Office Relocation and Environmental Change

Abstract

As office environments become more subject to rapid and continuous change, strategies must be developed to manage the resulting effects of increased levels of stress and dislocation on the part of office workers. Specifically, design strategies should be found that tend to minimize the impacts of environmental change and that enhance the nature of work itself. A postoccupancy evaluation (POE) measures the effects of environmental change within a single case study that used a number of behavioral and management techniques to improve worker satisfaction during the relocation of a governmental agency. Findings from the POE are compared to a national survey of office workers, and the results of the case study tend to reinforce the importance of small-scale attributes (lighting at the workstation, size of individual work surfaces, and office privacy) in contributing to positive ratings of occupant satisfaction in the workplace.