While the coronavirus-induced transition to our home offices has presented whole new challenges in terms of our ability to concentrate, such concerns have a long history due to the fashion for open plan offices that has dominated over the last few decades.
As people return to the workplace and things such as social distancing becomes an issue, now is perhaps a time to reassess just how our offices are designed so that employees can concentrate as much as possible.
It’s a task that new research from RMIT and Arup believes can be aided by the use of artificial intelligence to help ensure our workplaces maintain that ideal mixture of social and solitary spaces.
Comfortable workspaces
The workplaces of old have had numerous complaints over the years, and with data from software company Citrix revealing that 64% of us aren’t all that keen on returning to the office at all right now, it’s clear that numerous changes are going to be required.
This rupture presents facilities staff with a fantastic opportunity to refashion the workplace away from the cost center of old, and towards something altogether more supportive of a productive workforce.
The researchers set out to try and find ways to improve both the comfort and concentration levels of employees, and tapped into AI to help them do so. The AI was specifically used to try and learn specific patterns in human behavior, which can then help to successfully design the right workplace to support those behaviors.
The team worked with psychologists to spot a number of crucial variables that impact our concentration levels at work, before then figuring out how those variables could be measured. Once this system was designed, it was tested out on 31 members of staff across two of Arup’s offices over a four week period, with data captured on things such as temperature, noise levels, and air pressure.
“We used that information along with survey data to train machine learning algorithms that could identify patterns in perceived concentration and activity, and then provided solutions for making these spaces work best for people,” the researchers say.
Activity-based working
The results showed that people would often concentrate best in different parts of the workplace. For instance, most employees had a particular spot that they liked, whether this was near to their manager, or a window, or even the kitchen. Not being able to work from this desired location tended to make people more sensitive to other aspects of the workplace, such as the temperature. This sensitivity to temperature also grew as the day progressed.
The results also showed that productivity in the mornings was quite variable, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the quality of sleep enjoyed by each employee the night before played a crucial role.
Concentration also seemed to be significantly affected by the number of meetings we have, both in terms of formal meetings and informal ones. Those who had the unenviable task of undergoing five formal meetings per day unsurprisingly suffered in terms of their concentration levels.
Informal meetings were also important, however. These events, which the team defined as activity-based run-ins, were preferred by some workers as they could help them to reduce the number of formal meetings they had, but were equally found to be a distraction for others.
Another interesting finding revolved around the CO2 levels in a workplace, with high concentrations linked with poor concentration levels. The researchers believe this is a direct consequence of high occupant density levels.
“The results for CO2 and thermal comfort underline just how important a high-quality heating, cooling and ventilation system is in office design, as well as indoor plants to reduce CO2,” they explain.
Flexible workspaces
The researchers believe that this kind of AI-powered system could prove invaluable in helping managers make better and more informed decisions regarding the design of their workplaces, both in terms of maximizing productivity, and also ensuring that the various covid-related concerns of employees are addressed.
“We see this type of system having the potential to eventually be used to enable informed decision-making regarding workplace design and layout, or even to suggest to people when to take breaks, what zone might suit them best and so on,” they explain.
