Workers’ Satisfaction vis-à-vis Environmental and Socio-Morphological Aspects for Sustainability and Decent Work

Abstract

This study examines worker satisfaction vis-à-vis outdoor places in terms of their environmental and socio-morphological aspects. Numerous studies have considered decent work as the eighth goal of sustainable development. However, it is worth investigating outdoor workers’ satisfaction with a view to the practical design of the surrounding context that supports their work in outdoor places. Using bibliometric analysis, this study investigates possible approaches toward providing decent work in a public place in Cairo as a case study, focusing on outdoor workers’ satisfaction. In the bibliometric analysis, this study used query settings in the Scimago database to search for manuscripts published in the previous five years. The result yielded 195 manuscripts that were filtered down to 50 manuscripts and then grouped using VOSviewr Software. Environmental noise and heat assessment analyses were performed using noise level measurements, remote sensing, and the Grasshopper platform. Further, we conducted an ethnographic study employing 77 participant observations. The results show that work hours and time affect worker satisfaction, as do environmental conditions, particularly noise and heat. However, unexpected findings from participant observation in this study do not accord with findings in other scholarly sources, where other observers find workers neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with the spatial morphology in the case study. Per this study, the alignment of worker satisfaction with convenient socio-morphological tangible elements of the workplace and with other environmental aspects should be attained in both specified replicable methods to engender decent work for outdoor workers.