Abstract
Since its introduction in the 1960s, open office design has been driven by a need for lower cost, increased flexibility, and enhanced worker productivity. The first two can be easily evaluated, but what about ‘‘knowledge worker’’ productivity? The objective in open office design is to have speech intelligibility within a work space, and speech privacy between adjacent work spaces. This paper presents a first step in evaluating knowledge worker productivity as affected by the acoustic design of the space. Six large companies participated in a study on worker satisfaction and perceived effectiveness both before and after acoustic modifications of their workspace. Even a small increase in worker productivity will warrant incremental investments in acoustic treatments since the productivity payback is relatively short. Accordingly, the facility manager needs to consider the building space as a worker productivity ‘‘tool,’’ and not just a space in which to work.
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