Abstract
Open-plan office (OPO) layouts emerged to allow organizations to adapt to changing workplace demands. We explore the potential for OPOs to provide such adaptive capacity to respond to two contemporary issues for organizations: the chronic challenge of environmental sustainability, and the acute challenges emerging from the great COVID-19 homeworking experiment. We apply a socio-technical systems perspective and green ergonomics principles to investigate the relationship between an OPO environment and the occupants working within it. In doing so, we consider relevant technical and human factors, such as green technology and employee green behavior. We also consider how a green OPO might provide non-carbon benefits such as improving occupant well-being and supporting the emergence of a green organizational culture. Our investigation highlights several avenues through which an OPO designed with green ergonomic principles could benefit occupants, the organizations they work for, and the natural environment of which they are a part and on which they depend. We find reason to suspect that green OPOs could play an important role in sustainable development; and offer a research agenda to help determine whether it is true that OPOs can, indeed, exemplify how “going green” may be good for business.
Highlights
Government targets around “Net Zero Emissions” [1] demonstrate that sustainability is a mainstream priority for organizations in most, if not all, sectors
We review the field of green ergonomics, which focuses on developing human systems that integrate with the natural environment
Green Open-plan office (OPO) could establish the balance between economic, social, and natural capital required as part of sustainable development [38]
Summary
Government targets around “Net Zero Emissions” [1] demonstrate that sustainability is a mainstream priority for organizations in most, if not all, sectors. Danielsson and Bodin [7] define such offices as shared rooms or spaces with more than four workstations and minimal partitions between occupants, and which provide the capacity to accommodate large numbers of workers, including the flexibility to accommodate changing requirements. This contrasts with traditional (or cellular) offices that separate individual workspaces. To conduct our exploratory review, we included research literature spanning human factors, workplace, organizational behavior, environmental psychology, and engineering fields that overlap to create the topic area of green ergonomics We unpack this literature by first revisiting the main arguments for and against OPOs. we review the field of green ergonomics, which focuses on developing human systems that integrate with the natural environment. We briefly outline an agenda for future research in this area
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