Office design's impact on sick leave rates

Impact of a Comprehensive Workplace Hand Hygiene Program on Employer Health Care Insurance Claims and Costs, Absenteeism, and Employee Perceptions and Practices

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of a multimodal hand hygiene intervention program in reducing health care insurance claims for hygiene preventable infections (eg, cold and influenza), absenteeism, and subjective impact on employees.

METHODS

A 13.5-month prospective, randomized cluster controlled trial was executed with alcohol-based hand sanitizer in strategic workplace locations and personal use (intervention group) and brief hand hygiene education (both groups). Four years of retrospective data were collected for all participants.

RESULTS

Hygiene-preventable health care claims were significantly reduced in the intervention group by over 20% (P < 0.05). Absenteeism was positively impacted overall for the intervention group. Employee survey data showed significant improvements in hand hygiene behavior and perception of company concern for employee well-being.

CONCLUSION

Providing a comprehensive, targeted, yet simple to execute hand hygiene program significantly reduced the incidence of health care claims and increased employee workplace satisfaction.

Does Personality Have a Different Impact on Self-Rated Distraction, Job Satisfaction, and Job Performance in Different Office Types?

This study investigates the joint effect of office type (cell, shared room, open-plan, and flex) and personality, measured by the Big Five personality traits, on self-rated measures of distraction, job satisfaction, and job performance (measured by professional efficacy). Regression analyses with interactions between personality and office type were conducted on 1205 participants working in 5 organizations from both the private and public sectors. While few interactions were observed in the cases of professional efficacy and job satisfaction, several were observed between personality traits and office type on the level of distraction reported. Specifically, more emotionally stable participants reported lower distraction, particularly those working in flex offices. Both agreeableness and openness to experience were associated with higher levels of distraction among participants in open-plan compared to cell offices.

Effects of new ways of working on work hours and work location, health and job-related outcomes

New ways of working (NWW) is a type of work organization that is characterized by temporal and spatial flexibility, often combined with extensive use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and performance-based management. In a three-wave intervention study, we examined the effects of NWW on both the organization of work (changes in control over time and place of work; working hours and work location; and other key job characteristics), and on employees' outcomes (work-nonwork balance; health and well-being; and job-related outcomes). We applied a quasi-experimental design within a large Dutch financial company (N = 2,912). We studied an intervention group (n = 2,391) and made comparisons with a reference group (n = 521). There were three study waves: (i) one/two months before, and (ii) 4 months and (iii) 10 months after implementation of NWW. Repeated measures analyses of covariance (involving 361 participants from the intervention group and 80 participants from the reference group) showed a large and significant shift from hours worked at the office to hours worked at home after implementation of NWW. Accordingly, commuting time was reduced. Employees remained working on week days and during day time. Psychosocial work-characteristics, work-nonwork balance, stress, fatigue, and job-related outcomes remained favourable and largely unaffected, but the health score in the intervention group decreased (medium effect). These findings suggest that the implementation of NWW does not necessarily lead to changes in psychosocial work characteristics, well-being or job-related outcomes.

Impact of noise on self-rated job satisfaction and health in open-plan offices: a structural equation modelling approach

This study uses a structural equation model to examine the effects of noise on self-rated job satisfaction and health in open-plan offices. A total of 334 employees from six open-plan offices in China and Korea completed a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire included questions assessing noise disturbances and speech privacy, as well as job satisfaction and health. The results indicated that noise disturbance affected self-rated health. Contrary to popular expectation, the relationship between noise disturbance and job satisfaction was not significant. Rather, job satisfaction and satisfaction with the environment were negatively correlated with lack of speech privacy. Speech privacy was found to be affected by noise sensitivity, and longer noise exposure led to decreased job satisfaction. There was also evidence that speech privacy was a stronger predictor of satisfaction with environment and job satisfaction for participants with high noise sensitivity. In addition, fit models for employees from China and Korea showed slight differences.

PRACTITIONER SUMMARY

This study is motivated by strong evidence that noise is the key source of complaints in open-plan offices. Survey results indicate that self-rated job satisfaction of workers in open-plan offices was negatively affected by lack of speech privacy and duration of disturbing noise.

Noise effect on comfort in open-space offices: development of an assessment questionnaire

It is currently accepted that noise is one of the most important annoyance factors in open-space offices. However, noise levels measured in open spaces of the tertiary sector rarely exceed 65 dB(A). It, therefore, appears necessary to develop a tool that can be used to assess the noise environment of these offices and identify the parameters to be taken into consideration when assessing the noise annoyance. This article presents a questionnaire to be filled by people working in such environment, and a case study in different open plan offices. The majority of the 237 respondents consider that the ambient noise level in their environment is high and that intelligible conversations between their colleagues represent the main source of noise annoyance. This annoyance was significantly correlated with their evaluation of sound intensity, which could not be represented by A-weighted level measurements.