Abstract
Most work on activity-based working centers on the physical environment and digital technologies enabling flexible working. While important, we believe the key components for implementing activity-based working are employee and manager behaviors. To measure the degree of enactment of activity-based work, based on workshops with experienced practitioners as well as previous literature, we have developed and validated a behavior-focused measure of activity-based working behaviors. In our initial sample (Sample 1, N = 234), three subscales were identified: task – environment crafting, workday planning, and social needs prioritization. In the replication sample (Sample 2, N = 434), this model also showed adequate fit. Moreover, task – environment crafting was related to general health and lower stress in sample 1 (multi-organization sample), but not in the single-organization sample (sample 2). Workday planning was associated with higher concentration in both samples and in the second sample with general health and work engagement; the latter was also related to social needs prioritization.
Highlights
Over the past several decades, increased workplace flexibility has been a trend in the working life of white-collar workers (Stone and Luchetti, 1985; Appel-Meulenbroek, 2016a; Mache et al, 2020)
Whilst job crafting focuses primarily on the content and meaning of the job (Tims et al, 2012; Slemp and VellaBrodrick, 2013), activity-based working focuses solely on the process of how and where work is conducted. Both represent constructs that aim at increasing fit: job crafting focuses on the person-job fit (Tims et al, 2016; Kooij et al, 2017), whereas we argue that activity-based working aims at increasing the jobenvironment fit
Four items were excluded based on low factor loadings. Another two items were removed due to redundancy. This process resulted in eight items, categorized into three sub-factors of the activity-based working (ABW)-B: task – environment crafting (TEC), workday planning (WP), and social needs prioritization (SNP) behavior
Summary
Over the past several decades, increased workplace flexibility has been a trend in the working life of white-collar workers (Stone and Luchetti, 1985; Appel-Meulenbroek, 2016a; Mache et al, 2020). In activity-based working environments, employees often do not have fixed seats, are equipped with extensive digital solutions, and have significant discretion over where to work. While they have a historical predecessor in the “non-territorial office” at IBM in the 1970s, their current incarnation was coined in the 1990s by Dutch consulting company. The most frequent office types are called flex- and combi-offices (Bodin Danielsson et al, 2015). Both office types are activitybased; as such, they offer several types of workstations and environments for both individual and joint working. A-FOs are the most common activitybased office type, which is why we have chosen to investigate A-FOs in this study
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