Associations between spatial attributes, IEQ exposures and occupant movement behaviour in an open-plan office

Office workers spend much of their working day sitting or standing still, which can have dramatic impacts on their health. The physical environment has long been regarded as influencing people's behaviour, including how much and how often they move. Developing a deeper understanding of relationships between specific spatial and environmental attributes and office workers' movement behaviour may inform the development of effective interventions to help people to move more whilst at work. In this study, the daily movement behaviour of 22 office workers was analysed using high resolution location data collected over 4 weeks and compared to their individual exposure to objectively measured spatial and IEQ attributes of their workplace. The results showed that increased visibility of colleagues had significant negative associations with several measures of daily movement behaviour, including the total area utilised each day (beta = -0.73, 95% CI: 1.29, -0.14, p < 0.05). The distance to office destinations such as kitchens and meeting rooms was found to be positively associated with the median duration of moving bouts (beta = 0.29, 95% CI: 0.11, 0.50, p < 0.01). Associations with IEQ exposures were primarily related to stationary behaviours, such as those between operative temperature and maximum stationary bout duration (beta = 149.15, 95% CI: 43.8, 260.0, p < 0.01). Although in most cases, the material impacts of the associations were small, the results suggest several promising avenues to pursue in the development of new design and policy-based interventions to help reduce stationary time and increase movement in the workplace.