Green offices for well-being at work

User comfort is taken fully into account from the design phase onwards

Aspects of physical comfort play an important role in performance. Green offices provide an outstanding user experience in terms of appearance, acoustic quality and temperature. Individual elements are carefully coordinated during the planning phase to ensure that green office space offers a pleasant, harmonious, communication-friendly environment.

In the age of the computer workstation, visual comfort is a prerequisite for good performance. Artificial lighting makes it relatively easy to avoid glare, but the art lies in creating lighting that gives people a sense of well-being over the long term. Daylight is a crucial ingredient here.

Plenty of natural light
Nothing beats sun and natural light. In office spaces, a high proportion of light should come from natural sources because that is what the human body needs. Generous glazing and open architecture, combined with dynamic use of daylight for the associated sense of time, are essential for well-being.

To ensure optimum daylight quality it is important that room brightness changes with external brightness so that the rhythm of night and day is not lost. While ensuring adequate solar shading and protection from glare, users should still be aware of the outdoors. People also need to be able to see out to avoid feeling cooped up.

Maximum sunlight without glare
To ensure uniform illumination from daylight far into the room, the lintel height and degree of reflection from the materials used in the interior are crucial. The daylight factor and daylight autonomy are measures of the ideal amount of daylight in a room or building.

Getting the design of the façade right is one of the toughest challenges when planning a building. It is important to maximise use of the available natural daylight while at the same time providing solar shading and protection from glare. If luminance from daylight is too high around the window area this will cause excessive glare. Ways of guarding against this, such as utilising modern solar shading systems, must be incorporated into the design. This kind of shading reduces luminance while ensuring workstations are lit effectively from an ergonomic standpoint.

Getting the amount of artificial lighting right
Creating the optimum lighting scenario with electric lighting is much easier than with natural light. There are five key factors to consider when it comes to assessing visual comfort under artificial light:

• The level of illumination
• Uniform distribution of light throughout the room
• No glare (either direct or reflected)
• The direction of light and shadow
• Optimum colour reproduction and correlated colour temperature of light sources

The advantages of indirect lighting are that it provides uniform light distribution and minimises glare. Direct lighting, on the other hand, is more energy-efficient, increases contrast and can be controlled as needed. Combining both types of illumination usually enables a cost-effective solution to be found that delivers optimal visual comfort.

Psychological factors alone are a good reason for having opening windows. People feel cut off from the outside world behind fully closed façades. Transparency alone is not enough, the ability to open windows is also important.

Good sound insulation is essential in modern workplaces that combine open plan offices with a high level of transparency. The amount of noise generated by voices alone is repeatedly underestimated. Noise levels affect individuals’ ability to concentrate and therefore staff productivity.

The usual sound insulation measures are often not enough to ensure good acoustic comfort in modern offices, with many investors aiming to cut the amount of workspace per employee in open team and group structures. This can have a counterproductive effect on performance due to the inevitable increase in noise. In open plan offices in particular, communication and the intelligibility of speech may be considerably impaired.

Modular acoustic solutions
Interior designers, planners and office fitters are now creating sophisticated solutions that make efficient use of space while also meeting the needs of workers. Acoustic screens made of glass and sound-absorbing moveable partitions give structure to the space without losing eye contact. Compact acoustic modules and furniture that absorb a broad bandwidth of noise can be used to design open plan offices both visually and acoustically. Cupboards and wall units can be retrofitted with absorbers consisting of metal cladding which integrate seamlessly into the office’s existing design scheme. This allows smaller spaces to be configured as offices for several persons while keeping background noise down to the same level as in a cellular office. Despite the variety of acoustic measures currently available, dividing space into small units is still advisable for work requiring high levels of concentration.