Scoping review of health in office design approaches

What is it about?

This paper explores the literature on office design approaches in relation to employee health. The overall goal is to facilitate the practical use and theoretical development of design approaches to healthy offices. A scoping review of 7432 papers collected from four electronic databases and five scientific journals resulted in the selection of 18 papers for content analysis. Various office design approaches relating to building design features and health were identified. The findings highlight challenges for this emergent field, including (i) a paucity of literature on office design approaches, (ii) a lack of definitions of health and healthy offices, (iii) ambiguous design strategies, and (iv) a lack of a holistic office design approach. Office design approaches are potentially valuable resources but an under-considered topic for healthy office development. This study is the first scoping review to map and compare different design approaches in the context of office design and its main contribution is in encouraging researchers and practitioners to bring a salutogenic and holistic perspective to their design approaches.

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