Facilities Management: physical built environmental factors that influence user performance in an office building

In a generic sense, all services and core products are delivered to the users in a manmade space called ‘facility’ that serves the organization to deliver its core business objectives. Effective, efficient and comfortable working environment improves quality of life, wellbeing and perceived satisfaction of the user which improves performance to achieving the organisation’s goal. The appropriate configuration of the built environmental factors of a facility helps create a pleasant indoor environment and therefore have influential characteristics to dominate user’s productivity and performance. It is evident that quality of the built environmental factors will encourage users’ healthy working style and improve uses’ wellbeing. Facilities Management of an office building is an integrated approach that maintains, improves and adapts the built environment to support the primary business objectives of the organization. It is about managing user perceived satisfaction and includes the desire to provide a pleasant experience for the users of the facility in order to improve performance. In an organisation (SMEs[1] in the UK), the role of the manipulation of the nature of the facility is one of the primary objectives of a facilities manager for improved user’s performance and consequently the overall organizational performance. This research paper therefore aims to identify the key built environmental factors that influence the office building users towards improving their performance in a business enterprise. Quantitative research methodology has been adopted using questionnaires survey tool for this paper. The built environmental factors have been measured by the user on the basis of quality, their perceived satisfaction and the effect on their performance to establish a ranking order of significance. [1] Small to medium business enterprises in the United Kingdom