Causal modeling between workplace productivity and workers’ satisfaction with various spaces in office buildings

Abstract

Office workers’ productivity might be affected by their satisfaction with not only their own workplace but also meeting area, break area and accessory spaces in and around the building. This paper investigates the relation between workers’ subjective productivity and satisfaction with those spaces, statistically analyzing the data collected by the SAP that is a subjective productivity assessment system developed in Japan. Applying a statistical causality analysis to the data of 228 offices, it was revealed that, in addition to satisfactions with environmental factors in an office, satisfaction and frequency of use in other spaces considerably affect workers’ easiness of four types of behavior, focusing, relaxing, communicating, and creative activity, which finally influence productivity in a building. This finding supports the significance of extending the questions from office to overall building in the SAP system.