ABSTRACT

Climate change is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world today. As we know in the last four decades we have seen, and will continue to see, a growing interest in ecology and increasing attention in the protection of the environment as one form of climate change mitigation. This interest can be translated into the built environment and the ecology of the workplace.

This chapter makes the case for workplace ‘ecology’ and builds a unique framework based on the principles of environmental auditing in the context of organisation, space and technology provision. This framework highlights the relationship between organisation, space and technology domains via the quantification of workforce satisfaction, comfort and productivity respectively, and will assist in measuring the success of business enterprise to create ‘healthy’ work environments for their people.

The assessment of workplace ecology can be achieved by using a structured survey of participants in the workplace, at all levels of responsibility, to determine an overall consensus of satisfaction, comfort and productivity specific to an individual in the context of their job responsibility and its inherent complexity. This research makes a significant contribution to the current body of literature by exploring the nature and strength of the above relationships, as well as a means of assessing overall workplace performance as an arithmetic mean of individual perception. The connection between satisfaction and comfort can be alternatively defined as ‘happiness’, the connection between satisfaction and productivity as ‘empowerment’ and the connection between comfort and productivity as ‘efficiency’.

Workplace ecology, just like environmental ecology, is a balance of factors that contribute to the health of an ‘eco-system’ that is fundamental to corporate success and continuous improvement. This chapter develops a five-star rating system for office workplaces based on an environmental audit procedure integrating organisational, spatial and technological attributes into a novel workplace ecology model.