The workplace mainly refers to the physical space created by organizations where employees conduct their work. Creating a welcoming workplace is not only the managers’ responsibility but also the condition for diligent work of many laborers. A dull and uninteresting workplace easily gives rise to complaints or even resentment. Working in a workplace teeming with dust, pollution and noise without proper protection for a long time can easily cause irritability and fatigue. In these conditions, it is impossible to deliver passionate, pleasant and creative labor. Only by keeping every employee away from unsafe, unprotected work can they gradually find the meaning and passion of work.

    Apart from the objective physical conditions in the working process, the workplace also involves the conditions for maintaining laborers’ rights and interests before and after the working process - the welfare facilities. These welfare facilities constitute another part of materialistic conditions for protecting employees’ job roles and are of vital significance for laborers’ quality, skill, career stability, good organizational identity and loyalty. Presently in China, the “diversification of organizational functions” means that organizational managers not only try to improve employees' physical working conditions but also strive to extend organizational functions through upgrading physical conditions and providing facilities like canteen, infirmary, nursery, kindergarten, fitness and sports venues, thereby creating a welcoming workplace and improving organizational working conditions. Such a property of the workplace provides us with a special perspective to examine organizational workplaces in China.

    In the research, our measurement and discussion of laborers’ workplaces revolve around physical workplaces and risks of physical working conditions. Specifically, physical workplaces are operated across components of indoor/outdoor work, type of workplace and mobility of workplace, and the risks of physical working conditions are operated across the source of risks, protection and their effect on health in physical working conditions. Specific measurement question items are shown in Table 1: 

Table 1 Operational question items on workplace