1.6.3Office environment affects health, wellbeing and work

Office environment affects health,wellbeing and work

The way the workplace is designed hasgreater significance than we think. It affects health, wellbeing and work.

In Sweden, sickness absence has been highamong the working population in recent years. Ill health has become amacroeconomic problem. Research shows that psychosocial environmental factorshave a great influence on mental and physiological health, and we know that jobsatisfaction probably plays an important part in this context. Psychologicalill health is the most common cause of sickness absence among office workers.

On the other hand, we know much less of howthe physical office environment affects office workers and their jobsatisfaction. A research base design and construction process would be needed.The relationships among form, function and health and job satisfaction arecomplex. It is not enough to design office environments only on the basis ofpractical experience and professional preconceptions. Management wishes to havemore interaction and information sharing among employees, so that creativityand effectivity at the workplace may be enhanced in this way and better resultsmay be achieved in the long run.

Research concerning the influence of thephysical environment on the individual has ranged over a broad spectrum. Inenvironmental psychology, researchers have studied individual environmentalfactors, such as sound, to see how it affects the subjective perception ofstress. The study shows that noise gives rise to dissatisfaction with thephysical working environment.

Stress medicine has focused on how the bodyreacts to different stimuli in the environment. This research shows that a viewof roads and traffic produces higher stress levels in the blood than a view ofnature.

In management research there are studieswhich have attempted to chart the effect of the physical working environment onperformance and efficiency. The results indicate that a highly rated physicalworking environment results in greater job satisfaction.

In the area, architecture, that has adirect influence on the physical environment, there are few studies that showhow design affects the end users.

In our opinion, it is important to bringtogether the different disciplines so that we may have an opportunity tomeasure and assess the influence of the physical office environment on theemployees. In other words: an interdisciplinary approach is essential. It isalso important to apply a holistic view to the office environment, since it isthe totality of different factors that constitutes the actual officeenvironment.