Unpleasant temperature, noise and lack of privacy. People working in open plan offices often complain about the quality of the working environment. An international research team, including scientists from ECON MUNI, has been looking for a solution since the beginning of the year. According to associate professor Jakub Procházka, the Brno researchers will be responsible for ethical issues, economic analysis and the creation of business models.
Inappropriate design of the working environment can lead to increased stress or conflict in the workplace. This can lead to poorer psychological wellbeing, lower job satisfaction, lower performance, a greater risk of burnout and a greater tendency to leave the organisation. Our project focuses on the design of open plan office spaces. A frequent problem in such spaces, for example, is the office temperature setting. It's hard to find a temperature where people don't complain about it being too cold or too hot.
We do not have statistics on the frequency of complaints. The first phase of the project is to identify the main factors that threaten the wellbeing and health of employees in a shared workplace. Communication with companies and employees has shown that complaints from employees in open plan spaces are often related to temperature and also noise. Open plan spaces can make more efficient use of office space and encourage communication and collaboration between employees. On the other hand, people are more distracted from each other, it is more difficult to concentrate on work and there is limited privacy.
One solution is flexible working hours and part-time teleworking. The aforementioned demands are alleviated if a person is exposed to them for only part of their working hours. When a person needs a quiet time to work, they can stay at home or be at work at a time when there are fewer people. But that's not an option for everyone. Not everyone has a suitable working environment at home, and not everyone can or wants to be at the workplace early in the morning or late in the evening. Parents of young children are one example. Another possible solution is adaptive architecture.
Adaptive architecture is a flexible architecture that can adapt to the needs of users. Imagine being able to set different temperatures for different workstations, even in the same open plan space. Or raising and lowering noise barriers depending on whether you need to concentrate on your work or communicate with colleagues. Among other things, adaptive architecture allows you to change the working environment according to the needs of the organisation and the employees, thus helping to make the working environment more pleasant and less stressful.
The project should address the negative impact of the working environment on the mental wellbeing, health and productivity of office workers. It should identify negative impacts and seek to reduce them through adaptive architecture elements. The project will therefore bring new knowledge in the field of healthy working environments and hopefully practical suggestions applicable to the construction or renovation of office spaces that will contribute to the health and wellbeing of employees.
I would start with what we are not going to do. The core of the project will be experiments in so-called living labs that will test different elements of the adaptive architecture. The preparation, implementation and evaluation of these experiments will be the responsibility of the other project partners. However, we will be involved in the design and evaluation of the experiments through our roles in the project as ethics manager and partner responsible for the integration of recommendations.
The role of the ethics manager is to coordinate the ethical aspects of the research. This includes, for example, liaising with the ethics committees reviewing individual experiments, advising the experimental setup on ethical requirements, providing regular reports on ethics in the project, and considering the ethical aspects of recommendations arising from the research. We will also be concerned with the relevance of the recommendations that emerge from the project. We will try to make them understandable to managers in development companies or in companies considering the use of adaptive architectural elements.
We are the only partner in the project with an economic focus. We are responsible for the cost-benefit analysis of proposed solutions and the creation of sample business models. In other words, our role is to assess whether the adaptive architecture solutions we are investigating are worth implementing in a particular organisation.
We are also involved in a number of sub-tasks with other partners. Our representatives are part of the project steering committee, we will organise one of the project meetings in Brno, we will carry out surveys in the Czech environment, communicate with Czech organisations, participate in the organisation of a workshop for application partners and potential users of the project results and in the preparation of professional publications.
Project "Situation-aware OrchestratioN of AdapTive Architecture – SONATA" is financed by the Horizon Europe programme, Cluster 1 – Health.
Associate Professor Jakub Procházka has a degree in Psychology from the Faculty of Social Sciences and a degree in Financial Entrepreneurship from the Faculty of Economics and Management. He is the Head of the Department of Business Economics and Management, where he also teaches courses in Human Resource Management. His research focuses on factors affecting employees' mental wellbeing, health and job satisfaction.
Alena Šafrová Drášilová, Tomáš Ondrářek, Vilém Pařil, Dominika Tóthová, Dušan Mladenović and Mikhail Monashev also participate in the SONATA (Situation-aware OrchestratioN of AdapTive Architecture) project on behalf of ECON MUNI. The project is coordinated by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. In addition to Masaryk University, four other research institutions and ten application partners are involved. More information about the project and the consortium can be found here.
Unpleasant temperature, noise and lack of privacy. People working in open plan offices often complain about the quality of the working environment. An international research team, including scientists from ECON MUNI, has been looking for a solution since the beginning of the year. According to associate professor Jakub Procházka, the Brno researchers will be responsible for ethical issues, economic analysis and the creation of business models.
What negative effects can inappropriate architectural design of the working environment have on employees?
Inappropriate design of the working environment can lead to increased stress or conflict in the workplace. This can lead to poorer psychological wellbeing, lower job satisfaction, lower performance, a greater risk of burnout and a greater tendency to leave the organisation. Our project focuses on the design of open plan office spaces. A frequent problem in such spaces, for example, is the office temperature setting. It's hard to find a temperature where people don't complain about it being too cold or too hot.
What do employees complain about most?
We do not have statistics on the frequency of complaints. The first phase of the project is to identify the main factors that threaten the wellbeing and health of employees in a shared workplace. Communication with companies and employees has shown that complaints from employees in open plan spaces are often related to temperature and also noise. Open plan spaces can make more efficient use of office space and encourage communication and collaboration between employees. On the other hand, people are more distracted from each other, it is more difficult to concentrate on work and there is limited privacy.
How can these issues be addressed?
One solution is flexible working hours and part-time teleworking. The aforementioned demands are alleviated if a person is exposed to them for only part of their working hours. When a person needs a quiet time to work, they can stay at home or be at work at a time when there are fewer people. But that's not an option for everyone. Not everyone has a suitable working environment at home, and not everyone can or wants to be at the workplace early in the morning or late in the evening. Parents of young children are one example. Another possible solution is adaptive architecture.
What is adaptive architecture?
Adaptive architecture is a flexible architecture that can adapt to the needs of users. Imagine being able to set different temperatures for different workstations, even in the same open plan space. Or raising and lowering noise barriers depending on whether you need to concentrate on your work or communicate with colleagues. Among other things, adaptive architecture allows you to change the working environment according to the needs of the organisation and the employees, thus helping to make the working environment more pleasant and less stressful.
What new features will the SONATA project bring?
The project should address the negative impact of the working environment on the mental wellbeing, health and productivity of office workers. It should identify negative impacts and seek to reduce them through adaptive architecture elements. The project will therefore bring new knowledge in the field of healthy working environments and hopefully practical suggestions applicable to the construction or renovation of office spaces that will contribute to the health and wellbeing of employees.
What role will ECON MUNI play in the research?
I would start with what we are not going to do. The core of the project will be experiments in so-called living labs that will test different elements of the adaptive architecture. The preparation, implementation and evaluation of these experiments will be the responsibility of the other project partners. However, we will be involved in the design and evaluation of the experiments through our roles in the project as ethics manager and partner responsible for the integration of recommendations.
The role of the ethics manager is to coordinate the ethical aspects of the research. This includes, for example, liaising with the ethics committees reviewing individual experiments, advising the experimental setup on ethical requirements, providing regular reports on ethics in the project, and considering the ethical aspects of recommendations arising from the research. We will also be concerned with the relevance of the recommendations that emerge from the project. We will try to make them understandable to managers in development companies or in companies considering the use of adaptive architectural elements.
Will you also focus on the economic aspects?
We are the only partner in the project with an economic focus. We are responsible for the cost-benefit analysis of proposed solutions and the creation of sample business models. In other words, our role is to assess whether the adaptive architecture solutions we are investigating are worth implementing in a particular organisation.
We are also involved in a number of sub-tasks with other partners. Our representatives are part of the project steering committee, we will organise one of the project meetings in Brno, we will carry out surveys in the Czech environment, communicate with Czech organisations, participate in the organisation of a workshop for application partners and potential users of the project results and in the preparation of professional publications.
Profile:
Associate Professor Jakub Procházka has a degree in Psychology from the Faculty of Social Sciences and a degree in Financial Entrepreneurship from the Faculty of Economics and Management. He is the Head of the Department of Business Economics and Management, where he also teaches courses in Human Resource Management. His research focuses on factors affecting employees' mental wellbeing, health and job satisfaction.
Box:
Alena Šafrová Drášilová, Tomáš Ondrářek, Vilém Pařil, Dominika Tóthová, Dušan Mladenović and Mikhail Monashev also participate in the SONATA (Situation-aware OrchestratioN of AdapTive Architecture) project on behalf of ECON MUNI. The project is coordinated by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. In addition to Masaryk University, four other research institutions and ten application partners are involved. More information about the project and the consortium can be found here.
Project "Situation-aware OrchestratioN of AdapTive Architecture – SONATA" is financed by the Horizon Europe programme, Cluster 1 – Health.
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