Occupants' quality of life experience with sustainable work environments : using a mixed-methods approach to develop a humane and sustainable framework for assessing the indoor environmental quality in office buildings

This research studies perceived Quality of Life (QoL) and Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) of occupants’ in the work environments of sustainable office buildings certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system (green buildings) and in conventional office buildings. QoL is defined in this research in terms of perceived health, comfort, and productivity. The quality of indoor environments is important because people spend most of their time inside buildings, and in contemporary society, much of the time spent in work environments is in office buildings. In this era of growing concerns about sustainability and the increased awareness of buildings’ negative impacts on occupants, green buildings have been promoted as sustainable solutions to these issues. LEED is the most popular rating system for measuring the performance of green buildings in North America. However, the literature review indicates that there are user complaints about the IEQ of LEED-certified office buildings. LEED-certified buildings are assessed based on technical measures of building performance. This assessment way may create a gap between measured and perceived performance from the user perspective. This raises the question of whether buildings certified with the LEED criteria are humane from the QoL experience of occupants in office buildings. Hence, this research is therefore to propose a new framework that takes into account not only sustainable but also humane factors for evaluating work environments. The study uses a mixed-methods approach – using both quantitative and qualitative methods and proceeds in three phases to comprehensively study occupants’ perceived QoL experience in two LEED and one conventional office building. Phase I uses observations to document the physical work environment and users’ behavioral interactions with the environment. Phase II uses interviews to describe the occupants’ QoL experience, explore the possible IEQ factors shaping their QoL, and to define the constructs of a humane work environment. Questionnaires were distributed concurrently to measure the relationship between occupants’ perceived QoL and IEQ factors that are derived from the literature. Phase III uses focus groups to converge and focus the results of the study. The results are analyzed separately and triangulated using an integrative mixed-methods analysis to interpret, corroborate, conclude, and increase the validation of the findings.  The study compared occupants’ perceived QoL in «green» and «conventional» office buildings and revealed 32 quality factors (30 IEQ factors and two others) that influence the QoL experience in office work environments. Also the constructs of what composes a humane work environment based on occupants’ viewpoints have been identified. A new comprehensive, sustainable, and humane framework for assessing IEQ in work environments is developed. This framework guides the relationship between IEQ in work environments and occupants’ QoL as an environment-behavior system.

Keyphrases: LEED, Sustainable development, Green buildings, Work environments, Humane, Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), Quality of Life (QoL), Building occupants