The positioning of recreational spaces into the corporate office: Colombo, Sri Lanka

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.