Abstract:
The workplace is where office workers spend most of their lives and in a typical workday eight
hours are spent in the work environment. Therefore, the workplace must be a comfortable
environment in which employees can perform to their greatest capability. To ease the mental
stress of employees, offices invest in recreational spaces that boost teamwork and morale.
But there is a lack of studies with guidance regarding what recreational spaces are preferred by
employees or how these spaces can be integrated into the workspace. Without this knowledge,
offices may invest in spaces that will hardly be used by the employees and create an overall loss.
Hence, this study was conducted to find what recreational spaces are essential in the workspace
and where they should be placed in terms of a typical corporate office layout. A questionnaire
was used to collect data from offices in the Western Province of Sri Lanka to test out the following
hypotheses. (1) Employees prefer to work collectively and prefer common spaces. (2)The most
preferred recreational activity is ‘walking in the park’. (3)Those with recreational spaces in their
offices would have better physical and mental health.
The data was analyzed and the preponderance of the available data indicates that the above
hypotheses cannot be rejected. Among these an unexpected preference towards personal
workspaces was discovered, which stemmed from the amount of individual control a person has
over their space. Depending on the analysis was possible to conceptualize a recreational
workplace design model which opens thoughts with new concepts of living and working in cities,
suggesting new directions to urban recreation for working citizens.
