How salutogenic workplace characteristics influence psychological and cognitive responses in a virtual environment.

Until today, most research focussed on the effects of pathogenic workplace demands on employee illness instead of on salutogenic resources on health. Using a stated-choice experiment in a virtual open-plan office, this study identifies key design aspects that enhance psychological and cognitive responses, ultimately improving health outcomes. The study systematically varied six workplace attributes: screens between workstations, occupancy rate, presence of plants, views outside, window-to-wall ratio (WWR), and colour palette. Each attribute predicted perceptions of at least one psychological or cognitive state. Plants had the highest relative importance for all expected responses but views outside with ample daylight, red/warm wall colours, and a low occupancy rate without screens between desks were also important. Low-cost interventions like adding plants, removing screens, and using warm wall colours can contribute to a healthier open-plan office environment. These insights can guide workplace managers to design environments that support employees' mental states and health.Practitioner summary: Salutogenic workplace resources that promote health have been understudied. This study aimed to show which workplace characteristics caused positive psychological and cognitive responses to improve health, using a stated-choice experiment in a virtual office environment. Plants in the office were the most important attribute for employees' psychological and cognitive responses.

User discomfort while using a virtual reality headset as a personal viewing system for text-intensive office tasks.

Ergonomics issues while using virtual reality (VR) headsets for text-intensive applications have not been studied. Measures of neck and shoulder discomfort and simulator sickness symptoms were quantified while participants were performing a document creation task for 60 min using a VR headset and a desktop monitor. During the task with the headset, participants rotated the head 2.7 times more frequently and used the neck extensor muscles 25.9% more, in average. They also rated the neck and shoulder discomfort 60% and 17.5% higher after the task. The simulator sickness symptoms were also rated significantly higher (p < .05) for the headset condition, with more pronounced differences in the symptoms related to visual discomfort. Results indicate that the physical discomforts due to the frequent head rotations and the headset weight, and visual discomforts due to difficulty in reading texts were the main issues of the VR headset for common office tasks. Practitioner summary: Ergonomics issues associated with the use of a VR headset for conducting office productivity work tasks have been evaluated in an experiment. Study results indicate that the development in the neck physical discomfort and visual discomfort may be the main barriers to the use of current VR headsets for office works. Abbreviations: VR: virtual reality; VDT: video display terminal; EMG: electromyography; MVC: maximum voluntary contraction; SSQ: simulator sickness questionnaire; ECG: electrocardiogram; NEMG: normalised electromyography.