Environmental satisfaction in multi-tenant office buildings: A holistic approach

In the current office market office providers are obligated to meet as many wishes of the (future) end-users of their buildings as possible in order to keep their buildings from becoming vacant. In order to do so it is necessary to gain more insight in these wishes. The aim of this study was therefore to examine a holistic model for effects of many aspects of the current work environment and of the employees that use it (demographics, personality, and work characteristics) on user satisfaction, mediated by end-user needs. Besides the holistic approach, the context of multi-tenant offices to gather data was also innovative.Data was collected via a survey amongst 272 end-users of 18 office buildings in the Netherlands. A path model was constructed based on current literature and tested with the data using LISREL. Results showed the significance of testing a holistic model, as not all bivariate relations found in literature remained significant. Mainly the type of workspace, storage/clean desk policy and climate comfort of the currently offered work environment determined environmental satisfaction, together with personality characteristics of the respondent. The needs for privacy and for control & expression also played a mediating role. Surprisingly, demographic and work characteristics showed very little effect. Future studies should incorporate a holistic approach and preferably use large and diverse samples.