Our favorite highlights from The Steelcase National Study of Office Environments: Do They Work?, the published report of a survey conducted by Louis Harris & Associates, Inc.:
Eighty-two per cent of the office workers in this country have positive feelings about their jobs. There is little difference whether the person is male or female, or has been on the job more than six years or less than six years, and little difference whatever the type of job or the job level.
The three most important considerations that an office worker looks for in a job are clarity of the scope and responsibilities of the job, interesting work, and access to the tools, equipment, and materials needed to get the job done well.
During the past five years, seventy-three per cent of this country’s office workers have had a change in the location of personal work space.
Ninety-four per cent of today’s office workers feel that the way their personal work spaces look is important.
The two most important characteristics of a personal work space are how neat and well-organized it looks and the amount of privacy it affords. There is almost universal agreement on this among business executives and office workers.
More than seventy per cent of today’s office workers are satisfied with their personal work spaces.
Office workers on the average spend only 6.4 hours per day at or in their personal work spaces.
The Harris people interviewed one thousand and forty-seven office workers, two hundred and nine executives, and two hundred and twenty-five office designers. None of the office workers, executives, or office designers mentioned the importance of nice, clear, long corridors or of Coke machines. A nice, clear, long corridor is an important thing to have in an office because office workers are then able to trip up or do a fireman’s carry on an unsuspecting colleague. A Coke machine is important because an office worker can buy a nice, refreshing drink at it, stand around it and flirt, or sit on top of it stark naked while having a small nervous breakdown or while reading the poetry of Adrienne Barbeau.
—January 8, 1979