The influence of the built environment of the workplaces on the workers' well-being: a study towards enhancing prime working age workers' productivity through interior design

Workplaces are the place where people spend mostly half of their life there. It is not exclusive to office buildings and companies; indeed, in each department in every building there are individuals working behind the scenes in an attempt to better the society. The workplace environment must accomplish workers’ requirements that vary between physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. Thus, the employees can provide high performance and be more productive, which leads to a successful group, corporations, society, and world generally. The aims for this study were to explore the different strategies that big companies used to attract new employees and to ensure the well-being of the current workers within workplaces. In addition to investigating the effects of the workplace environment on the workers’ well-being in the previous studies, this research analyzes six cases of good examples for companies' headquarters and evaluating their design techniques. The results showed that these companies share the same factors to increase their workers’ well-being. Flexible workspaces that provide workers the ability to choose where, how, and when to work is the first factor. Promoting body movements, reducing stress and depression, and building private spaces or facilities to energize workers are other factors. However, most of the cases involved the inspirational encouragement in interior design as major factors to enhance workers’ well-being. Furthermore, some of the applied techniques in the buildings are similar, like offering a flexible workplace, while others vary following the company industry, image and location.