Month: June 2020

Why COVID-19 Raises the Stakes for Healthy Buildings

by Kristen Senz
View the original article here

Like it or not, humans have become an indoor species, so buildings have a major impact on our health. That’s why the Healthy Building Movement is gaining momentum, say John Macomber and Joseph Allen.

Will you ever again step onto a crowded elevator without hesitation? Reach for a doorknob without concern (or gloves)?

Easing social distancing restrictions might reopen businesses, but as long as memories of COVID-19 lockdowns are still fresh in people’s minds, the experience of being inside an office building most likely will not return to “normal.”

Even before the pandemic struck, there were plenty of reasons to be concerned about air quality and ventilation in the buildings where we live and work. After all, healthier indoor environments don’t just keep us from getting sick—they also enhance cognitive performance.

“OFFICES WITH THE PREMIER HEALTH STORY WILL GET THE PREMIUM RENT AND GET THE TENANTS, AND THE OFFICES WITH A LAGGING HEALTH STORY WILL LAG.”

To convey to managers the benefits of the healthy building movement, John D. Macomber, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, recently wrote a book about it: Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, to be published April 21.

Although facilities managers might think they’re saving a few dollars on electricity and air filters, “There’s just no reason anymore to economize on airflow and filtration,” Macomber says. “That just doesn’t make any sense. It’s a cheap way to help people be healthier.”

Together with co-author Joseph G. Allen, a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Macomber explores “nine foundations for a healthy building” and studies how simple tweaks to increase air flow and quality can have dramatic effects on workers.

But the economic benefits don’t stop there. Macomber expects that a growing public focus on health measures will drive major changes across a variety of industries, but especially in travel and hospitality. Increasingly, Macomber postulates, savvy business leaders and landlords will begin to leverage healthier indoor spaces as recruitment tools and sources of competitive advantage. Anxieties over COVID-19 are likely to accelerate these trends, he says.

“I think awareness is heightened, and in this economy there’ll be a drop in demand for space, both for apartments and offices,” he says. “With those two things together, I think that the offices with the premier health story will get the premium rent and get the tenants, and the offices with a lagging health story will lag.”

Many elite companies already use their building’s efficiency or grandeur to send a signal to customers and workforce talent. As a result of the global pandemic, Macomber expects an emphasis on indoor air quality and other healthy building measures will diffuse through the rest of the economy.

As the country begins to return to work, concerns about the spread of infectious disease will “make it easier than ever to invest in the basics of a healthy building, notably around ventilation, air quality, water, moisture, and security,” says Macomber. “Those aren’t expensive to begin with. So, I think those will propagate through pretty quickly, and they’ll be must-haves, because the cost is not relatively very high, and the benefit is extremely high.”

As anyone who has ever felt sleepy on a stuffy airplane can attest, poor ventilation impedes cognition. “Casinos figured this out a long time ago, pumping in extra air and keeping the temperature cool to keep you awake at the gaming tables and slot machines longer,” Allen and Macomber write.

But through scientific, double-blind studies of workers in offices with various levels of air quality and flow, in which the workers were compared with themselves to gauge differences in personal performance, the authors of Healthy Buildings can quantify these effects.

Across all nine dimensions of cognitive function, which include things like “strategy,” “focused activity level,” and “crisis response,” performance was dramatically improved when study subjects worked in the optimal conditions (with high rates of ventilation and low concentrations of carbon dioxide and other harsh compounds).

“Think about that for one second—simply increasing the amount of air brought into an office, something nearly every office can easily do, had a quantifiable benefit to higher-order cognitive function in knowledge workers,” Macomber and Allen write.

Macomber is careful, though, not to make the leap from enhanced performance to increased productivity, because productivity involves so many different factors.

Among the nine foundations for a healthy building (see graphic) is “security,” a term the authors expect will take on a broader meaning in a post-pandemic world. Building security will involve monitoring not just who enters and what they are physically carrying, but also what they might be carrying internally. In addition to metal detectors, infrared scanners at building entrances will take visitors’ temperatures, to help prevent the spread of viruses and other pathogens, similar to technology already in place at some airports.

As people begin to internalize the collective nature of public health, sharing of personal health and air quality metrics—using wearables and smartphones—could lead to new applications that provide real-time information about the conditions inside buildings. Imagine an app that does for public health what WAZE has done for traffic congestion, Macomber says.

“There is going to be substantially more awareness and interest on the part of the public, in terms of the quality of the spaces that they’re occupying, and they’ll be selective about their airplanes and about their cruise ships,” he predicts. “And pretty quickly they’ll be selective about their apartments and their offices as well, and they’ll share that information with other people.”

WELL Building Standard – The Next BIG Thing in Business

Written by Zack Sterkenberg
View the original article here

Our world is getting greener by the day. As a global community, we are trying vigorously to recycle more, waste less, and become more efficient in everything that we do. Now, with the green building trend towards sustainability firmly in place, the WELL Building Standard is helping to spearhead the next big wave of change – making buildings healthier and greener for those of us who inhabit them.

The days of walking into uninspiring, lean-style working environments that carelessly hemorrhage energy and neglect facility performance with a blind eye are no more. Thanks to the growing popularity of WELL and the rising trend towards human health optimization, the architects and designers of today take care to mindfully consider your well-being and overall satisfaction.

The WELL Building Certification

At the most basic level, WELL is a building performance rating and certification system similar to LEED, but with a focus on human well-being and performance rather than environmental sustainability.

This performance-based system was constructed around seven core concepts to measure, certify, and monitor our working environments. These seven concepts lay the foundation for maximizing human health and wellness within the built environment.

The WELL Building Standard’s core concepts include:

  • Air
  • Water
  • Nourishment
  • Light
  • Fitness
  • Comfort
  • Mind

Under each of these concepts is a more complex list of certification “features” or metrics. The list includes over 100 individual metrics that fall under the greater umbrella of the seven core concepts.

The WELL program was developed during the course of seven years of exhaustive research. The research looked intensely at the role of nature and nature-based architectural patterns on human physical and mental wellbeing.

The correlation between human wellbeing and nature is well documented in studies on biophilic design, but WELL is the first building standard to tie all of the research together into a cohesive program that focuses exclusively on the health and wellness of people.

Benefits of a WELL building

In 2013, the CBRE Global Corporate Headquarters in Los Angeles became the first commercial office space to achieve WELL Certification. Upon initial analysis of the pilot program, employees working in the Headquarters reported overwhelmingly positive outcomes.

  • 83% felt more productive
  • 92% reported a positive effect on health and wellbeing
  • 94% claimed the space had a positive impact on business performance
  • 93% reported easier collaboration

WELL v2

After seeing such great success from WELL v1, WELL introduced WELL v2 in 2018. Using the latest health data and user feedback, WELL v2 maintains the first four WELL concepts and expands the concept list to ten.

  1. Air
  2. Water
  3. Nourishment
  4. Light
  5. Movement
  6. Thermal Comfort
  7. Sound
  8. Materials
  9. Mind
  10. Community

Version two of WELL was built with the goal of accessibility. WELL wanted to put even more truth behind their mission of “[advancing] health buildings for all.” The new version aims to meet the needs of any type of building, as its dynamic nature allows for continuous advancement and change. V2 provides a much more adaptable scorecard than v1. The new concept provides the opportunity to build a unique scorecard with the features that are relevant to your building.

Why businesses are betting on WELL

To date, there have been over 2,000 WELL-certified projects registered across 52 countries. These projects represent over 391 million square feet in built space. These numbers continue to grow by the day. There are several reasons why WELL is making such expansive waves in the business world. The most significant is the impact that the initiative has on the overall health and productivity of the employees, a company’s largest and most important asset.

As an engine operating at peak performance helps to drives a car to victory in a race, a workforce that is happy, healthy, and efficient workforce leads to increased success and higher profits for the entire company. By constructing facilities that integrate green design elements, businesses can expect lower physiological stress, increased attention span, increased cognitive functioning, and improved employee well-being across the board.

In the same vein, by incorporating plants into the working environment, employees will have lower blood pressure, cleaner air to breathe, lowered risk of illness and an overall boost in wellbeing. WELL effectively leads to a more productive and creative workforce with lower absenteeism rates and lower healthcare costs. By definition, it’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.

This is great news for the employee. A company’s staff is the backbone of the business and is a major driver of overall success. This is why it makes absolute business sense to invest in them. This is the core mission of WELL: to make businesses more effective by making the employees more productive.