Personal Control of the Indoor Environment in Offices: Relations with Building Characteristics, Influence on Occupant Perception and Reported Symptoms Related to the Building—The Officair Project

Personal control over various indoor environment parameters, especially in the last decades, appear to have a significant role on occupants’ comfort, health and productivity. To reveal this complex relationship, 7441 occupants of 167 recently built or retrofitted office buildings in eight European countries participated in an online survey about personal/health/work data as well as physical/psycho-social information. The relationship between the types of control available over indoor environments and the perceived personal control of the occupants was examined, as well as the combined effect of the control parameters on the perceived comfort using multilevel statistical models. The results indicated that most of the occupants have no or low control on noise. Half of the occupants declared no or low control on ventilation and temperature conditions. Almost one-third of them remarked that they do not have satisfactory levels of control for lighting and shading from sun conditions. The presence of operable windows was shown to influence occupants’ control perception over temperature, ventilation, light and noise. General building characteristics, such as floor number and floor area, office type, etc., helped occupants associate freedom positively with control perception. Combined controlling parameters seem to have a strong relation with overall comfort, as well as with perception regarding amount of privacy, office layout and decoration satisfaction. The results also indicated that occupants with more personal control may have less building-related symptoms. Noise control parameter had the highest impact on the occupants’ overall comfort.