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Article

Working from Home in Italy during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Survey to Assess the Indoor Environmental Quality and Productivity

by
Francesco Salamone
*,
Benedetta Barozzi
,
Alice Bellazzi
,
Lorenzo Belussi
,
Ludovico Danza
,
Anna Devitofrancesco
,
Matteo Ghellere
,
Italo Meroni
,
Fabio Scamoni
and
Chiara Scrosati
Construction Technologies Institute, National Research Council of Italy (ITC-CNR), Via Lombardia, 49, San Giuliano Milanese, 20098 Milan, Italy
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Buildings 2021, 11(12), 660; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120660
Submission received: 10 November 2021 / Revised: 10 December 2021 / Accepted: 15 December 2021 / Published: 18 December 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of COVID-19 Pandemics on Buildings’ Energy Consumptions and Indoor Environmental Quality: Current Issues and Future Needs)
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Abstract

Italians were the first European citizens to experience the lockdown due to Sars-Cov-2 in March 2020. Most employees were forced to work from home. People suddenly had to share common living spaces with family members for longer periods of time and convert home spaces into workplaces. This inevitably had a subjective impact on the perception, satisfaction and preference of indoor environmental quality and work productivity. A web-based survey was designed and administered to Italian employees to determine how they perceived the indoor environmental quality of residential spaces when Working From Home (WFH) and to investigate the relationship between different aspects of users’ satisfaction. A total of 330 valid questionnaires were collected and analysed. The article reports the results of the analyses conducted using a descriptive approach and predictive models to quantify comfort in living spaces when WFH, focusing on respondents’ satisfaction. Most of them were satisfied with the indoor environmental conditions (89% as the sum of “very satisfied” and “satisfied” responses for thermal comfort, 74% for visual comfort, 68% for acoustic quality and 81% for indoor air quality), while the layout of the furniture negatively influenced the WFH experience: 45% of the participants expressed an unsatisfactory or neutral opinion. The results of the sentiment analysis confirmed this trend. Among the Indoor Environmental factors that affect productivity, visual comfort is the most relevant variable. As for the predictive approach using machine learning, the Support Vector Machine classifier performed best in predicting overall satisfaction.
Keywords: working from home; survey; questionnaire; indoor environmental quality; COVID-19 lockdown; productivity working from home; survey; questionnaire; indoor environmental quality; COVID-19 lockdown; productivity

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MDPI and ACS Style

Salamone, F.; Barozzi, B.; Bellazzi, A.; Belussi, L.; Danza, L.; Devitofrancesco, A.; Ghellere, M.; Meroni, I.; Scamoni, F.; Scrosati, C. Working from Home in Italy during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Survey to Assess the Indoor Environmental Quality and Productivity. Buildings 2021, 11, 660. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120660

AMA Style

Salamone F, Barozzi B, Bellazzi A, Belussi L, Danza L, Devitofrancesco A, Ghellere M, Meroni I, Scamoni F, Scrosati C. Working from Home in Italy during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Survey to Assess the Indoor Environmental Quality and Productivity. Buildings. 2021; 11(12):660. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120660

Chicago/Turabian Style

Salamone, Francesco, Benedetta Barozzi, Alice Bellazzi, Lorenzo Belussi, Ludovico Danza, Anna Devitofrancesco, Matteo Ghellere, Italo Meroni, Fabio Scamoni, and Chiara Scrosati. 2021. "Working from Home in Italy during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Survey to Assess the Indoor Environmental Quality and Productivity" Buildings 11, no. 12: 660. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120660

APA Style

Salamone, F., Barozzi, B., Bellazzi, A., Belussi, L., Danza, L., Devitofrancesco, A., Ghellere, M., Meroni, I., Scamoni, F., & Scrosati, C. (2021). Working from Home in Italy during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Survey to Assess the Indoor Environmental Quality and Productivity. Buildings, 11(12), 660. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120660

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