The document discusses how the work environment, including the physical setting and social surroundings, impacts employee performance and organizational effectiveness. A manager must consider factors like plant layout, lighting, noise levels, and employee involvement in the work setting. Improving the physical work environment can positively influence workers' perceptions and productivity, though simply changing the space may not be enough without also addressing organizational culture. The document outlines questions to evaluate aspects of the work setting and obstacles to enhancing the physical workplace.

1. Human resources performance
Today it is widely recognized that a manager who wants to improve organizational
performance must concern himself with the total environment in which employees
work. He must be sensitive to the need for change in the physical and social
surroundings in which work is performed, as well as to questions of compensation,
hours of work, incentives, recognition, and the like.
The importance of the physical setting-plant layout, lighting, ventilation, and so forth-
on productivity was an early concern of scientific managers.
There is very complex and subtle interdependence of
(a) Management efforts to introduce change,
(b) Workers perceptions of such efforts, and
(c) Organizational efficiency. Unfortunately, the impact of this important insight-as
well as a limited understanding of the way space and other aspects of the physical
environment affect people-led to inferences that the physical setting hardly mattered.
Today space planners and organizational development experts have found in a
broader approach to the physical environment natural and fruitful areas for
collaboration in their efforts to improve organizational effectiveness.
A broad view of the work environment requires a firm to consider the convenience
and esthetics of plant or office location just as important as the efficiency and
attractiveness of the plant itself, but for most managers plant or office location is a
given. For them the more direct and continuing concerns are likely to be light,
ventilation, noise level, layout of work space, and the trappings of status. Some of the
major considerations are summed up in the following questions.
• Is the workplace big enough to give employees easy access to all necessary material
and to allow them to perform their jobs without getting in each other's way?
• Does the workplace contain all the necessary materials and provide reasonable
access to less frequently used resources such as copying machines?
• Is there sufficient flexibility in the rooms to accommodate special needs and to
permit easy adjustments as conditions change?
• How effective is the management of distance in facilitating the flow of work, in
needs for privacy, in facilitating essential communication, in establishing a friendly
social climate and (if required) conferring status?
• Are staff meeting places appropriate? Can one room accommodate the entire staff at
one time?

2. • Is the work setting reasonably free of distraction from noise, smells, and
interruptions?
• Within the constraints imposed by the nature of the workplace, have efforts been
made to make the setting orderly and esthetically pleasing through the use of light,
color, materials, effective arrangements, comfort of seating, and so forth, that give
some semblance of organization and permit logical relationships while providing
opportunity for variety?
• Within constraints imposed by work flow and other production requirements, is the
employee given the maximum freedom to control the arrangement and aesthetics of
his work area?
• Should more be done to make people sensitive to their setting and to involve them in
improving it?
One major obstacle to improving physical setting is often passivity rather than active
opposition to change. A passive attitude stems from personal characteristics, such as
un awareness of what can be changed or an acceptance of the status quo. It results
from an absence of any analysis of whether an inherited arrangement has any lack of
analysis of the impact of the work setting on performance and the fear of raising
questions about issues that may seem to lie outside one's prerogatives.
• The importance of work in an individual life will decline, perhaps to the point where
other activities will absorb most of his energies and will be the source of self-
satisfaction and status. There has been a great decline in the proportion of an
employee life that is spent on the job: The workweek is shorter by a third; vacations
are longer; and workers generally enter the labor force later and retire earlier than they
did in the past. The step from a reduction in hours worked to a substantial decline in
the importance of production and distribution activities is admittedly a big one; but in
the long run the link between work performance as presently defined, consumption,
self-fulfillment, or status could be severed. In such a setting there would be
continuing efforts to eliminate the physical and psychic discomforts and hazards
associated with work but perhaps less attention to efforts to make work interesting
and satisfying since these factors would count for little.
• Work will continue to be a central focus for most people in the labor force, but the
twin needs to humanize work and conserve energy will dampen the demand for goods
and continue to increase the demand for services. The scale of an organization will
become an increasingly important consideration; resources will be treated as capital
goods rather than income; and intermediate technologies will be developed that will
be more congenial to man. In such a society one could envision increasing attention to
job redesign, worker participation, and the like:
• Another view is that technology will solve the prospective energy shortage and
greatly reduce damage to the environment resulting from industrial production and
population growth; and population growth will taper off as economic welfare
improves around the world. Work will retain its role in society, even if more of the
traditional production tasks are automated and a growing proportion of the population
is engaged in services or in a revival of traditional handicrafts. Unmet demands for

3. services will keep labor force participation and employment high, and the work ethic
will continue to have the same hold that it does today.
• A variant of the first view above is that in the next century the distinction between
work and non-work activities will fade.
• Of a less sweeping and more specific nature is the prediction that the continuing
rapid pace of technological and social change will necessitate a more flexible
approach to the organization of work-to the use of task forces for special projects, for
example-and to a decline in the emphasis on hierarchical organizations. This, in turn,
would increase the need for better trained and more autonomous workers. To make
such workers available would, in turn, require greater emphasis on training,
particularly emphasis on skills that enable workers to adapt more readily to different
challenges, and less emphasis on the specific tasks that now are the focus of training
programs. However, in the absence of successful efforts to make workers more
adaptable, the flexibility of organizational approaches to work might not be
universally attractive.
• An extension of the foregoing view is the vision of a more flexible boundary for
organizations-with a greater emphasis on sub-contracting; leasing of office space and
equipment; and, for certain kinds of jobs, perhaps the possibility of more work being
done at home (which could be linked easily to offices through new communications
technology). Workers in such an environment would have a smaller sense of
attachment to employing organizations and perhaps less pressure to conform to
organizational demands for conformity.
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