork and collaboration of workers. Employees need to embrace each other in a better light and to enhance these factors might create an essence or culture of team building, participation, collaboration, team work among other valued aspects of work. Individual performance does not only determine success but a culture of unity and togetherness to meet the institution’s objectives.

Another universal satisfactory finding from the study is the fact that of all the five office plan layouts, enclosed private offices were the most positively rated. However, when compared to the high level of occupant satisfaction of enclosed private offices on visual privacy, acoustical privacy achieved a relatively low response in the same offices. Hence, suggesting that most occupants depict private office plans as providing below expectations acoustical isolation. To rectify this, building constructors could apply the use of more quality materials in the construction buildings such as thicker glasses, use of carpets and also soundproof partitions, especially in office plans. Additionally, these findings might also be used by unions and other occupants governing bodies to call for better working conditions in the working environment. Passage of laws that require such conditions to be followed to could also be drafted for future purposes and continuous transitioning practices within the work industry.

Critique

The study was intuitive in bringing to light some of the factors that induce success in an organization but at an individual level through workspace satisfaction. However, even though the study was strict to use IEQ factors from the CBE, it is imperative to state that there are still other factors which have been left out. Workspaces are usually varied, and the factors that influence satisfaction are diverse as well. It is impossible to justify the study in full with such a limited number of factors. Additionally, the IEQ factors also limit the scope and findings of the study. They give definitive answers to the problem but do not capture the whole issue of work satisfaction in full. However, the study still offers a lot of empirical facts which will aid in gaining a further understanding on the matter in future research.

Future research should focus more on the dependent variables and how the IEQ factors provided affect the outcome of most occupants. Although the aim is to measure the satisfactory rate of occupants, a cross-study on how the same IEQ factors affect other results of the occupants such as performance, work objectivity, and goals among other things might help in gaining further insight on the matter. The author should have also used different research-based methods to study satisfaction rate of occupants regarding office space. This would have explored the rationale of the survey from various perspectives. Observational research, focus groups, and true experiments are just some of the similar methodologies that could have been used to counter the validity of each other regarding the author’s hypothesis.

Conclusion

The article on workspace satisfaction is insightful enough to offer further understanding on the concept of occupants’ satisfaction regarding workspace but leave a lot to be desired. The IEQ tool used does not validate or conclude the hypothesis at hand. IEQ factors used are also not broad enough to capture the full scenario of occupants in a work office. However, the design of the experiment and rationale behind it is intuitive at most; more questions are left unanswered on how individuals relate to their workspace.

References

Kim, J. & de Dear, R. (2013). Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices. Journal Of Environmental Psychology, 36, 18-26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.06.007