Leadership in Multi-Space Offices: Realizing the Potential of Modern and Flexible Workplace Concepts

Abstract

This chapter discusses the challenges for managers resulting from modern and flexible workplace concepts. It will specifically reflect on stressors that arise for employees when working in a multi-space environment and how employees bind to their workplace. Using a combined methodological approach, which integrates a literature review with the experiences of our daily work as workplace change consultants, managers receive concrete advice on how to lead in multi-space. This article thus aims to reduce the uncertainties and stressors triggered by New Work environments, or even to convert these into growth potential for the entire company, by naming concrete leadership measures based on values formulation and emotional leadership.

1. Introduction

The world is in change, and New Work is a result of this. What is meant with New Work, a wide idea which encompasses a whole range of concepts? For that, one must get a hold on the underlying drivers which point the way in which work evolves.

New Work is a socially driven change, encompassed by the dynamics of globalization, technology development, and improvement of living conditions all abroad. Naturally, globalization has its downsides too. On the other hand, changing demographics impact directly the situation of work. Generations X, Y, and Z will progressively incorporate into the workforce, whereas society experiences altogether an aging of its population. The result is a lack of qualified and leading workers [1]. The nature of work turns global as well and demands on mobility and permanent availability increase, with a tendency toward globalized connection among people and coworkers. This widening of our network and social sphere also implies that the workforce has a larger range of employment options to reach. Organizations must therefore consider the needs of their employees more considerately if they want to keep the already scarce human resource.

As our societies have been experiencing, digitalization is abstracting work, information, and data into automatized circuits. It facilitates working with information and knowledge, automatizes physical and digital processes, and helps visualize facts that otherwise would be too complex or expensive to represent. Digitalization is a true disruptive force, which also allows employees to access their jobs within a tick of an eye, or a mouse click. In this sense, the last pandemic has also demonstrated to which degree the current network of jobs in our society can be extrapolated into our own homes, namely under the term of home office.

With changing dynamics and increasing ease of life, people have more resources and can decide more freely what they do. A rash change of values is taking place in our twenty-first century [1]. Generally speaking, work-centered lifestyles are shifting to more balanced ways of living, gaining family, friends, and relationships more consideration [2]. Within work, values divide, ranging from people who seek to live stress-free from work, others want to work in community and for social causes, or work committed with a vision and meaning in mind. New Work is increasingly being conceptualized as an element of life that promotes self-actualization, personal security, meaning in life, and relationships with others [1]. For instance, according to the Zukunftsinstitut, the prevalence of home office has been decreasing after the pandemic. Many long for the social aspect of work where one gets to creatively and genuinely engage with other coworkers [2], which strengthens the idea that people are social in nature.

In consulting practice, however, it is noticeable: executives from larger companies often express the opposite view. Many of their employees apparently do not want to return from the home office. The situation is not quite that simple; the problem seems to be a double-edged one. Often, attempts are made to get people back into the office by offering free coffee, sponsored lunches, or internal sports activities. There is nothing wrong with this in principle, but creating a monetary incentive is the wrong marketing strategy in this situation. Social factors must be used in advertising. Employees must recognize the benefits of the office on their own initiative and want to come back.

Currently, from a practice perspective, the trend is 60/40: 60% of managers struggle to get their employees back to work in the office and in 40% observe that employees are happy to return to the office. The key question is, how do you balance home office engagement with a conducive work environment? A strategy must be chosen that ensures the preservation of the corporate and individual added value of home office. How well this balance is achieved has a lot to do with a company’s corporate, leadership, and team culture and its communication strategy. These four areas must therefore be analyzed and optimized. This is exactly where Workplace Change Consulting comes in. The goal is for employees to return to the office voluntarily and with pleasure, and to recognize the added value, especially of direct social interactions.

Indeed, humans are social in nature, a generally acknowledged fact. People are embedded in organizational structures, too, and the organizational structures of enterprises are experiencing deep remodeling because of pressing global demands. Being pressed by a changing work environment [3], organizations must be much more attentive to changes in the industry and technological realm to remain competent. With it, the individual carries more responsibility for the success and survival of the firm. Organizational hierarchies become decentralized, and coworkers gain in freedom and responsibility, which makes the production of internal knowledge a more collectivized and democratized phenomenon. Agility and resilience are keywords for this development. And where abstract structures reshape also make the space conditions in which employees work. To optimize performance, the resources and physical space need to reflect the organizational dimension and how people cooperate with each other. Digitalization allows for new forms of teamwork, where digital tools and cloud-based services enable for direct communication and collaboration. Nevertheless, as stated before, the digital world cannot replace the real-time social world.

Activity-based work (ABW) is a concept that supports working in various areas, based on to the required work demands and needs [1]. Overall, ABW represents multifunctional workspaces with different work zones available for different needs. For example, an employee might need a day to exchange information with another employee in privacy, work in a bigger team, and then focus alone. Accordingly, he can use the exchange zones, collaboration zones, and retreat zones. The concept of ABW is embodied in Multi-Space offices which provide the users with diverse functional spaces.

It is important to note that, in addition to the type of work, personality also plays an important role. Personality-based working (How are employees structured and under what conditions are individuals efficient and capable?) is just as important as performance-based working. Depending on personality, a zone that is objectively perfectly designed for a certain function may nevertheless not work for a person because of his or her personal way of working.

Multi-Space offices have only recently been used because they are the direct result of New Work demands. Nonetheless, according to a review on modern office concepts, the breadth of literature covering this topic presents clear contradictions when referring to the perceived satisfaction employees experience with new office spaces [4]. Whereas some studies present satisfactory results with Multi-Space offices, others result in low levels of satisfaction and find more negative aspects than positive ones. According to the same study, the difference in perception is explained to a large extent by the fact that office designers do not consider the needs of the employees.

That is why it is so important to involve the employees in the process and check in on them regularly—not only on an architectural but also on a human level.

Nevertheless, the work change process should remain a top-down process. Practical experience has shown that change must be initiated from the top. A bottom-up approach does not achieve the desired results. In order to be able to integrate the needs of the employees, it is extremely relevant to define the framework conditions of the new working world in advance. This can be done, for example, by means of a basic document to which everyone can orient themselves and which contributes to a common understanding of the starting position, approach, and goal. In this way, it is also possible to set the right expectations. Incorrect expectation management can jeopardize the transition to the new working worlds and so exactly the opposite of what is intended happens: People are distrustful and close their minds to change.

The same study as mentioned above also shows that the perceived satisfaction with the workplace depends to a large extent on overall satisfaction with the work environment itself [4]. Influencing the satisfaction perception are the cultural aspects and climate of the organization, as well as the subjective aspect of employees. These are all factors that are part of the big picture and that need to be considered by leaders. Because those coworkers who are satisfied with their work overall are satisfied with their workplace, even if the workplace is functionally suboptimal or esthetically unpleasing [4].

Therefore, this chapter will cover the idea of leadership in Multi-Space offices, proposing a theory to diffuse the diverse contradictions found in the general breadth of Multi-Space Office literature. From here on, the psychological grounding to workplace satisfaction will be laid, significant stressors stemming from Multi-Space offices will be presented, and diverse perspectives on leadership will be proposed, concluding with a set of practical recommendations for organizations to influence and increase the performance and satisfaction with Multi-Space offices.

2. The psychology of the individual at the workplace

Perceived job satisfaction depends on a complex interplay of the individual’s personality, attitudes, and goals with his or her physical and social environment. Simply stated: depending on a person’s behavior, the environment reacts differently and vice versa, a person behaves differently depending on environmental conditions.

Explaining the intersection at a psychological level between the individual and the work environment is the Job Demands – Job Resources (JD-R) Model [5]. The JD-R Model assumes that the arousal and experience of stress is the result of an assessment weighing the difference between job resources and job demands. Job demands are those physical, psychological, social, and organizational aspects of one’s job that are associated with physiological and psychological costs. On the other hand, job resources are those aspects of the job that support and lead to the completion of a goal. Should job demands outweigh job resources, the individual will proportionally experience stress. Where job resources can be, for example, being well equipped with knowledge, computers or being provided functional zones, examples of job demands include high workloads, failing computing equipment or having a distracting environment.

Whereas the JD-R Model explains the underlying cause of stress arousal, it does not picture the internal processes that take place within the individual’s psychology at the time of assessment. Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional stress theory [6] defines the individual stress assessment process as a series of appraisals. A primary appraisal determines if the situation poses either a threat or a challenge. A secondary appraisal estimates how manageable the threat or challenge is based on one’s available resources. If the primary appraisal poses a greater threat than that what can be managed, stress is released accordingly. This stress assessment process is continuous and loops, meaning that the perception of the job situation and experience of stress is a dynamic process, which can also be influenced. The theory finalizes that to deal with stress, coping strategies will be used by the individual, being some coping strategies healthier than others (or not).

The stress model by Gauer also describes how stress in new working environments is evaluated from the interaction of technology/space, people, and companies. It plays a role whether a factor that triggers stress can be seen as an opportunity or as a problem. Such models are an enormously important basis for people from Chance Consulting as at Gauer Consulting. By understanding such processes, teams or companies can be supported. They can be supported in perceiving stressors as challenges and as opportunities, learning from them and growing from such obstacles.

The strength of the transactional stress theory is that it situates the individual in the center of the assessment and hints at the subjectivity of the individual, meaning it is finally the individual who assesses if he really possesses the required resources, some of which are highly personal and relate to one’s identity. The solidity of this self-assessment and self-belief is centralized here, but due to the subjectivity in the assessment, it might be that this self-belief is objectively accurate or not. For instance, a person’s lack of trust in swimming might not be justified, if the person indeed knows how to swim.

On the same line, the aforementioned self-assessment acquires strong significance for another theory that literally “binds” the individual to the workplace. Scrima and colleagues [7] present a theory of workplace attachment that situates the individual at the workplace with different types and degrees of bonding with the workplace. This bond or attachment is explained as a cognitive-affective link to a significant place; individuals develop an emotional bond that determines part of the perception of the individual and how he behaves in relation to his environment. The theory uses two factors to determine the type of attachment. These factors are the place-assessment and the self-assessment, and each assessment can be evaluated as either positive or negative, which leads us to form a matrix-like table with four attachment styles (although one of them is not included due to its pathological nature, the negative-negative one).

Before going into the relevant attachment styles, the Scrima and colleagues’ theory will be tied with previous theories. Relating the workplace attachment style theory to the JD-R model, it can be deduced that both the place and self-put demands on the individual. The workplace (or organization in JD-R model) objectively provides demands, and the individual integrates them into their assessment framework. On the other hand, the workplace (or organization) provides resources to the individual, and the individual or self is central to the assessment of owned resources, also determined by the belief in one’s capacity to resolve the situation effectively. In this sense, a negative self-assessment relates both to the production of stress and less ideal attachment styles to the workplace.

The attachment styles are as follows: the secure attachment style (both positive place- and self-assessments), the avoidant attachment style (negative place-assessment but positive self-assessment), as well as the preoccupied attachment style (positive place-assessment but negative self-assessment). All theories set together and summarized are to be found in Tables 1 and 2.

	Job demands	Job resources
Organization (place)	Sets demands	Puts resources at disposal
	Environmental stressors are present in Multi-Space offices	Guides employees
		Sets rules for civic behavior
	Very high workloads will most likely lead to more negative place evaluations.	Providing the employee with resources will most likely lead to more positive place evaluations.
Self	Primary appraisal: Integrates and processes job demands.	Secondary Appraisal: Considers available resources and determines manageability of the situation.
	High workloads decrease the chance of positive self-assessments.	Equipping the employee with resources strengthens confidence and positive self-assessments.

Table 1.

The effect of job demands and job resources on place- and self-assessments.

		Place-assessment	Self-assessment
Workplace attachment style	Secure	Positive	Positive
	Avoidant	Negative	Positive
	Preoccupied	Positive	Negative

Table 2.

The workplace attachment styles ordered by place- and self-assessments [7].

The next subsection will be dedicated to the analysis of stressors at the workplace. However, even the perception of environmental stressors such as noise is regulated by the self-assessment. For instance, the perception of noise, a stressor that is very common in Multi-Space offices, differs in accordance with one’s own emotional state [8, 9]. The same noise will be perceived more negatively when the individual is in an emotionally negative state. Bad planning and management of demands has the potential of boosting the perception of already existing stressors. For that matter, the importance of an appropriate organizational culture, leadership, and climate is of detrimental importance. A study by Zheng and colleagues points out that alone culture, structure, and strategy explain 31% of the variance in organizational efficiency (Table 3) [10].

1	Emotions arise as a consequence of an evaluative process
	Personal values determine what is important for oneself and what not
	Emotion follows in accordance to one’s evaluative template/values
2	The engendered emotion has its own drive and motivation
3	Since emotions are born from values, the emotionally intelligent leader can better picture the individual’s personality, what drives him or her, and which emotional reactions can be expected in which scenarios.
4	Emotional intelligence gives access to complex information, from which well-founded solutions can be devised in an agile manner. Particularly in environments in which action and mobility are fluid and relationships are dynamic.
5	Emotional intelligence ensures fluid understanding to bond employees with their team, organization, and workplace.

Table 3.

A logical process to understand how emotional intelligence contributes to leadership in the context of this chapter.

The organization analyzes the business environment and integrates into its strategy the recognized industry demands, which then translate into job demands for the organization at large and their employees. The fact that certain demands are either perceived as challenges or as threats is a partly subjective fact and points at the fact that organizational demands have an effect on the employees’ stress level and perception. This indirectly shapes the way that the employee sees the organization, place, and themself. On the other hand, job resources such as a valuable culture that inspires a climate of trust or being qualified and trained with enough knowledge and skills will positively strengthen the perception and felt satisfaction with the workplace, organization, and oneself. Here, too, the manager plays an enormously important role. Especially in change processes, where there is generally a lot of uncertainty, good leadership and communication top-down can be a positive game changer.

Overall, when applied to the way workplaces are perceived, it is found that employees tend to attach to workplaces mostly in a secure, avoidant, or preoccupied style. However, as stated previously, the analysis of the job situation is a constant and dynamic process [6], and there is much room to change things.

3. The stressors at sight

The fact that Multi-Space offices boost mobility through the implementation of diverse areas that serve for different activities also implies that new stressors will arise as a result of new dynamics. On the other hand, with new dynamics, open space, and mobility, the constellation of privacy providing spaces is redefined. More concisely, open-space-type offices boost both the need for privacy and the need for social interaction [11]. This apparently contradictory statement is justified by the fact that open offices leave the individual more “exposed” to the world, but the dynamics of the place increase the desire to socialize more [11], which goes in hand with the New Work idea, that the workplace is increasingly becoming a place to socialize [1]. As of this new dynamic and spatial configuration, the most commonly mentioned stressors in Multi-Space offices are as follows:

• Office noise [4, 12, 13, 14]

• Reduced privacy [12, 13, 14] and lack of retreat zones [4]

• Reduced confidentiality [4]

• Increased disturbance from others [4, 13]

• A sense of depersonalization and low status [13]

• Visual distraction [13]

• Climatic/air quality problems [4]

These stressors can impair the completion of current job demands, which can loop and exacerbate already present stressors and job demands. In accordance with Scrima and colleagues, low levels of privacy seem to amplify the negative consequences of avoidant and preoccupied attachment styles, whereas high privacy settings help buffer exhaustion [7]. Just as the generation of stress is a fact-dependent on personal traits [6], the need for privacy is a factor that is determined by personal characteristics [11].

The occurrence of potential stressors is independent of individual assessment, but managers shall take into consideration that the evaluation of these stressors is subject to personal assessment, which is a function of personal characteristics. On the other hand, stressors in Multi-Space offices arise mostly from social interactions in an environment that is more dynamic and open than traditional spaces. This means that stressors can be targeted independently from the subject and reduced through the implementation of rules at an organizational level. Stressors cause negative emotion to employees and can lead to hindering performance on an individual and organizational level.

4. Formulating organizational values for cultural adaptation and promoting emotional leadership

Organizational values are the main driver of fluidity in Multi-Space offices and as a determining force in the social climate of a company. Organizational values are also the grounding assumptions on which the collective meaning of the organization is generated, and guidance to employees’ action and behavior is given [15]. Values ensure consistency in collective action and give a framework to assess each other’s behavior. Values ensure collective fluidity and are of great strategic importance, particularly where firms need to orient themselves toward rapidly changing markets and environments [16].

The strategic importance of HR and people management has increasingly been reflected in the formulation of strategic decisions for organizations. Firms do not only recognize that they need to shift due to technological or market pressures, but that the employees who must contend with these shifts also have to adapt to change swiftly [16]. Being that Multi-Space offices and the division of space into functional areas reflect changing market and technological dynamics, the individuals who work and live on a day-to-day basis in these functional areas must adapt their behavior to live up to both the changing dynamics and the potential of Activity-Based Working (ABW). It is henceforth the task of HR to gear and point the direction of employees’ development and their cultures, which makes the adaptation of employees to the usability of Multi-Space offices an ambition that is embedded in larger cultural initiatives within the firm. The way organizations work translate into the physical space. For example, there is evidence that innovative and cooperative climates lead to an increase in social interactions [17] or that confirm that mutual trust, flat hierarchies, or open feedback cultures promote strengthened teamwork [18].

To promote leadership in Multi-Space offices and guarantee the fluidity of these spaces, HR interventions must be designed from a standpoint that considers values as the gearing point of any cultural change. These values must then be incorporated and translated into specific measures and actions [15], such as leadership trainings, learning and development programs, or recruitment strategies. Values are the gasoline, and initiatives are the vehicle for fluidity. One cannot give the wrong gasoline to their vehicle if they intend to be mobile. Cultural change and value reformulations cannot remain in mere promise and must be set into practice and upheld at all levels of the firm through relevant development programs and support structures [16].

From the perspective of values as instruments, generating affective commitment toward the firm [19] are humane values such as courtesy, cooperation and forgiveness, and visionary values such as development, openness, and creativity. The significance of this fact is that such values can directly foster secure attachment styles toward the workplace and organization, since the individual’s personal and creative growth is supported on one side, and the organization and the workplace as its physical embodiment serves for a more humane and supporting atmosphere, where individuals might not feel as much exposed to risk and failure as in other scenarios.

Since the fluidity, dynamism, and satisfaction with Multi-Space office depends on a large degree to the emotional climate formed by coworkers, the quality of leadership in Multi-Space offices will be considerable determined by the capability of managers to access employees’ emotions, understand where they come from, and extract the information held in them. Accessing the emotional information, which is also the information that gives insights in the way employees relate to the environment or Multi-Office space [7], is essential to be able to form decisions in an agile manner to promote the civic and dynamic use of Multi-Space offices.

Emotional information can be conceived as a set of signals that communicate information about the individual’s assessments and motivated reactions to important survival phenomenon such as perceived threats, conflict, appeasement, alliance, and so on [20]. On the other hand, emotional intelligence is understood by Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso as “the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking… which includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth” [20].

The emotionally intelligent leader should be able to recognize how a particular employee is relating to their environment and can understand how they are feeling. Furthermore, if one considers that, according to many philosophers of emotion, (a) a particular emotion arises as the outcome of our own evaluative process, and that (b) emotions have its own drive and motivation [21], the emotionally intelligent leader can more accurately calculate the behavior an individual based on their emotional predisposition and values. On the other hand, goals change as do our values [22], together with our emotions as signals of what is important or needed. Accordingly, the meaning employees find in their environment and the objects that occupy it changes as do their broader goals [22]. Simply said, our environment reflects back what we value, and we interact with it accordingly. As an example: an individual is anxious in social situations but values highly providing for their family. Being that the culture of the firm rewards efficiency and creativity, the employee might be more prone to pursue exchange with other coworkers to ensure productivity and new ideas, despite aversion toward social interaction. Naturally, this process is smoother for the employee, when he or she experiences support in that process, and his or her potential is promoted [23].

Employees want to be treated humanely, with room to exploit their potential, and when both organizational and personal values match, affective commitment is more likely to happen [19]. In that the affective commitment of employees toward the organization increases when treated in a humane and visionary way, leaders want to support their employees personally and aid them in the unfolding of their potential, which benefits both the employee and the organization. A competent leader will identify where the development of the individual is obstructed and help them unfold their capabilities and skills.

When targeting the development of staff for fluidity in Multi-Space office, where environmental stressors are have less impact on the individuals, skills that should be fostered to remain competent in more functional and dynamic environments are as follows: self-management, self-awareness, social skills, resilience and courage, empathy and emotional intelligence, critical thinking and questioning one’s beliefs, goal setting and goal execution, awareness and focus, attentive listening, and also having a positive attitude toward work, the world, and people. Leaders and managers in New Work increasingly need to undertake the role of development partners for their employees and use situations to stimulate the development of employees [1].

Having mentioned relevant points of discussion for leadership in Multi-Space offices, the points are presented in Table 4 as relevant topics for organizational development and fluidity in the use of space.

Training leaders
Organizational values	Trainings should sensibilize leaders about the strategic direction the firm wants to take, the values the firm wants to foster, and put leaders in context
Emotional intelligence	Trainings should enhance leaders perception, cognition, and emotion-generating capabilities in order to gain access to emotional information and produce a good organizational climate
Keywords	Emotional intelligence, proxemics, workplace attachment, emotional bond, culture and climate, social interactions and space, empowering others and unfolding potential, team cohesion and vision, and humane and visionary values

Table 4.

Key areas for the design of leadership programs for Multi-Space offices.

Naturally, by engineering meaning and values, ethical dilemmas come into play, such as that promoting a particular set of assumptions and beliefs might interfere with the development of true well-fare or the construction of healthy personal identities. However, the organization that wishes to generate affective commitment and workplace attachment and stimulate the liveliness and civility in Multi-Space offices should target values that are humane and visionary and reach the individual at a profound and existential level [22].

Structuring training programs for overall cultural change and leadership in Multi-Space offices should divide the different key areas in a way that makes sense. When training exclusively for emotional leadership, Sadri suggests dividing emotional leadership trainings in different focus areas [24]. After Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso’s conceptualization of emotional intelligence, four areas are presented: perceiving emotion, the ability to use emotion to enhance thought, understanding emotion, and the ability to manage emotion. According to Sadri, training sessions should rather focus on single or various but not all focus areas for the development of competence, as this would lead to suboptimal results [24].

Overall, the way leadership trainings are delivered can be classified by methods: by personal growth (promoting self-awareness), by conceptual understanding, by feedback (promoting self-regulation), or by skill building (social skills) [24]. Some specific proposed training tools are given [16, 24], and all these tools can support the development of both focus areas 1 and 2:

• Individual reflection sessions and self-analysis.

• Group reflection and identification of patterns and strategies for improvement.

• 360° feedback rounds.

• Executive coaching targeting the improvement of social skills and conceptual understanding.

• Developing personal plans for leadership development to apply at work.

• Simulation exercises

• Team building, networking activities, and charity work for empathy development.

Emotionally intelligent leaders present a deeper understanding of their employees and teams, which supports leveraging the transformational capabilities they can exercise on their employees [24] and help boost team cohesion, communication, and teamwork [23].

5. Conclusion

Times change and work nowadays has become far from what it used to be centuries, even decades before. As has been narrated in this chapter, New Work is a social change surrounding the way work is performed and is driven by the course of globalization, digitalization, changing demographics, and an overall remodeling of values that individuals in society hold [1, 2]. Because of this development, Multi-Space offices are finding a recent boom in implementation. The literature describing the perceived satisfaction of users of Multi-Space offices is diffuse and contradictory, one study against each other [6]. There have been hints on the underlying psychological grounding of such differences, which can explain how Multi-Space offices can be led to ultimately increase performance, satisfaction, and fluidity in these novel work environments.

In this context, satisfaction is an important factor that depends on the attitude and emotion employees have toward their work environment. Emotions can be controlled from the outside to a certain extent. It is part of a manager’s task to ensure a suitable change process in the event of a change in the working environment and to inform and involve the employees appropriately. The positive effects of New Work can only unfold if the introduction to the new working worlds is adapted to the target group.

It is important for managers to keep an eye on employees’ stress levels. If job demands exceed job resources, stress is released according to the JD-R Model [5]. Within the context of our chapter, the experience of stress is assumed to be a high-level proxy of the quality and satisfaction experienced with one’s work, since, according to Lazarus and Folkman, stress presents a subjective component [6].

Multi-Space offices are rich in social interaction, and most stressors in this environment present a causal factor that is social in essence, the largest targetable area in order to improve the manageability of Multi-Space offices are the social interactions that conform this work environment. Changes targeting the way social interactions take place and the way individuals behave imply large cultural and climate shifts [15, 16].

Subjective attachment to the job is described as a meaningful cognitive-affective attachment resulting from the evaluation of the place and the evaluation of the self [7]. Thus, job satisfaction can be influenced based on job demands and job resources. Following this train of thought, the main goal of HR is to influence the way social interactions take place in Multi-Space offices and promote a climate of trust, growth, vision, and cooperation. Values such as cooperation, trust, or any other value in general direct much of human thought and action, each value in its direction. Being that organizational values determine the context in which actions take place, and the meaning of social interactions is derived [14], fostering and implementing humane and visionary values across the length of the company is primordial in order to guarantee a good use of Multi-Space offices. With emotional leadership in mind, leaders can target their employees and improve their place- and self-assessments by gaining access and working with emotional information that explains much of the satisfaction experienced for the organization and workplace [24, 25].

Which work zone is supportive for which activity depends, for example, strongly on a person’s personality or personal way of working. Therefore, special attention should be paid to which work types, work styles, and work methods are represented in a team. In practice, it has been repeatedly found that performance and team climate improve significantly when these points are taken into account and incorporated into the implementation of the new working environment.

It is also the task of the manager to clarify the framework conditions before introducing Multi-Space offices and to ensure appropriate and transparent communication with the employees. In this way, a large part of the conflict potential of a change process is nipped in the bud. Not only the goal but also the path to new working environments must be clear. If the manager has clarified how the employees will be involved in the process, the employees can be approached. People have no problem with not having a say in the process. They only struggle when they a) do not know why they are not being involved or b) believe they have a say in the process and that is not the case.

To develop leadership traits that foster emotionally intelligent leadership, HR professionals can go through several considerations or specific programs that they can implement as part of leadership development programs. However, the central point of leadership development programs is to create a climate and culture that supports individuals in their workplace. Emotionally intelligent leadership can therefore be seen as an important tool for recognizing how employees relate to their environment.