Previous researchers have had difficulty in defining what constitutes office productivity, especially in 'knowledge' environments rather than 'processing' environments. The main body of published research that attempts to address the link largely addresses the physical environment. It falls into two main categories, those of office layout and office comfort. It must be noted that much of the physical environment literature lacks any theoretical framework. This study developed a validated theoretical framework for the evaluation of office productivity, and included components to represent both the physical and the behavioural environment. It is proposed that by adopting such an approach, insights into the dynamic nature, or connectivity, of office environments can be established. The main objective of this thesis was to investigate the effects of the office environment on its occupant's perceived productivity. The study's strength is that it is based on two sizable data sets. Whilst the data collected contain data about the physical characteristics of the office environment, it had in addition data pertaining to the behavioural environment. The categorical data collected provided a unique opportunity to undertake an analysis of office occupiers by work process type. One of the key contributions of this study was the development of the components of office productivity, which were: comfort, office layout, informal interaction points, environmental services, designated areas, interaction and distraction. The components were reduced to four in preparation for a more detailed statistical analysis. The four distinct components were comfort, office layout, interaction and distraction. This study establishes that it is the behavioural environment that has the greatest impact on office productivity. It demonstrates that it is the dynamic elements of the office environment, interaction and distraction that are perceived as having the bigger positive and negative influences on self assessed productivity and explains the finding in a model in which knowledge creation and knowledge transfer, and ultimately productivity, are enabled through various forms of communication. Managers responsible for office environments can use the techniques, and the analysis procedures, to assist in evaluating and identifying productive office environments. The positive results can be just as important to the manager as the negative, as they give an indication as to areas in the office environment that are working correctly. A comparative approach between offices can allow best practice solutions to be transferred from one office to another.

Offices are evolving rapidly to facilitate organisational cost reductions and to better support contemporary working practices. This thesis explores the design and reconfiguration of physical workspace. Theories of the physical environment, work design and ideas from the design literature are drawn upon to understand interactions in modern workspace. The evaluation of a global engineering company's office reconfiguration programme provides the research context. Study one examines the relationships between features of contemporary office configuration (proximity and break-out areas), staff autonomy and communication. Data from 405 employees in differing offices were collected. Break-out areas and autonomy were positively related to communication. A three-way interaction was observed, suggesting that configuration affects groups of workers differently and that the environment-worker relationship should be considered as a system. Study two examines the trade-offs present in contemporary reconfigurations (reduced proximity and density, vs., increased break-out provision). The potential mediating role of crowding in the environment- worker relationship is also investigated. The research utilised a longitudinal quasi-experimental design. Data were collected from 296 respondents, at two time-points, in three offices. Reconfigurations that reduced individual workspace (density and proximity) were related to increased crowding. Inclusion of greater break-out provision within offices that reduce individual workspace appear not to trade-off negative relationships with crowding and communication. Findings indicate that crowding partially mediates the relationship between density and proximity with communication. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed. Future research and methodological directions are also articulated.

Among many issues involved within the field of manufacturing systems, the design of facilities layout is an ongoing and interesting research field, where new solutions and approaches are sought to determine the appropriate location and physical organisation of the resources in manufacturing systems. Issues such as space, material handling, machine placement and orientation, utilities location, and environmental factors are important features that may be considered when establishing the requirements of a facility layout design. The facility layout design can be thought of in terms of interconnecting work centres that can be represented by a set of interrelated vertices in a graph. Directed graphs can be used to characterise each product operation sequence, which combined into a single directed graph, be used to represent appropriately a layout design. Doing this together with the material handling system requirements, will allow better facilities planning and may improve process sequences that should be reflected in better designs. The Strong Component Based Methodology proposed here, obtains a graphical structure from the integration of various products and using their operation sequences to produce a relationship diagram. The attributes of the resultant structure are used to create this diagram. The objective is to obtain layouts that minimise material handling, that is, as close as possible to that which can be obtained with dedicated facilities for each product family but without the capital costs involved in the case of the latter. Encouraging results have been obtained by considering strong components, a feature of directed graphs, because less computational resources than in the case of many previous methods, which use Quadratic Assignment Problem approaches, are required to formulate and produce a relationship diagram. Moreover, this approach produces faster designs than other graph theoretic approaches because it avoids using planar and dual graphs. These characteristics allow the Strong Components approach to address more complex situations and obtain comparable or better solutions than previous approaches. The proposed Strong Component approach is a robust and versatile tool to support layout designs. It is a robust methodology because it provides efficient relationship diagrams even in cases when the resultant structure has relatively few strong component relationships. It is a versatile approach, because it can address various situations and can use different criteria to create layouts. Thus, the proposed approach offers effective-economical relationship diagrams to produce the same set of products as when producing them in dedicated facilities.