Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10
The Virtual Reality of Work - How to
Create a Workplace that Enhances
Well-Being for a Mobile Employee
Ursula Hyrkkänen
1
, Suvi Nenonen
2
and Inka Kojo
2
1
Aalto University and Turku University of Applied Sciences
2
Aalto University
Finland
1. Introduction
New developments in information and communication technology have changed the way
people approach their life and work. Mobile virtual work is no longer bound to fixed locations
as utilizing information and communication technology allows people to function freely in
various environments. The employee is considered as mobile, when he works more than ten
hours per week outside of the primary workplace and uses information and communication
technologies for collaboration (Gareis et al., 2006; Vartiainen & Hyrkkänen 2010). Virtual
reality (Fox et al., 2009), as an environment related to the new 'anytime anywhere work', can
be called
the virtual workplace
. The virtual workplace provides connectivity through different
size of devices and is accessed by different interfaces when supporting the performance of
both individual and collaborative activities (Nenonen et al., 2009).
The interest of this article is the interrelationship between the physical and the virtual
workplace not only with regard to their infrastructure, but also to their social and cultural
contexts. Both prerequisites connected to the virtual workplace and its actual use can be
challenging. It could be claimed, for instance, that simultaneous physical and virtual co-
presence is generally not yet mastered in an effective way and that there still exist certain
bottlenecks for a mobile employee in entering virtual reality.
Vischer (2007, 2008) has analyzed the workplace as a physical, functional and psychological
entity in order to identify features related to comfort and fit between a workplace and an
employee (fig 1). When the environment sets inappropriate or excessive demands to users,
in spite of their adaptation and adjustment behaviors, it manifests the concept of misfit. In a
good fit there is a balance between a person's abilities, skills, degree of control and decision
latitude and the work environment's demands, complexity, expectations and challenges.
The nature of person-environment transactions arouses the sensation of either comfort or
stress. Comfort may be considered as the fit of the user to the environment in the context of
work. (Vischer 2005, 2007, see also Dainoff et al. 2007.)
According to Vischer (2007), environmental comfort encompasses three hierarchical
categories: the physical, functional, and psychological. Physical comfort relates to basic
human needs, i.e. safety, hygiene and accessibility. These needs are responded to by
