Post-Occupancy Evaluation of the New York Times Headquarters Building: an Examination of Causes for Occupant Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction with the Energy-Efficiency Measures

A post-occupancy evaluation (POE) survey was issued by The New York Times (NYT) to their employees with the assistance of Sustainable Energy Partnerships (SEP). SEP conducted a detailed analysis of the survey data (September 29, 2010 draft) and found that a significant fraction of the building occupants were satisfied to very satisfied with the overall building. Compared to other buildings, the overall level of satisfaction was greater than the norm of surveyed buildings.

This additional analysis was conducted to identify potential causes of the occupants’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the innovative lighting, shading, and space-conditioning systems themselves and/or the resultant indoor environment produced by these systems. The analysis used various methods to identify statistically significant factors, where the factors were those given in the survey questionnaire. Additional factors or causes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction were identified through analysis of the detailed comments: this was done for the questions related to the lighting section of the survey.