Beyond Desk Numbers: How Office Occupancy Shapes Comfort and Productivity
Figure 1: Representation of a modern office environment. Image created using an AI research assistance tool.
The physical environment of offices has evolved over the past decades, with open-plan offices, in contrast to traditional cellular offices, becoming a popular office design, particularly for organisations wishing to reduce fixed overheads and increase employee density [3,4]. This evolution is in response to the rapidly changing working styles and innovative communication methods. As such, alternative workplace environments are increasingly needed to accommodate rapid change and support future office concepts.
This has become more evident, given the established significant impact of the workplace environment on workers’ health, comfort, productivity, and engagement, both positively and negatively [1, 2]. Workplace features such as temperature, ventilation, lighting, and physical facilities have been the focus of investigations into workplace performance. But another factor can significantly influence how workers experience an office: the number of people sharing the space.
A study titled: Does the Number of Occupants in an Office Influence Individual Perceptions of Comfort and Productivity?, examined responses from 5,000 office workers across 67 commercial and institutional buildings. Five workplace types were examined: solo offices, two-person offices, offices shared by two to four people, offices shared by five to eight people, and larger spaces occupied by more than eight people.
The central question was: as more people share an office, do their perceptions of comfort, health and productivity change?
What did they find?
The study found that workers in solo and two-person offices generally reported greater satisfaction with their working environment than those sharing offices with five or more people. They also felt they were healthier and more productive, and had greater control over their surroundings.
This issue of control is particularly important. In a smaller office, people may be better able to adjust windows, blinds, heating, cooling or lighting to suit their preferences. They may also have more influence over noise levels and interruptions. As the number of occupants increases, individual control becomes more difficult because one person’s preferred setting may not suit another.
That said, larger offices did have one notable advantage: the workers in spaces with more than eight people were the most satisfied with summer temperatures. This might be because of the shared warmth that comes not just from physical proximity to another person, but also from the interactions and broader movements enabled in shared spaces.
Nevertheless, the general pattern was clear. The workers who shared their offices with fewer people (2–4) tended to report better overall experiences than those in larger shared environments or solo offices. This supports the importance of balance in space occupancy. Sharing a space with fewer people creates a balance between optimisation of space and achieving comfort.
One of the most useful findings is the caution that an office condition may affect how comfortable someone feels without necessarily influencing how productive they believe they are—or vice versa. This study found that the indoor environmental quality factors, namely temperature, lighting, and ventilation, that predicted comfort were not always the same as those that predicted productivity. Noise was the exception. It was the only indoor environmental quality factor that predicted both comfort and productivity across all five office types. This means that, amongst all the indoor environmental quality factors examined, only noise predicted comfort quality and worker productivity across all five office types.
This has a direct operational implication for facilities management. Noise cannot be treated simply as a minor complaint or an unavoidable feature of shared offices. Persistent conversations, ringing phones, online meetings, office equipment and unplanned interruptions can affect both the occupant experience and people’s ability to work effectively.
What could facilities managers consider?
The findings suggest that workplace decisions may benefit from considering the relationships among occupancy, environmental control, and the activities undertaken. As illustrated in Figure 1, thoughtful occupancy choices, noise management, and environmental control are required to support comfort and productivity. Possible approaches include:
- Offering varied settings, such as quiet rooms, collaborative areas, smaller shared offices and spaces for confidential or virtual meetings.
- Locating concentration-intensive work away from busy routes, social areas, printers, and frequently used meeting rooms.
- Looking beyond technical capacity when assessing occupant density, as accommodating more desks may not necessarily support comfort or performance.
- Providing occupants with reasonable control over temperature, lighting, blinds and airflow where practicable.
- Developing shared expectations around phone calls, online meetings and extended conversations in communal spaces.
- Identifying noise sources and transmission paths before investing in acoustic treatments.
- Seeking occupant feedback regularly for early detection of issues and after workplace changes to understand whether conditions have improved.
It may also be useful to look beyond building-wide averages. Overall satisfaction scores can conceal differences between office types, teams and locations. Examining post-occupancy evaluation results by workspace type, occupancy level and work activity could help distinguish widespread issues from those concentrated in particular areas. This will be explored in another article.
Occupant numbers alone do not determine productivity. Job type, organisational culture, building systems and personal preferences may also influence people’s experiences. Nevertheless, before adding more desks, it may be worth asking how additional occupants could affect comfort, control and people’s ability to work effectively.
Want to know more about this study? Read the full open-access publication in Buildings.
Works cited in this article
Chandrasekar, K. Workplace environment and its impact on organisational performance in public sector organisations. J. Enterp. Comput. Bus. Syst.2011, 1, 1–19. [Google Scholar]
Oseland, N. CIBSE Technical Memoranda TM24: Environmental Factors Affecting Office Worker Performance (CIBSE Technical Memoranda); The Chartered Institute of Building Service Engineers: London, UK, 1999. [Google Scholar]
Davis, M.C.; Leach, D.J.; Clegg, C.W. The Physical Environment of the Office: Contemporary and Emerging Issues. Rev. Ind. Organ. Psychol.2011, 26, 193–237. [Google Scholar]
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By Dr Eziaku Rasheed, on behalf of the FAM Research Group, Massey University.
