Activity‑based working methods – Östersund Municipality

In the autumn of 2023, a large part of Östersund municipality's officials moved into newly renovated premises adjacent to the town hall. The staff has previously worked at various management nodes in Östersund. The premises that the staff have moved into are adapted for so-called activity-based activities. In short, this means that the employees do not have fixed physical workplaces, but the workplace varies. Specific solutions have been taken to address factors affected by occupational health and safety legislation.

Office work has become increasingly common in working life and today about half of Sweden's employees use a computer for at least half of their working hours (Swedish Work Environment Authority, 2016). Different types of offices have historically existed with differences between different countries (Bodin Danielsson, 2014). The service sector has grown and office work has become increasingly common in our workplaces. Today, there is a trend in both the public and private sectors to implement activity-based offices consisting of open environments as well as zones and areas to support different types of tasks. There are also different variants of activity-based offices in terms of the amount of individual workplaces, flexible offices, combined offices, etc.

Although research on activity-based offices has increased, both internationally and nationally, there is a lack of knowledge about the impact on the work environment, health and productivity. Results from research show both positive and negative effects regarding these areas (see, for example, Wahlström et al., 2020; Öhrn et al., 2021; Larsson et al., 2022). There is also knowledge about how remote work affects different outcomes among employees and in the organization that may be relevant to the project (Swedish Agency for Work Environment Expertise, 2022). In the project, we intend to take as a starting point the aforementioned research regarding the implementation of data collection and analysis of results.