Impact of Interior Physical Environment on Academicians' Productivity in Pakistan Higher Education Institutes Perspectives

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionErgonomics is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities. The International Ergonomics Association (IEA, 2000, p.1) defines ergonomics as follows:"Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance".A general perception is that a better workplace environment produces better results. Most of the workplaces or offices are designed according to the nature of the job. In corporate level, productivity is affected by many factors such as workers, work environment health and safety moral and cultural aspects. To get more or better productivity, it is necessary to provide a better workplace.Participatory ergonomics includes a large variety of approaches, and an interesting framework to classify the approaches which has been developed by Haines et al. (2002). Apart from the classification, it is interesting to know what factors influence the chance of being successful. Success factors have been described in various studies (e.g. Koningsveld et al., 2005; Looze et al. 2001; Vink et al., 2005). These are arranging direct workers' participation, arranging strong management support, carrying out a good inventory, using a step-by-step approach, arranging that a steering group is established with responsibilities, checking the effects, including side-effects. At an early stage, to focus only on health issues is not encouraged and to describe the cost such as benefit ratio in monetary terms and with non-quantitative measures is approved.Figure 1 shows the summary of the success factors.This paper does not include all dimensions and factors of the physical environment and employees' productivity but limited to the following variables:* Employees' Productivity: According to Hameed and Amjad (2009), productivity is a ratio to measure how well an organization (or individual, industry, country) converts input resources (labor, materials, machines, etc.) into goods and services. In this study, subjective productivity measurement method is used. The measures of this method are not based on quantitative operational information. Instead, they are based on personnel's subjective assessments. Wang and Gianakis (1999) have defined subjective performance measure as an indicator used to assess individuals' aggregated perceptions, attitudes or assessments toward an organizations product or service. Subjective productivity data is usually collected using survey questionnaires. Subjective data can also be descriptive or qualitative collected by interviews. Subjective productivity data is gathered from employees, supervisors, clients, customers and suppliers (Croome & Kaluarachchi, 2000).* Office Design: Providing a workplace for employees that is equipped to make the most of a company's human resources is essential. Chiefly the layout of the office space and its system increase productivity specifying that half of all employees say they would put in an extra hour of work every day if they were supplied with an improved workplace. Present study used a number of factors which impacts on employees' productivity in higher education institutes perspectives in Khyber Pakhtoonkhawa (KPK) province of Pakistan such as furniture, temperature, noise, lighting and other arrangements.The more specific objectives are:1. To analyze the office design of different universities in Khyber Pakhtoonkhawa (KPK) province of Pakistan.2. To highlight the need of better workplace for improving productivity,3. To determine the effect of office design on physical environment4. To analyze the features which employees value in their workplace. …