Good for business

By Lee Bint and Andrew Pollard - 1 February 2015, Build 146

An international report finds that healthy workplaces may result in higher productivity. Some of its results mirror work done by BEES on indoor air comfort and the use of natural light.

USUALLY THE SALARIES of the occupants of an office building far outweigh the rental and energy costs of the building.

While increasing occupant density or reducing energy services, such as the levels of lighting, may reduce immediate costs, the question remains, ‘How does my building impact my people?’

This was examined in Health, wellbeing and productivity in offices: the next chapter for green building, the latest report from the World Green Building Council (WGBC).

Eight findings from overseas

The report reviews numerous overseas studies and highlights how factors like daylighting, passive ventilation and good spatial configurations can affect the productivity of building occupants. However, measuring productivity is difficult and can be more subjective than factual in many instances.

The report included eight key findings:

● Better indoor air quality can lead to productivity improvements of 8–11%.

● Thermal comfort plays an important role in workplace satisfaction, so users with some control over their indoor environment are more productive.

● A connection to the outside environment and proximity to window views are a significant factor in the wellbeing of people.

● Maximising daylight cannot be achieved in offices that have a very deep floor plate.

● Noise and unwanted distractions can be a major barrier to productivity.

● Interior office layout impacts on concentration, collaboration, confidentiality and creativity.

● Access to services and amenities such as bike storage, showers, gyms and green spaces can all encourage healthier lifestyles.

● Tracking issues such as absenteeism to determine patterns in tenanted areas provides a metric for identifying opportunities to improve buildings.

Backed up locally by BEES

Some of the report’s findings have also been identified in New Zealand through BRANZ’s Building Energy End-use Study (BEES) and in other work.

The indoor air quality, thermal comfort and daylight findings as well as tenant-building management relationships have, in particular, been examined and reported on in BEES.

Thermal comfort

Not all of the monitored office spaces in BEES had well controlled CO₂and temperatures. Post-occupancy evaluations showed that spaces with larger indoor temperature variations throughout the space had higher user dissatisfaction than offices that had more consistent temperatures.

Poor daylighting for deep spaces

An important finding from the WGBC – that maximising daylight cannot be achieved in offices with a very deep floor plate – was also found in BEES. The BEES work involved computer modelling, particularly relating to the rebuild of Christchurch CBD.

BEES found that narrow floor plates – less than 7 m to windows – are optimum for achieving effective daylighting and passive ventilation. BEES research also found that approximately 75% of the premises surveyed had little usable daylight and had to rely heavily on artificial lighting for most, if not all, of their lighting needs.

Keeping on top of information

BEES research shows the distinction between buildings and their premises is extremely important.

Many building occupants, particularly in smaller buildings, did not know who their landlord or building manager was or reported not having one.

Coordinating absenteeism and financial and building-related information from large multi-tenanted buildings could become extremely onerous. This is particularly so when information from three or four different parties within each tenancy needs to be tracked.

How measures can payoff

The WGBC report provides a way to review selected elements contributing to better design and indoor environmental quality from a building occupant perspective.

At a higher level, it provides a simple toolkit that companies can use to measure health, wellbeing and productivity of their buildings and to inform financial decisions.

This is extremely important for driving the business case for higher-quality buildings that are valued by investors, developers and tenants. The ‘sweet spot’ is identified as the overlap of:

● building knowledge, through facilities managers

● the people, through human resources

● finance, through organisational financial metrics.

Data could be gold

The report states that ‘many organisations are sitting on a treasure trove of information that, with a little sifting, could yield important immediate strategies for their two biggest expenses – people and places’.

This suggests that there is increasing recognition of how property and facilities managers and their knowledge and information could contribute to successful building design and outcomes.

It is unclear whether the WGBC studies looked only at green buildings or was broader. However, to achieve a well performing building, it is not necessary to have a green building rating but rather to understand the impacts buildings have on their occupants and implement strategies to reduce them.

This report provides an effective starting point for businesses to do this.