What pushes people out of the office

The occupational health researcher Annu Haapakangas surveyed 923 employees at four Finnish workplaces in autumn 2022, most of them in modern activity-based offices, and asked what would make them want to telework more or less. The office worked mainly as a push. Insufficient workspaces for quiet work, insufficient space for spontaneous collaboration and too little work and storage space were all associated with wanting to be at home more. Screening from disturbance at one’s own workstation was the one condition that worked in both directions. Demographic factors, psychosocial factors, employee wellbeing and work ability were all tested as alternative explanations, and wellbeing and work ability did not predict the preference.

The built environment researcher Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek ran a stated choice experiment, putting designed office alternatives in front of employees and recording which they picked. The survey went to 470 office workers of a commercial real estate company in January 2021 and 218 completed it. It separated two segments cleanly, one intending to re-embrace the office and one intending to stay home a lot. The expected crowdedness of the floor and the availability of enclosed rooms for concentration and for meetings decided their choices. The office segment had relatively more men, more highly educated and full-time workers, more people whose work depends on communication and more people with a short commute. The home segment had relatively more women, more part-time employees and more administrative roles.

The engineering researcher Amanda Rosgaard conducted contextual interviews with seven employees and semi-structured interviews with five managers and a facility manager across three large organisations. People came to the office for the facilities and for the other people. They stayed at home because the office did not support their tasks, because they could not control the indoor environment there, and because home gave them comfort, privacy and flexibility. 13 people is a pilot study, and the paper presents it as one, with the frank conclusion that a good deal about how activity-based and hybrid work operate in practice is still not understood.

The organisational psychologist David Holman split each setting into three activity-supportive characteristics, for interaction, for concentration and for recovery, and tested them against task performance, engagement and workspace satisfaction across two survey waves in an engineering organisation. 3 paths reached significance. Office characteristics supporting recovery raised task performance. Office characteristics supporting interaction raised satisfaction with the office workspace. Home characteristics supporting concentration raised engagement. The abstract does not report how many employees answered.

The management researcher Lila Skountridaki reads the same discontent as an industrial relations question. Drawing on qualitative and survey data, the paper argues that employee dissatisfaction with office space is a major driving force behind hybrid-work preferences, and that it reaches management through no established channel. Employees want to keep the control over their physical working conditions that hybrid work handed them unintentionally. The paper’s own suggestion is that academic studies function as a voice mechanism where the organisation provides none. Skountridaki reports no sample size for either the qualitative or the survey data.

Only one sample here is large enough to carry a regression: Haapakangas surveyed 923 people, once. Appel-Meulenbroek’s 218 respondents chose between pictures of offices, so the result describes an intention and not a week of behaviour. Rosgaard interviewed thirteen people. Holman and Skountridaki both report no sample size in their abstracts.