The building houses more than 6000 of the bank's employees and is at the forefront of environmental standards, having been awarded a six star Green Star rating.

It's also known for its avant garde fitouts, including informal meeting spaces, collaborative tables, quiet rooms and team huddle spaces, and has fully "agile" flexible workspaces which enable employees to sit at and use different spaces.

The Woods Bagot-designed building has been shortlisted for several architecture awards, and won the Australian Institute of Architects (Victorian Chapter) gong for its commercial interior.

But now the angular glass monolith has received recognition of a different kind, coming out on top of the Building Occupant Satisfaction Survey Australia, a benchmarking tool that ranks top performing office workplaces.

The survey, backed by Sydney University and the University of Technology Sydney, rates about 60 of Australia's premium "ivy league" buildings for air quality, comfort, noise, temperature, connection to the outdoors, and for their effect on employees' health and productivity.

The buildings range in scale from 30 staff occupants to many thousands.

"It is an Ivy League occupant database survey. We have in our pool of buildings only the very top end of the market in office real estate in Australia," Sydney University lecturer Dr Christhina Candido​ said.

The survey has been running for five years and is an accredited part of the NABERS and Green Star ratings schemes used by building occupants and owners to comply with and benchmark against the system.

NAB's building topped five of the nine categories and ranked highest on all four indices that score buildings. "To come out on top is really, really hard because the competition is really stiff," Ms Candido said.

NAB's head of property solutions Monica Klyscz said the survey revealed a 17 per cent increase in staff satisfaction with their workplace and an 11 per cent boost in productivity.

At least 95 per cent of staff work under flexible or "agile" arrangements at 700 Bourke Street, with regular staff movement between NAB's two other Melbourne offices which use the same workplace design and principles, Ms Klyscz said.

Ms Candido, a trained architect, said the BOSSA survey had thrown up some interesting preliminary results about the impact of activity-based designs in offices in Australia.

Not surprisingly, employees tended to gravitate to warmer or cooler parts of the office depending on their "thermal preference". Others chose their workplace according to views.

The freedom to move was connected with staff satisfaction and productivity.

There was an important link between activity-based environments and storage space - they need to be close together, she said.

One warning note highlighted by the survey was that "acoustics are a nightmare".

"We know how to design buildings for visual comfort ... we don't really know how to deal with that [office noise]," Ms Candido said.