Relationship Between Workplace Spatial Settings and Occupant-Perceived Support for Collaboration

The increasingly collaborative nature of knowledge-based work requires workplaces to support both dynamic interactions and concentrated work, both of which are critical for collaboration performance. Given the prevalence of open-plan settings, this requirement has created new challenges for workplace design. Therefore, an understanding of the relationship between the spatial characteristics of workplace settings and the support for collaboration that is perceived by office workers is valuable and timely. Based on a study of 308 office workers in 27 office spaces, this article examines the relationship between a series of workplace spatial characteristics and the support that is perceived by the occupants for collaborations. The spatial characteristics that were examined included individual workstation characteristics that were derived from the literature and a new set of floor-plan layout variables that highlighted shared spaces that are critical for a variety of formal and informal collaboration activities at work. The key characteristics of workplace spatial settings that were associated with the support that the occupants perceived for collaboration were the distance from workstation to meeting space, the distance from workstation to shared service area, the distance from workstation to kitchen/coffee area, and the percentage of floor space that was dedicated to shared services and amenities.