Is your boss the host with the most?

Did you visit friends or family this weekend?

How welcome did you feel?

Do you want to visit again - or return the invitation?

Did they offer advice on transport or parking?

Perhaps tracked down your favourite snack or checked for allergies?

Was there a clean and convenient spot to hang your coat and leave your bag?

A high chair for a toddler or an extra cushion for someone with a bad back?

Around 75% of us feel as though we’re more productive at home on the kitchen table or in the spare room than we do in the places hosted by our employers, the office.?

And yet employers want us to spend more time ‘at their place’.

We all know what counts is whether your host or hostess made you feel genuinely noticed and at ease, not how much they spent or even where they live. It’s also common sense that no amount of lavish catering or gold-plated taps will make up for bickering or bullying hosts.?

It’s the same with workplace design.?

The technical term for how well your workplace delivers is called Interior Environmental Quality (or IEQ).? IEQ satisfaction is the strongest positive predictor of staff engagement, especially in private offices -?A longitudinal investigation of work environment stressors on the performance and wellbeing of office workers.

This large-scale review identified three broad levels, similar to Maslo’s hierarchy of needs:?Indoor environment quality effects on occupant satisfaction and energy consumption: Empirical evidence from subtropical offices.

1.? Basics: Acoustics, basic temperature and humidity, lighting, privacy and cleanliness.

2.? Performance factors: Thermal comfort, indoor air quality, furnishing, available space and personal control - access to the light switches comes top of the list

3.? And the Bonus factor, things like a gym or a free cafe. But of all these perks, just having a window came out top every time -?Comparing better building design and operation to other corporate strategies for improving organizational productivity: a?review and synthesis.?

Getting IEQ right matters because when you feel you’re working in a space that’s set up to help you be your best, you believe your productivity goes up. That in turn boosts objective productivity, engagement and satisfaction. Men seem to be most strongly affected by specific elements of IEQ, while women tend to experience their environment ‘in the round’ -?The impacts of building characteristics, social psychological and cultural factors on indoor environment quality productivity belief.

This classic paper by Fisk and Rosenfeld estimates that improved indoor environment can result in a direct increase in productivity, ranging between 0.5 and 5 percent -?A genetic algorithm based framework to model the relationship between building renovation decisions and occupants’ satisfaction with indoor environmental quality.?Another study calculates the potential financial benefits of improving indoor environments exceed costs by a factor of 18 to 47 -?Estimates of Improved Productivity and Health from Better Indoor Environments.

On the flip side, poor IEQ chips away at productivity and morale. One study found reduced?cognitive performance between 2.4% and 5.8%, and up to 14.8% for some. Every incremental increase in stress factors directly reduced performance -?A longitudinal investigation of work environment stressors on the performance and wellbeing of office workers.

So which dimensions of the IEQ count the most?

Noise, especially sound levels inside the building consistently tops the list of IEQ factors that employees care about, followed by air quality, light and thermal satisfaction -?Perceived Indoor Environment and Occupants’ Comfort in European “Modern” Office Buildings: The OFFICAIR Study. Perceived control over the environment is the single biggest factor in satisfaction. Simply having access to the light switch made the greatest difference overall.?Perhaps unsurprisingly, these effects? are greatest in open plan compared to closed offices -?Indoor environmental factors affecting the productivity of workers in office buildings.

It’s hard to isolate the effects of any one dimension in a complex environment like an office. But one study found that every one-unit increase in perceived quality of light related to a reduction in risk of stress of 0.88 -?Associations of perceived indoor environmental quality with stress in the workplace.

The classic Snowball effect study with the CBRE and University of Twente linked changes to dynamic lighting with supplemental task lighting and enhanced control with an increase in subjective performance of 18% and 12% in objective performance. Staff reported feeling more energised and 76% even reported they felt happier - The Snowball Effect of Healthy Offices.

Veitch et al concluded that “People who appraise their lighting as good will also appraise the room as more attractive, be in a more pleasant mood, be more satisfied with the work environment, and more engaged in their work.”?-?Lighting quality and office work: two field simulation experiments.

Employees who feel welcomed to the office as honoured guests are more likely to accept the invitation to return - and to get more done while they are there.