The open office conundrum: Post‐occupancy assessment of speech privacy in offices

Post‐occupancy evaluation is used to assess whether a completed building is delivering to its occupants and owners the benefits which were set as goals in the design process, and utilizing this information to improve future projects. As part of its workplace research program, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has embarked upon an ambitious program where both objective measures of physical conditions (e.g., Articulation Index) and occupant satisfaction are assessed. Comprehensive evaluation of eleven GSA workplaces has shown that both before and after renovation, employees consistently rank acoustical privacy high in importance, but low in performance. This presentation will address three questions. First, what have we learned about the objective acoustical performance of contemporary open plan workplaces? Second, what have we learned about occupants subjective perception of office acoustics? Third, what guidance for new projects can GSA provide designers to improve occupant satisfaction with ...