Healthy workplaces that support employees’ health and well-being can be a goal in itself, but may also have intended or unintended effects on other values, such as employee satisfaction, productivity, costs, corporate image and risk. 1.2 Relationship between healthy workplaces and other values Too little time, too much work and tight deadlines are the most widely recognized risk factors, resulting in sleep disturbance, changes in mood, fatigue, headaches and stomach irritability. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (2014) warns for a disbalance between high job demands and available job resources. Other influencing factors on health and well-being are important as well, such as the context (cultural, social, economic, political), personal characteristics (age, gender, lifestyle), organizational issues (leadership, personal support) and job characteristics (work load, (mis)fit between demands and resources). Positive relationships were found between physical well-being and aspects that encourage physical activity between physical/psychological well-being and (day)light, individual control and real/artificial greenery and between social well-being and small shared rooms. (2020) on the relationship between interior office space (layout, furniture, light, greenery, controls and noise) and employees’ physical, psychological and social well-being showed that open-plan offices, shared rooms and higher background noise are negatively related to health. In a survey of 2,000 office workers, occupants reported preferences for lots of natural light, access to outdoor spaces, contemplation spaces, support from colleagues and private as well as collaborative spaces, whereas the main irritants were noise in open-plan areas, lack of natural light, lack of colour, lack of greenery, lack of artwork, lack of fresh air, no personal control of temperature, lack of privacy, clutter and inflexible space ( British Council for Offices, 2018).Īnother frequently assessed factor is office type. It appears that in particular a poor indoor climate, noise and distraction have a negative impact on employees’ health and well-being, whereas appropriate opportunities to communicate and to concentrate and contact with nature contribute to a healthy workplace. The relationship between physical workplace characteristics and health and well-being has been explored by a variety of studies, using reviews of the literature ( Forooraghi et al., 2020 Van der Voordt, 2021), surveys ( Cordero et al., 2020), case studies ( Bauer, 2020) and conducting short-term experiments using mobile devices ( Nelson and Holzer, 2017). Besides, people have become more aware of the impact of health and well-being on our quality of life and the risk of health complaints, illness or – in worst cases – burnout ( Appel-Meulenbroek et al., 2020). This may be because of the shift from a one-sided focus on cost reduction to a more holistic and integrated value-based approach and an optimal balance between costs and benefits of interventions in buildings, facilities and services ( Jensen and Van der Voordt, 2017). The past decades show a growing awareness of the impact of the physical environment on peoples’ health and well-being, both in academic research and in professional publications. 1.1 Impact of the physical environment on health and well-being Well-being reflects one’s feelings about oneself in relation to the world, personal feelings about motivation, competence, aspirations and degree of personal control. Health is the result of a complex interaction between the physiological, psychological, personal and organizational resources available to individuals and the stress placed upon them by their physical and social environment at work and home ( Clements-Croome, 2018). As such, a healthy workplace can be defined as a workplace that contributes to the physical, mental and social well-being of its users. The WHO defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. The full terms of this licence may be seen at Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Copyright © 2021, Theo van der Voordt and Per Anker Jensen.
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