How private a workplace feels

The occupational health researcher Rostam Golmohammadi measured seventeen open-plan banks in Hamadan, in western Iran, and had 175 employees fill in a 100-point annoyance scale while they worked. The speech transmission index was 0.56 with a standard deviation of 0.09 and the signal-to-noise ratio 20.5 dB with 8.2, which means speech at the workstations was more intelligible than the standard calls satisfactory. The preferred noise criterion was 48.2 dB with a standard deviation of 5.5, above the recommended limit for public spaces. 95% of the employees said they were annoyed by the background noise. The main source was speech the employees had no part in, and they reported losing concentration to it.

A survey by Rieder asked 324 employees who split their week between home and the office how well the privacy at each location fitted the work they had to do. Privacy fit correlated with burnout at −0.28. It stayed a significant predictor once gender, employment type, working hours, quantitative demands and workplace flexibility were in the model, for the office and for the home separately. Fit between the space and the need to cooperate did not predict burnout at all, apart from one component: satisfaction with cooperation fit at home.

The engineering researcher Amy Kim retrofitted one floor of an office building in Seattle, changing the layout, the size of the workspaces, the lighting and the sound-masking technology, and asked the staff to rate the old setting from memory and then the new one. Occupants reported being more satisfied overall than they recalled being. Satisfaction with the privacy of conversations did not move: 3.30 from 27 people rating the old floor, 3.29 from 56 rating the new one. Exterior noise measured 40.0 to 43.6 dBA across all 26 sampling points, within the WELL standard, so the privacy that did not improve is not a matter of the building envelope.

The public health researcher Dorota Węziak-Białowolska surveyed 456 employees across 20 offices of a single architectural firm, on the argument that designers notice space more than most people do. Acoustic privacy and perceived office density correlated at 0.54, visual privacy and acoustic privacy at 0.78, and visual density and office density at 0.73. Those correlations are high enough that the three cannot be separated cleanly in a path model, which is why the paper examines them one at a time.

The psychologist Milena Sina Wütschert put the same question to 287 people working from home. Perceived privacy correlated with musculoskeletal complaints at −0.252, at p below 0.01, so the less private the home workplace, the more often people reported pain. Relaxation correlated with complaints at −0.204 and with work-family conflict at −0.244. Wütschert tested work-family conflict, family-work conflict and relaxation as mediators of that correlation. The structural equation model showed no significant mediation, so the correlation stands without a mechanism behind it.

Węziak-Białowolska surveyed 456 employees once and Rieder 324 once. Wütschert surveyed 287 teleworkers during the pandemic. Golmohammadi measured seventeen buildings with instruments and questioned 175 people in them. Kim’s figures come from one floor, rated by 27 people from memory and 56 in the new space.