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Corporate Real Estate Executive, October, p. 35, 37, 2000-10-01
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Cost-effective Open-Plan Environments (COPE)
Researching the link between office design, indoor environment, and occupant satisfaction
Guy Newsham
Institute for Research in Construction, National Research Council Canada
(A version of this paper was published in "Corporate Real Estate Executive", 35, October 2000)
The Changing Office Landscape
Dramatic changes in office design and furnishings are occurring all over North America. Enclosed offices are being rejected in favour of the open-plan, and those open-plan workstations are getting smaller and the partitions are getting lower. The reasons for this trend are compelling:
• Open-plan offices are more flexible in the face of rapid organisational change and churn rates in modern business of over 100 %
• Smaller workstations mean less real estate required to house the same sized workforce; i.e., direct cost savings
• Lower partitions can increase the communication between team members, potentially lowering project completion times
These changes have captured the attention of the mainstream media, and have formed the subject of many a Dilbert comic strip. This attention is well-founded, more of us work in these environments than in any other – millions of us spend up to half our waking moments in open-plan offices, it is important that we get them right.
Résumé
Des modifications importantes dans la conception et l’ameublement des bureaux ont lieu dans toute l’Amérique du Nord. Le concept du bureau fermé est abandonné au profit de celui du bureau à aire ouverte, ce dernier étant plus plus petit, pourvu de cloisons plus basses. Les arguments en faveur de cette tendance ne sont guère discutables :
• Les bureaux à aires ouvertes sont plus adaptés aux changements rapides et aux flux de plus de 100 % qui ont lieu dans les entreprises modernes.
• Des postes de travail plus petits signifient moins d’espace occupé pour une même position et donc, des économies directes.
• Des cloisons plus basses peuvent faciliter la communication entre les membres d’une équipe et éventuellement, faire gagner du temps pour un projet.
Ces changements ont attiré l’attention des médias grand public et ont été à l’origine de plusieurs bandes dessinées ayant Dilbert pour héros. Il s’agit là d’une préoccupation bien fondée car bon nombre d’entre nous passent plus de temps dans leur environnement de travail qu’ailleurs - des millions de gens passent plus de la moitié de leur « temps d’éveil » dans des bureaux à aires ouvertes, il est donc important que ces derniers soient bien pensés.
We at the Institute for Research in Construction of the National Research Council Canada (IRC/NRC) began to think about the effect on the indoor environment (acoustics, air quality, lighting, temperature) of these officing trends. It was a question we’d heard raised by individual facilities managers, but not one we’d seen discussed in the trade
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journals and magazines. The issue is certainly a complex one, consider those shrinking partitions: there are certainly fewer barriers to communication, but there are also fewer barriers to unwanted sources of noise too. Lower partitions let in more daylight from distant windows and encourage fresh air circulation, but they also reduce visual privacy and increase the potential for visual distractions.
Partition height is certainly not the only design feature that presents such trade-offs when the indoor environment is factored into the equation. Increased occupant density might save money, but it also means an increased density of air pollutants from the occupants, their furniture and their equipment. In an existing facility the HVAC system will probably be able to increase the airflow to vent these pollutants, but this might cause local draughts close to diffusers. Diffuser relocation or replacement might solve the problem, but at what cost?
We got together with our research partners, drawn from the Canadian and US public- and private- sectors, to design the COPE study to address this complexity of trade-offs. Our goal is to provide tools that will enable the designer/facilities manager to compare open-plan office design alternatives on the basis of quantitative indicators: cost, indoor
environment parameters, and occupant environmental satisfaction.
The case for quanitifying occupant environmental satisfaction is undeniable given the widespread belief that a more satisfied worker is a more productive worker. For
example, a University of Illinois study found that workplace characteristics explained 34 % of the variance in on-site absenteeism, 31 % of the variance in work satisfaction, and 24 % of the variance in employee turnover; another study from the University of New South Wales produced similar findings. In this context, and considering the fact that salaries and employee training comprise around 90 % of business operating costs, it is clear that truly cost-effective office space design should not compromise employee satisfaction. While it might be desirable to reduce the cost of facilities, one must be careful not to be penny wise and pound foolish. The good news is that according to a recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, investments in improving the indoor environment payoff 20 to 50 fold.
Environmental satisfaction is clearly only one element of total workplace satisfaction, but it is an important element; its quantification in this study is a necessary first step in understanding its importance, and in understanding its role in employee performance and other measures of organisational productivity.
The Built Environment Jigsaw Puzzle
There are a number of fundamental challenges in developing quantitative tools to perform the kind of trade-offs described above:
1. We don’t have an extensive and integrated knowledge of how office space design affects the office indoor environment.
2. We don’t have an accepted predictive model of how the office landscape and indoor environment affect occupant satisfaction.
However, it would be untrue to say that we know nothing. There is a large body of work on which COPE must build if we are to maximise its effectiveness. The problem we face is akin to the challenge of completing a large and complex jigsaw puzzle, in which only a few of the pieces are already in place. To make matters worse, our jigsaw has a number of unique complications. The pieces (existing reported work) are not found exclusively in one box but in many, boxes labelled: engineering, acoustics, psychology, IAQ, architecture, lighting, and health. Within each of these boxes we find that the pieces are jumbled, some of the pieces are in the wrong box, some of them are just plain wrong, and some are missing entirely. The COPE project, with its multidisciplinary approach, will open up all the boxes. COPE will sift through the pieces to find the good ones and put them in order – the literature reviews and meta-analyses tasks of the project. Further, COPE will manufacture some of the missing pieces and place them in the puzzle – the original research in the laboratory and field.
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The project will proceed through a series of logical steps as outlined below:
1. Derive quantitative scales for each indoor environment aspect. A good place to start would be commonly used design codes and standards. For example, criteria for lighting might include desktop illuminance, glare on the VDT screen, and wall brightness.
2. Define office design parameters expected to affect the physical environment. Some parameters (e.g. wall reflectance) might only affect one aspect of the physical environment (in this case, lighting), whereas others (e.g. partition height) can be expected to affect all aspects.
3. Quantify the indoor environment consequences of changing the office design
parameters; i.e. generate functions of, for example, speech intelligibility vs. partition height, or desktop illuminance vs. workstation size.
4. Evaluate the effect of changing the office design on occupant environmental satisfaction. Both the effects of the indoor environment and psychological factors such as privacy and crowding will be considered. In addition, other outcomes of relevance, e.g., self-reported productivity and health effects, will be noted, where available.
5. Develop appropriate economic models to account for the full costs of the various design options.
The work will be conducted through literature review, simulation, experiments in mock-up office spaces, and field studies in real office buildings undergoing change.
The COPE Evaluation Tool
One important project deliverable will be software to compare conceptual open-plan office designs on cost, indoor environment effects, and occupant environmental satisfaction. A prototype screenshot, showing how we think the tool might look, is shown below (all data are hypothetical and for discussion purposes only). Inputs to the
An experiment NRC/IRC’s Indoor Environment Research Facility. Pre-recorded speech sounds are generated by the
loudspeaker (marked with a yellow arrow) in combination with various background noises (e.g. ventilation noise). Workers in adjacent workstations perform office tasks and rate the acceptability of the acoustic environment.
tool will include various building characteristics, geographical location, local costs, and personnel costs. The top half of the screen shows a schematic diagram of the two options being considered, and their characteristics. The bottom half of the screen compares the performance of the two options. At the bottom-left is a bar chart comparing all relevant costs including space rental, furniture, energy, maintenance, and the cost of remedial measures for improving the indoor environment. At the bottom-right is a comparison of predicted indoor environment parameters and predicted environmental satisfaction. At bottom-centre is a summary comparison of costs and satisfaction.
While not predicting productivity effects, the tool will use productivity indicators to help guide the decision-maker. In the example shown, we see that the proposed design, while saving money, is predicted to have substantially lower environmental satisfaction. The tool is indicating that, based on the salaries of employees, productivity would only have to drop by 1% to wipe out the cost savings. Based on this information the
designer/specifier might choose to use a fraction of the initial expected savings to
upgrade the indoor environment, with the goal of providing a new space which is at least as satisfactory as the old space, while still saving some money.
A similar tool for acoustical design only will also be developed.
Solving the Puzzle
Returning to our jigsaw puzzle metaphor: we expect COPE, by focussing on the occupant satisfaction aspect of organisational productivity, to do the equivalent of completing the puzzle’s perimeter, a crucial step towards solving the whole puzzle. And in taking this step we will be generating new information that will help facilities managers design truly
COPE Design Tool -- National Research Council Canada
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BASE BUILDING DESIGN BUILDING
RESULTS
FINANCIALS SUMMARY INDOOR ENVIRONMENT
BUILDING BASICS Floor Area Ceiling Height. EMPLOYEES Number Ave. Salary LIGHTING EQP. Luminaire Type 50000 9 400 40000 1x4 lens ft2 ft $ BUILDING BASICS Floor Area Ceiling Height. EMPLOYEES Number Ave. Salary LIGHTING EQP. Luminaire Type 50000 9 500 40000 task ft2 ft $ Default DESIGN to BASE Savings Co st s IAQ Lighting Thermal Comf. Acoustics Satisfaction base design Savings 1,800,000 $ Floor Area 50,000 ft2 Employees 500 Density 100 ft2/pers. Satisfaction ΟΟΟΟΟΟΟΟ Productivity-to-cost 1 %
Views Targets Details Views Details
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θ
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cost-effective office space that workers are happy to be in, and that will help
manufacturers develop a new generation of products to improve the office environment.
The project started in the Spring of 1999 with the support of Public Works and
Government Services Canada, USG Corporation, Ontario Realty Corporation, Natural Resources Canada, British Columbia Buildings Corporation, Steelcase and various Canadian Provincial and Territorial Works organisations under the umbrella of the Building Technology Transfer Forum. Project completion will be in Spring 2003, but we will be reporting results as they become available – Watch this space!
More information can be found at www.nrc.ca/irc/ie/cope
Guy Newsham is the COPE Project Manager. He received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of St. Andrews, and a Ph.D. in Architectural Science from Cambridge University. He has been a Research Officer at the National Research Council Canada since 1990, where he has conducted research on thermal comfort, building energy consumption, lighting quality, and occupant use of environmental controls.
Field study
measurements will be made in individual workstations. Office workers are asked to complete a questionnaire (presented on a handheld computer) on their satisfaction with the indoor environment. At the same time, an instrumented chair collects data on the temperature, air velocity, humidity, noise level, light level, and air quality in the workstation.
