Enhancing staff's satisfaction with comfort toward productivity by sustainable Open Plan Office Design

Abstract

Several sustainable building assessment tools have been developed globally to manage sustainability in building's indoor environment. The sustainable building assessment tools (SBATs) measure the user's satisfaction and comfort, independently. However, staff's physical and psychological satisfaction with comfort was not dependently investigated by SBATs, particularly, incorporating with staff's performance and productivity in open-plan office buildings. The current research aimed to determine the Open Plan Office Design (OPOD) features and sub-features meet the staff's satisfaction with comfort toward productivity enhancement. The research was designed in two phases. Phase one was to identify OPOD features and sub-features within positive and negative approaches. Through a systematic review process and content analysis, the research identified twenty seven OPOD sub-features involved in eight features. Phase two was to determine the Factor Actual Weight Consensus (FAWCai) of those identified OPOD sub-features through pre and final weight-value analysis stages. The research expresses the 'Flexible Space' (F.P.5) received the weight-value 0.215 which is the highest amongst other positive OPOD sub-features. In the negative category, the 'Auditory Distraction' (F.N.2) got the highest weight-value 0.591. In contrast, there are OPOD sub-features have received very low weight-values; such as, the 'Thermal Discomfort' (F.N.7), 'Exposure to Viruses' (F.N.11), and 'Sick Building Syndrome' (F.N.12) have received 0.040. Undertaking the FAWCai of OPOD sub-features aids open-plan office building assessment auditors to benchmark the strengths and weakness of their design in comparison with the ideal one. As future works, the FAWCai of OPOD sub-features will be formulated as the open-plan office building assessment indexing.