The Transdisciplinary Workplace Research (TWR) network is an eclectic group of scholars and practitioners who share one goal: to contribute to the design of workplaces where people work to their full potential and experience high levels of mental and physical wellbeing.
Social, physical, technological, and managerial aspects of the workplace play a role in achieving optimal employee-workplace alignment, which in turn ensures optimal support of employee performance, satisfaction, health, and wellbeing. This also includes worker behaviors and interactions with one another and with their physical, psychosocial, and digital work environments. Additionally, the awareness has grown that the place where work is carried out plays a vital role for mental and physical well-being and has been expanded to many different types of locations over the past decades due to more hybrid ways of working.
Hence, a transdisciplinary approach is required to advance both workplace research and practices. Many different stakeholders are involved in reaching optimal employee-workplace alignment. In academia, the complexity described above has translated into many different disciplines being involved in workplace research, without sufficient cross-disciplinary research. Also, little research is translated to practical solutions in the professional fields that are involved. Practitioners have been working largely independently of academic researchers for decades to research how workplaces make workers thrive in their specific context.
These challenges led to the formation of the Transdisciplinary Workplace Research (TWR) network in 2017. It brings together workplace researchers and research-focused professionals from many relevant disciplines to share their insights and ideas about the best place(s) to work.
2024 in Edinburgh
2022 in Milan
We warmly invite extended full paper versions of the short papers presented at TWR2024 in Edinburgh to be submitted to the special issue of Journal of Corporate Real Estate. Papers are submitted through the ScholarOne system reacheable through the journal’s website (see https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jcre). For questions, reach out to the TWR2024 host team, who guest edit this special issue.
The special issue “Transdisciplinary Workplace Research (TWR) 2022 Conference” is now available in the Journal of Corporate Real Estate! https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1463-001X/vol/26/iss/2
For a general intro, you can read the guest editorial by Chiara Tagliaro: https://doi.org/10.1108/JCRE-05-2024-079
The issue hosts 5 interesting pieces of research by:
1️⃣ Kyra Voll and Andreas Pfnür about working from home
2️⃣ Kaja Indergård and Geir K Hansen on academic work
3️⃣ Chiara Tagliaro, Alessandra Migliore, Erica Isa Mosca and Stefano C. with a focus on diversity
4️⃣ Daniel Magnusson, Hendry Raharjo and Petra Bosch-Sijtsema about sustainable coworking
5️⃣ Ebru Baykal Uluoz and Goksenin Inalhan on healthy workspaces.
We have received 94 abstracts for TWR2024 in Edinburgh so far, so it promises again to be very content-rich event. We hope to see many of you there to attend some of the presentations on these studies.
To allow those that missed the abstract-submission deadline (last Friday) to join us, we are leaving the submission system (go to https://easychair.org/cfp/twr2024) open until coming Thursday (November 30th). So, please make sure that you have submitted your abstract by then, if you want to be able to present your research at our conference next year. After this deadline, we can no longer except new abstract submissions.
May 18 2022 our network celebrates its first anniversary. Exactly 5 years ago, we held our first ever board meeting to get this network started with workplace researchers from across the globe. The board hopes to eat cake with you in Milan at #TWR2022 to celebrate this! Below you find a short blog written to celebrate our anniversary, with thoughts from some of these board members on why they like TWR so much.
People, workplace and management – research through disciplines
The Transdisciplinary Workplace Research (TWR) network was initiated in 2017. Its intention is to bring together workplace researchers and professionals from all relevant disciplines to share their insights and ideas to ensure evidence-based workplace development. The network is celebrating its 5-year anniversary on the 18th of May 2022. Let’s have a look at the very first thoughts of the board in 2017.
Why TWR?
The founder and chair of the Transdisciplinary Workplace Research (TWR) network is Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek from the Netherlands. She is an Associate Professor in corporate real estate (CRE) and workplace at the Department of the Built Environment at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). “The only way to provide real evidence for the business case of workplace interventions is by getting involved in transdisciplinary research initiatives”, she states. Therefore, she approached a selection of workplace researchers from different disciplines to form a board for the TWR network. The following people joined Rianne in the first TWR board that jointly have setup the network: Remi Ayoko, Derek Clements-Croome, Alison Hirst, Jan-Gerard Hoendervanger, Annette Kämpf-Dern, Rachel Morrison, Ingrid Nappi, Suvi Nenonen, Cheuk Fan Ng, Kerstin Sailer, Sara Wilkinson, and Mascha Will-Zocholl. Later, others followed.
Suvi Nenonen from Finland, currently working as a senior expert in University of Helsinki, shared the significance of transdisciplinary approach to workplace research. Her background is in social sciences and she conducted her PhD in 2005 to Helsinki University of Technology. “According to my experience of transdisciplinary research work, it is not easy to find the common language and shared understanding across the disciplines. Communication between different groups and sciences is challenging. TWR network is one potential tool to share the knowledge and increase the common understanding”, says Suvi about her motivation to engage with the TWR network. In 2018 the first conference took place in Finland, hosted by Suvi and her colleagues. Important knowledge and experiences were shared across disciplines regarding methodological challenges, building design and the study of people and their behaviour in their work environment.
Most of the inaugural board members joined this first conference, including Kerstin Sailer, professor in the Sociology of Architecture in The Bartlett School of Architecture, United Kingdom. She investigates the impact of spatial design on people and social behaviours inside a range of buildings. Her research interests combine complex buildings, workplace environments and space usage with social networks, organisational theory and organisational behaviour. She states: “The theory of space syntax provides a way to formalise the connection between spatial configuration and human behaviour. I am happy to share the research results how the configuration of office space shapes the activities of people and I am eager to learn how other disicplines approach the people-building connection – that is the attractor of TWR-network for me.”
Also present in Finland, was Remi Ayoko, associate Professor of Management at the University of Queensland Business School, Australia. “My research interests include the physical and virtual environment of work, open plan offices, conflict management, emotions, leadership, diversity, teamwork and employee territoriality.” Especially, she and her research team (in the Next Generation of Workplaces) investigate how employee interactions and wellbeing are impacted by differing workspaces. “The TWR network brokers new cross-disciplinary insights into people and organizational issues, Remi adds. “It also allows me the opportunity to find new research partners with similar interests for collaboration”, she continues.
What has happened in five years
The network now consists of over 300 researchers from universities and other public and private organisations involved in workplace research on several different continents. With its roots in Europe, TWR quickly expanded to North America and Oceania, and there is already some interest from the other continents as well. Besides the first conference in Finland, another one was organized as a hybrid conference, by German board members Annette Kämpf-Dern and Mascha Will-Zocholl. The third conference will be held physically in Milan in September 2022, organized by Chiara Tagliaro and her colleagues at Politecnico di Milano. In addition, several webinars have been organized over the years, to share knowledge. The TWR website has also evolved to include insights into PhD studies on workplaces and their users and managers at different universities and a TWR LinkedIn group was created.
Stronger together – wiser with diverse perspectives
Workplace research is still fragmented. This is the reason why the TWR network was created and hopefully over the next decades it will help decrease this fragmentation. More evidence is needed to support business cases of end-users for investing in workplace quality, and both physical and digital workplace matter. We need to increase awareness of users to how buildings affect them and discover how to deal with personal differences. The last two years the global crisis of COVID-19 has provided opportunities to pilot and practice new working methods and topics. Designing, drafting, and testing new structures, processes and practices is as important as the change management of transformation in the new situation – the workplace research agenda is full of interesting research questions for the TWR-network to respond to.
The first part of the two-part TWR2020 conference special issue in Journal of Corporate Real Estate is now online at https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1463-001X/vol/24/iss/1.
It is guest edited by the last conference’s hosts, Mascha Will-Zocholl and Prof. Dr. Annette Kämpf-Dern, with articles from Maral Babapour, Antonio Cobaleda Cordero, Clara Weber, Birgitta Gatersleben, Suvi Nenonen, Marko Lahti, Erkki Sutinen, Cornelia Gerdenitsch, Thomas Meneweger, Christina Stockreiter, Paul Butterer, Martina Halbwachs, and Daniel Scheiblhofer.
We have received 123 abstracts for TWR2022 in Milan next September. So, TWR2022 appears to become a very knowledge-rich gathering again, with people from all over the world. As last September hardly any Corona restrictions were in place in Milan (and in many other countries), we still presume that the conference will be held physically in Milan. If anything should change, we will of course update you. Please keep an eye on the conference website for the latest updates.
The importance of the real estate industry for the overall economy is huge. Real estate shapes the image of our cities, and at the same time, everyone lives or works in a building. That’s why Immobilien Manager Verlag launched the immobilienmanager Award in 2009 to honor the best real estate projects, deals, services and minds in the real estate industry. Incidentally, the company applying does not necessarily have to be a real estate company.
The industry’s prestigious prize, sometimes named the ‘Oscar’ of German-speaking real estate, is awarded every year in 14 categories. A high-caliber, independent jury of respected real estate industry experts nominates up to three award-worthy candidates per category for the shortlist from all the applications received. The nominees in each category receive media attention from the time of the announcement, both in the run-up to the event and during the exclusive gala evening with over 400 top decision-makers from the industry – if there is no pandemic. At the awards ceremony, good nerves are then called for when the winner’s envelopes are opened on the big stage and it’s “The Winner is…”
The TWR network has applied with the TWR2020 Conference in the category ‘Communications’. The other four nominees in this category are (see here: https://www.immobilienmanager.de/imaward-2021-jurysitzung-top-5-nominiert/150/81560/)
The 6 feet office concept of C&W won the award, but we are very thankful to have been nominated.
TWR2020 will become one of the first truly hybrid conferences – a blend of physical and virtual participation as the potential ‘new normal’ for conferencing of the future. The hybrid conference will be a fully virtual conference with physical sessions in Frankfurt, Germany. People attending the conference virtually will be able to fully participate in all physical sessions and vice versa. For more info, visit http://www.twr2020.org/
Registration for TWR2020 is now open through https://express.converia.de/frontend/index.php?folder_id=3224
Early bird rates are available until the 31st of May.
The abstract deadline has been extended until Friday November 15th.
