| Abstract | The global pandemic of COVID-19, according to some commentators, changes everything: Remote work forever! The death of the office! Reshape our cities! End commuting! There is no question that in the short term, many of these forces are at play; but this might not be the right set of choices for the long term. Trust, social cohesion, informal communication, and idea generation all benefit from co-location and shared experience. Many organizations will find that a physical location remains necessary.
The current times do reveal the need to decrease occupant density, provide more separation between individuals, and to change building ventilation strategies to prevent disease transmission. These run counter to recent design trends and to many organizations’ and governments’ strategies to address facilities costs and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with those facilities.
Our group has long argued that workplace design and building operation needs to support the needs of employees, organizations, and the environment. This means that efforts to address environmental goals such as reducing GHG emissions and achieving sustainable construction ought not to come at the expense of organizational productivity understood broadly, taking into account not only the quantity of work produced or the value of products sold, but also individuals’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, intent to turnover, absenteeism, and overall well-being.
This presentation will blend results from several streams of recent NRC research, addressing the relationships between organizational productivity and activity-based working; satisfying individuals’ needs for various building amenities; and interior environmental conditions. In parallel, our colleagues have demonstrated that connected building operations can rapidly pay back in reduced energy use, which may be the smart route to take to achieve the indoor environmental conditions in buildings that individuals need and for organizations to prosper while delivering on society’s environmental and climate-change targets. |
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