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This research analyses the current focus on family-friendly offices and develops a set of recommendations for office providers and operators to help them facilitate this new scenario. The main drivers of change towards family friendly offices are social policy, employers and employees.
Demographic changes such as the later transition to parenthood...
Citations
... . surveys of current practices, emphasizing the social science perspective (for example, Felstead et al., 2005;Lewis and Cooper, 2005;Strelitz and Edwards, 2006;and Hyman et al., 2005) . architectural case studies of new office design (for example, Myerson and Ross, 2006) . ...
Flexible working gives employees in knowledge-based organizations new opportunities for choosing the locations and times of work activities. This trend has been described many times, but the literature has little quantified data about the resulting activity patterns, or their impact on the scale of demand in buildings. A preliminary simulation model of individual employees' decision-making in office-based organizations was developed, generating quantified output data describing the times and places chosen for work activities. Decision-making was based on individual preferences between home and office locations over a 25-time period weekly cycle. Systematic models runs provided indications of possible trends. Survey data from real organizations that compared participants' actual and preferred activity patterns provided some empirical support for the model findings. The model requires further empirical validation, and offers scope for enhancement. Information provided by models of this type would be highly relevant for the briefing, design, and management of buildings for the knowledge economy.
