Workplace affordances of social well-being: a conceptual framework

The prolonged working from home during the recent pandemic has increased awareness of the social function of the office: employees missed informal social interaction with co-workers, face-to-face meetings, and spontaneous encounters. If the trend of hybrid working persists, one of the main functions of the physical office will be to support face-to-face interaction and social bonding for increasing well-being, innovation, and organizational commitment. This short paper explores how workplace design could support the social well-being of its users based on established theory in the field of environmental psychology. First, individual social well-being at work and social workplace affordances are defined. Next, workplace affordances for social well-being are deducted from theories on the psychology of space, such as Space syntax theory, Privacy regulation theory, Behavior setting theory, and Place attachment theory. From this analysis, three categories of workplace design features are induced which could support social well-being at work: interaction affordances, privacy affordances, and identity affordances. A conceptual framework is presented that connects social well-being components to these three categories of affordances. This framework can serve as a starting point for the collection of empirical studies, the deduction of specific social affordances from design practice, and the development of design strategies for enhancing social well-being in offices.