Annu Haapakangas

Purpose: Shared workspace concept is one modern solution applied in health-care facility design. Yet, studies investigating the effects of their implementation on employees are rare. This study aims to compare perceptions of usability, psychosocial work environment and well-being in a psychiatric outpatient clinic that relocated from traditional workspaces into shared workspaces. Design/methodology/approach: Questionnaires were administered seven months before and eight months after the change in a Finnish outpatient clinic. Data from 36 employees were analyzed statistically using the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test methods. Findings: Shared workspaces supported work tasks and task privacy less than traditional workspaces. Satisfaction with air quality and accessibility increased; however, perceptions of lighting and sufficiency of work- and storage space decreased. Further, well-being deteriorated, but psychosocial work environment was unchanged, except for perceived job security which decreased. To achieve a workspace that is effective, efficient, satisfying and supportive of well-being, shared workspaces and guidelines for using the facilities should support different work tasks. Practical implications: Based on a small pre–post study in one psychiatric outpatient clinic, organizations moving to shared workspaces should clearly differentiate areas for quiet and noisy work in activity-based workspaces, ensure sufficient nearby enclosed rooms for calls and discussions, provide easy booking and allocation systems and establish guidelines to support a peaceful work environment. Further, organizations should guide employees to use spaces as intended and monitor user experience and the psychosocial environment after relocation and adjust practices as needed. Originality/value: This empirical pre–post study is unique, as it investigates shared workspace concepts in the health-care sector, capturing the impact of the concepts on usability and well-being.

Introduction: Longitudinal studies are rare for associations between telework and sickness absence (SA). This prospective cohort study aimed to investigate short (1–3 days) SA from 2019 to 2023 among a cohort of Finnish knowledge workers and the role of telework in short SA. Methods: Complete employer-owned register data on SA and telework were available from four organizations for 2019–2023, comprising 924 employees. Weekly means of telework days/week and short (1–3 days) SA days were calculated and analyzed using conditional Poisson with fixed-effects to obtain incidence rate ratios (IRRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: The levels of short SA were low from 2019 to 2023, while telework increased at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and remained at an elevated level. In a fully adjusted model, each 1-day increase in telework was associated with a higher likelihood of short SA (IRR 1.35, 95%CI 1.22, 1.50). Conclusion: Telework has become a central way of working among Finnish knowledge workers since the COVID-19 pandemic, while shortSA has remained at a low level. A higher number of weekly teleworking days may be linked to a higher likelihood of short SA, indicating that workplaces should pay special attention to their employees’ wellbeing and health.

Objectives: As digitalization has made knowledge work multilocational, the need for space-efficient, modern-design offices, including activity-based offices, has increased. However, studies of how activity-based offices are related to employee well-being, particularly in hybrid work, are rare. This study investigated whether the perceived activity-based office environment in hybrid work is associated with employee well-being and self-reported work ability. Methods: We used a cross-sectional survey of 971 employees working in activity-based offices in 5 Finnish organizations in 2022. The workplaces were observed, and the employees responded to a survey of their office environment perceptions, well-being, and work ability. The survey covered burnout risk scores, work engagement, daily recovery, self-reported work ability, insomnia, and pain symptoms. We used the regression analysis general linear model to analyze associations between the environmental perceptions and employee outcomes, adjusting for age, gender, supervisory position, and telework frequency or effort–reward imbalance. Results: Employees’ daily recovery and self-reported work ability were better when the employees’ office environment perceptions (task privacy, satisfaction with work environment, person-environment fit, workspace support for interaction, ease of workspace switching) were more positive. These associations remained in the adjusted models. Additionally, work engagement increased, and burnout risk scores and insomnia symptoms decreased when workplace conditions were perceived more favorably. Conclusions: More favorable perceptions of activity-based offices are associated with better employee well-being and self-reported work ability in hybrid work. The perceived office environment seems essential for employee well-being and work ability even when psychosocial aspects (effort–reward imbalance) are taken into account.

Objective: To investigate perceived task privacy in 2022 associated with short (1–3 days) self-certified sickness absence (SA) in 2023. Methods: A prospective cohort of 1400 Finnish office workers with survey data in 2022 about, for example, task privacy, telework, and office type were linked with employer-owned register data of SA in 2022–2023. Poisson regression models were used to obtain risk ratios with 95% confidence intervals. Results: Each one-unit increase in task privacy was associated with a less likely short SA (risk ratio, 0.83–0.89; 95% confidence interval, 0.74–0.97), also across the amount of telework in 2022. The association was only statistically significant in activity-based offices. Conclusions: Each one-unit increase in perceived task privacy at the office was associated with less likely short, self-certified, 1–3 days SA. Task privacy is an important factor to be considered in offices.

Purpose: The increase in teleworking has highlighted the role of office design in hybrid work. The purpose of this study is to examine employees’ workplace experiences as push and pull factors for working on-site. The study investigated which aspects of perceived office conditions are associated with employees’ preference to increase or decrease teleworking, taking into account other potential predictors of these preferences (i.e. demographic factors, psychosocial factors, employee well-being and work ability). Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional survey was conducted in four Finnish workplaces in autumn 2022 (n = 923). The offices mostly represented a modern activity-based design. The authors analysed the data using multinomial regression, and adjusted for gender, age and education. Findings: The workplace experiences were mainly a push factor as, for example, insufficient workspaces for quiet work and spontaneous collaboration and the amount of work and storage space were associated with preferences to increase telework. Only task privacy was both a push and pull factor: better privacy was associated with a preference to decrease telework, and vice versa. The current amount of telework was related to telework preferences, whereas psychosocial factors, employee well-being and work ability were not. Practical implications: Ensuring satisfactory task privacy and providing adequate workspaces for work requiring concentration appear particularly important in making the office more attractive in hybrid work. Office design should be considered an integral component of organizational models of hybrid work. Originality/value: The study bridges research on telework and office design. It provides novel evidence on the role of the office in post-pandemic workplaces.

Activity-based offices (ABOs) have become increasingly common. Yet, longitudinal studies investigating the effects of change are rare. This three-wave longitudinal study compared perceptions of privacy and office support, satisfaction with the work environment, and well-being in an organization that renovated private offices into an ABO (maintaining assigned desks). Questionnaires were administered four months before and eight and 21 months after the change. Data on 34 employees from the first and 21 from the second follow-up were analyzed. Privacy, perceived office support for work tasks, and work engagement decreased at both follow-ups. No effects were found on perceived office support for interaction or job satisfaction. Satisfaction with the work environment decreased at the eight-month follow-up. This study’s long follow-up demonstrated the negative effects of office redesign on the perception of privacy, support for work tasks, satisfaction with the work environment, and well-being.

Tens of millions of workers in Europe work in office environments. Such a physical environment might seem fairly harmless compared to the exposures of many other work environments. Yet, the office design is associated with important occupational health-related outcomes, as demonstrated by increased sickness absence (1) and the risk of disability retirement (2) in traditional open-plan offices. Unfortunately, modern office designs, such as activity-based offices, have received limited attention in the field of occupational and public health. Even in traditional offices, the mechanisms behind the associations with sickness absence and work ability are poorly understood and research on particular health outcomes, such as mental health and musculoskeletal disorders, is very limited. Research continues to be fixated on the simplistic dichotomy of “open-plan” versus individual cellular offices, while the evolution towards more sophisticated and complex office designs has been under way for several decades. As the development of office design appears to have been be accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic (3), research on the health implications of modern offices is severely lagging behind. Contemporary office design For a few decades, the trend has been towards more space-efficient office designs that are based on desk-sharing instead of assigned rooms and workstations. This development is supported by many forces in society, including digitalization, increasingly flexible work arrangements, an emphasis on collaboration – and collaborative workspaces – as a key productivity factor in knowledge work, and growing attention on the environmental impacts of buildings. An activity-based office design is currently a common solution to address these different trends (4). Thus, workers are expected to switch between workspaces that are designed for different activities (eg, collaborative or concentrative tasks) depending on what they are doing. Before the pandemic, a typical activity-based office had desks for about 70% of employees (5, 6), but much lower targets of desks-to-employees ratios can be expected as a response to increased teleworking. Many organizations are also re-thinking the role of the office as teleworking appears to have permanently increased (3). Thus, it may not be just the amount of space, but also the types of activities that are supposed to take place at the office, that could change in the coming years. Modern office designs are commonly confused with traditional open-plan offices. However, the dimensions of the office design that could be relevant to how workers experience and are affected by the environment are more complex. An activity-based office can be defined by (i) desk sharing (ie, lack of assigned spaces), (ii) the provision and flexible use of task-related workspaces, and (iii) the openness of the main work environment (6) although, in practice, there is plenty of variation in how the concept is applied and described. The location of the office is yet another dimension (7). While working from home has become a major topic of research during the COVID-19 pandemic (8–10), increased teleworking might also lead to new applications of coworking office designs (eg, near residential areas). Such offices often apply the activity-based design but are intended for the shared use of small businesses or individual workers from different organizations. Different combinations of these dimensions can create physically and socially different work conditions in terms of both job demands (eg, distractions) and job resources (eg, social relations). For example, Gerdenitsch et al (11) found that environmental distractions decreased and interaction across teams increased after workers moved from shared office rooms to an activity-based office. The reference office type, however, is important as the risks and benefits of modern office designs appear different depending on which office type they are compared to (6,12). For example, a controlled natural intervention study by Haapakangas et al (13) found increased job demands and decreased social support after a relocation from individual cellular offices to an activity-based office, while no effect was found for those who moved from an open-plan office to an activity-based office. The desk-sharing feature appears to be important for more positive perceptions of the office environment in shared workspaces (14), possibly due to facilitating an active choice of suitable workspace. Such behaviour could potentially contribute to a higher fit between the person and the environment (11,15) and higher perceived autonomy (16) as well as more physical activity in sedentary jobs (17–19). On the other hand, qualitative observations suggest that constantly switching workspace – with all related activities from planning the workday to setting up and clearing workstations – is an additional job demand (14, 20). Gaps in existing research It is striking how little is known about the health implications of modern office designs. The research field is developing and particularly the number of high-quality studies is still small. For example, a systematic review on health, work performance and perceived work environment in activity-based offices that was published in 2019 (12) identified only 17 studies, many of which reported only descriptive information, were congress papers, or investigated only activity-based offices without any reference condition. Few of the included studies actually addressed health, indicating that perceived satisfaction with different aspects of the work environment and self-rated productivity have been the dominating outcomes of interest so far. While research on office design has increased in recent years, studies on outcomes such as musculoskeletal disorders, sedentary behavior, mental health, and sickness absence are still rare and the evidence is equivocal. Studies often lack in...

Little is known about the factors that explain the differences in the ways that individuals use activity-based offices (ABOs). This study aimed to investigate whether person-related and situational factors are associated with self-reported use of workspaces and the perceived person-environment (P-E) fit in ABOs, independently of the job profile. Survey data were gathered in one organisation (N = 332) 7–11 months after an office re-design. Younger age, male gender, managerial position, and better work ability were associated with more frequent use of different workspaces. Workspace switching was perceived as more time-consuming by employees who worked at the office less, had a high workload, and were dissatisfied with ergonomics. All variables except gender were associated with the P-E fit. Person-related and situational factors appear relevant to workspace use and P-E fit, independently of job contents. Contextual, cultural, and office design differences should be considered when generalising these results. Practitioner summary: This case study investigated individual differences in how activity-based offices are used. Being younger, male, a manager, or having good work ability were associated with using workspaces more actively. Person-related and situational factors appear relevant to how offices are used and perceived, in addition to job characteristics. Abbreviations: ABO: activity-based office; P-E fit: person-environment fit; RQ: research question; SD: standard deviation; IN: interactive needs; CD: cognitive demands; OR: odds ratio; M: mean; ref.: reference category; CI: confidence interval; h: hour; PO: proportional odds