Workplace planning and design standards in South Africa: office planning and evaluation standards for South Africa

English: The importance of workplace environmental conditions in improving and sustaining the productivity of end-users in offices was recognised. Developments in offices to support diversity in work style and work processes in offices have become a field of study in more advanced countries in Europe and Japan. This lead to the investigation of the standards of offices in South Africa, a fast developing country. The workspace influenced the level of success brought by the individual to the company. Facility managers realised the importance of end-user optimum productivity and the influence of end-user satisfaction in a competitive marked worldwide. What are the standards of South African offices, and what are the guidelines used to plan the ideal workspace? A study of the methods of the developed countries like Japan’s New Office Promotion Association (NOPA), and the Netherlands’ Centre for People and Buildings (CfPB) was used as a case study to provide guidelines as to what is important when planning a workspace, to end in the optimal physical resource. A comparison of these standards with the National Building Regulations (NBR) and its companion, the South African National Standards (SANS 10400), lead to the conclusion that the regulations set to plan offices was underdeveloped and therefore opened a field of research to develop a set of proposed guidelines. The standards of NOPA and CfPB were compared with the available standards from SANS 10400 and NBR to create a document with recommended minimum standards for workplace environments in South Africa. By using these recommended minimum standards as an evaluation instrument, a nationwide company, Telkom, was approached for participation on the bases of case study research to determine the quality of office environments in South Africa compared to the set standards concluded from other countries. The company was evaluated by using the Post Occupation Evaluation (POE) method introduced by Wolfgang Preiser (Preiser,1988:4). Performance evaluative research in workplace environments is a form of evidence-based research which aims to assess the functionality and serviceability levels of a specific facility on the basis of its ability to support and facilitate diverse work styles, as well as the user-needs and -requirements associated with it. The evaluation process was conducted according to the principles of an investigative-level Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) study, and aimed to assess the impact of stimuli from the workplace environment on the ability of users to optimally perform and accomplish work-related tasks. Conclusions drawn from this study indicated that users realise the impact that the overall work environment has on their ability to work productively. In this regard problems related to limited or inconvenient access to office resources, and problems related to poor thermal comfort (specifically with regards to the penetration of direct sunlight and lack of control over air-conditioning) occurred with a similar frequency. The results from this study were compared to the current regulatory standards in an attempt to create updated minimum standards. Since workplace environmental performance evaluation is still a new approach to the study of the built environment in South Africa, it is expected that data obtained through this study will contribute towards the founding of a database on workplace office environment standards in South Africa. By building up a database of this nature, it would be possible to enable comparative evaluations with international examples from researchers participating in cross-cultural evaluations of workplace environments as part of research initiatives. Most importantly, data and results generated by this study will enable valuable feedback to participants in the study in terms of facility performance, employee satisfaction, and factors that inhibit/enhance productivity.