Healthy Buildings: Key Benefits & How They Work
Thursday, 8th September 2022
With the average American spending 90% of their time indoors, it’s not just our bodily health that we need to consider, but the health of our built environment: the buildings we live and work in, day in, day out.
Why? A healthy building has a significant impact on the mental and physical health of its occupants, on building running and maintenance costs and on achieving environmental targets. Creating a healthy built environment the smart way, with cutting edge, integrated technology will help you reap these rewards and foster a happier, healthier and more productive workplace.
What is a healthy building?
According to researchers at Harvard University, a building can be called ‘healthy’ if it satisfies the following nine criteria:
Good air quality: levels of pollutants such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) should be minimised and humidity levels controlled.
Sufficient ventilation: the guidelines for outdoor air quality should be met or exceeded. Outside air should be filtered.
A comfortable temperature: indoor temperature should be stabilised and maintained at a comfortable level throughout the working day.
Correct moisture levels: any leaks and sources of condensation should be addressed.
High water quality: water should be continuously monitored to ensure that it meets national standards.
Minimised noise: indoor noise levels should be controlled and occupants should be shielded from excessive outside noise.
Optimised natural light and views: natural light should be used wherever possible, and occupant work and leisure spaces should have exterior windows in clear sight of occupants.
Comprehensive safety and security measures: sufficient lighting, monitoring and action plans should be in place in case of emergency.
Elimination of pests and dust: cleaning should be sufficient to stop the buildup of dust and preventative measures should be taken to avoid attracting pests and vermin.
As you can see, a healthy building is created by careful attention to many factors, which all work together to optimise occupant wellbeing.
What are the key benefits of a healthy building?
Healthy buildings are so much more than bricks and mortar: a healthy building provides real-life, tangible benefits for occupant health, day-to-day running costs for businesses and our planet—by establishing a more sustainable future.
1. Promote physical and psychological wellbeing
Building health impacts physical and psychological wellbeing in multiple ways. For example, research studies have found that poor air quality is linked to respiratory illnesses, loss in productivity and even cancer. According to experts, cold, draughty and damp buildings are associated with poor mental health, including anxiety.
The Infogrid Healthy Building Survey corroborates this, with over half of those questioned saying that the healthiness of their workplace impacted their mental and physical wellbeing. Workplace health has never been so pertinent: 65% of employees are more concerned about the health of their workplace than they were before the pandemic.
Gone are the days when employees expect only a desk, with little consideration of indoor environmental quality. Of those that are happy to return to work, given the nature of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, 60% had said it was because their employer had made their workplace safe. Many employees had specific concerns that many didn’t feel were being met by their current employers, including:
Regular and thorough cleaning
Improving air quality
Limiting the number of people in indoor spaces to ensure the maintenance of social distancing.
Building health is now a significant factor in employee choice of workplace, with 49% of participants in the Infogrid OnePoll survey saying the healthiness of their workplace impacts their productivity and 39% even stating that the healthiness of their workplace would influence their decision to join a new company.
Put simply: to attract and keep talent, businesses need to be proactive in creating and maintaining a healthy indoor environment for their occupants.
2. Invest in your business
Investing in healthy building strategies now is a sound investment for the future of your business. The United States Environmental Protection Agency thinks so too, as described in their ‘Vision for the 21st Century’:
‘[...] By choosing designs, ventilation systems, materials, and products wisely, we are able to create healthy buildings while substantially reducing energy use, cutting materials costs, and raising productivity. The Nation’s success in improving human health indoors serves as a model for better building design and construction, rehabilitation and maintenance, and product development around the world.’
Creating a healthy indoor environment also makes sense economically—a healthier building means lower real estate and operational costs. For example, using smart healthy building technology you can:
Optimise your buildings: target things like cleaning, ventilation and temperature to where they are needed most.
Reduce energy consumption: by being more efficient with resources, such as electricity and water, businesses can make substantial savings on their energy costs.
Monitor sites remotely: save time and money on labour and maintenance, use technology to securely monitor your premises, 24/7.
Earn building certifications: increase the commercial value of your site by earning well-recognised certification in building health and sustainability, for example, LEED, BREEAM, WELL and RESET.
The payoffs are substantial. Using Inforgrid’s healthy building system, a supermarket saved $1.6 million a year—on their HVAC system alone, we helped a bank save $1 million a year on their water bill and a housing trust saved 69% on maintenance and legal fees.
3. Take a proactive approach to achieve your company’s environmental goals
According to the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, a staggering 30% of the energy used in commercial buildings is wasted.
Ensuring the health of their built environment can help businesses improve the sustainability of their buildings and help to meet a company’s environmental and social aims, as well as regulatory compliance. By taking a smart approach to building health you can:
Be more energy-efficient: power down underused areas and set appropriate room temperatures to respond to specific occupant needs.
Optimise your equipment: reduce waste by ensuring company equipment is running at its optimum level, at all times.
Demonstrably lower your organisation's carbon footprint: show your investors that you mean business when it comes to your sustainability aims.
It all adds up. Using infogrid’s healthy building system, a retail company saved 800 tons of CO2 per year. And With Infogrid’s pipe monitoring technology, a business saved more than 600 litres of water per tap and prevented over 2,900 Kg of carbon from being eliminated from each of their buildings.
What are the challenges of building a healthy building?
1. To meet all of the criteria for a healthy building you need an integrated system
Having a healthy building means more than just ‘ticking off’ one or two criteria. As well as sufficient soundproofing measures and enough natural light, a healthy building should have:
A robust system in place to monitor and ensure sufficient air quality, including the monitoring of pollutants and viral risk factors.
Occupancy across all indoor sites actively tracked: to optimize space usage and, if necessary, allow for social distancing.
Tailored cleaning: to respond specifically to high usage areas which can be easily validated, to improve hygiene standards and reduce unnecessary costs.
Constant monitoring of water quality, temperature and potential leaks: to help avoid labour-intensive interventions down the line.
Site-wide monitoring: for timely and effective intervention should any safety or security issues arise.
To ensure all the foundations are in place to make their building as healthy as it can be, facilities and workplace managers make sure all of these strategies are in place—using an integrated, easy to manage system.
2. To maintain a healthy building you need to use data
Despite the obvious need for ensuring building health, many organisations find the maintenance of the indoor environment and subsequent demonstration to their employees a challenging task.
Round-the-clock cleaning, for example, is costly, and beyond the budgets of most organisations. The need for cleaning will differ depending on the specific location and time—it does not make sense to clean all areas with the same intensity and frequency at all times, from the point of view of both hygiene and cost-effectiveness.
To ensure health performance indicators, such as cleanliness, indoor air quality and occupancy are maintained at optimum levels, organisations need wide-ranging and integrated ‘healthy building’ data.
In the past, this data has been done manually, and as a consequence, has been unreliable, inconsistent and expensive. An organisation may have found a way to measure one indicator well, but without an easy way to integrate that statistic into the wider picture, by cross-referencing other factors, such as occupancy, an organisation cannot gain a clear and informative view of the health of their building as a whole.
At Infogrid, we’ve created the Healthy Buildings System: a combined state-of-the-art IoT and proprietary AI platform to provide an integrated and whole-building view of indoor health indicator data, including air quality, water safety, cleanliness, occupancy, and employee satisfaction all at the same time and on a single, easy to navigate dashboard.
How do you build (or retrofit) a healthy building?
We believe that a healthy indoor working environment should be available to everyone—no matter what type of building their workplace occupies.
Read on to find out how our adaptable, easy-to-use and scalable healthy buildings system can transform your indoor environment, no matter how unique.
An adaptable and easy-to-use solution
When you think of the foundations of a healthy building, you might assume that the only way to achieve this is by building from scratch. To many organisations, therefore, the ability to reach ‘healthy building’ status may seem beyond their means—especially if their organisations are located in older, more complex structures.
With the Infogrid system, however, this is not the case: our healthy buildings system has been designed with the reality of diverse working environments in mind. Our best-in-class wireless IoT sensors can be fitted to any building and, being both simple to use and install, are completely scalable to fit any size of site.
Use infogrid smart sensor systems to automatically and securely monitor:
Air quality: CO2, VOCs, radon, humidity, light levels, ventilation, virus risk factor, air pressure, and a range of pollutants including particulate matter.
Occupancy: movement of people to monitor space usage, social distancing and access across a whole site.
Smart cleaning: tailor cleaning based on usage and validate when and where cleaning has taken place.
Water: water movement and temperature to help reduce the need for labour-intensive processes and to determine the presence of leaks and if pipes require flushing.
Fire safety and security: visualised floor plans and real-time SMS/email alerts for immediate and targeted intervention should problems arise.
Retrofitting in action: how we helped preserve an iconic British heritage site
The iconic Royal Opera House, in Covent Garden, exemplifies the applicability and flexibility of Infogrid’s healthy building system. Housing a beautifully ornate plaster frieze on its ceiling, which is one of the oldest in Europe, the building’s humidity and moisture levels had to be monitored frequently to ensure the building’s health—with the collapse of the delicate ceiling being a major concern.
This required twice-daily, manual checks that were inefficient and onerous.
Now, working together with Integral, hundreds of sensors are providing engineers with real-time data on moisture levels and leak detection— significantly easing manual workload. Evidence-based decisions can be made in the best interests of the building and its occupants based on the comprehensive data and analytics provided by Infogrid’s smart technology.
From June ‘21 to August ‘21, the Opera House achieved a 98% reduction in leak detection— saving 650 labour hours a year on detection, 1350 labour hours on pipe monitoring and 600,912 litres of water on L8 compliance.
Inforgrid’s cutting edge technology has provided this organisation with a fail-safe solution, safeguarding hundreds of millions of dollars in assets; the Royal Opera House ROI was achieved in less than 3 months.
We aim to remove the challenges associated with traditional healthy building technology, both in terms of logistics and expense. Facilities managers and estate owners can focus on bolstering compliance and improving their return on investment, all whilst forging healthy, sustainable and efficient buildings.
What are the key outcomes for organisations that invest in healthy buildings?
By creating a healthy working environment, organisations are making a long term investment for their employees' wellbeing.
This, in turn, has real-world consequences for your business:
Fewer sick days: safeguard employee health and reduce sickness-related absences
Increased productivity and happiness: safer, cleaner and healthier environments result in increased employee wellbeing and increased output.
Increased employee confidence: demonstrate your healthy building measures with our transparent platform and intuitive data analysis.
Maintain your competitive edge for attracting and keeping talent: easily compare the health of your building to competitors with an easily communicated, benchmarked score.
In addition, creating a healthy building means investing in more sustainable systems that are more energy efficient: all whilst decarbonising your building portfolio and reducing your real estate and operational costs.
With Infogrid, organisations have:
Saved a supermarket $1.6 million a year on energy costs
Helped a bank save $1 million a year on their water bill
A housing trust save 69% on maintenance and legal fees
A retail company save 800 tons of CO2 per year
A national theatre save over 2,000 hours of labour a year on compliance
At Infogrid, we empower organisations to create healthy buildings for their employees by providing integrated, simple to use and smart building intelligence at scale.
Interested in finding out how Infogrid can help your organisation create a healthy indoor workplace and invest in the future?
Sign up for our demo, here.
Watch our on-demand webinar ‘How Infogrid’s indoor air quality monitoring can help you get ahead of regulations and create a healthier work environment to improve employee wellbeing and productivity’ to explore:
Industry trends and regulations you need to know
The benefits of monitoring IAQ
How Infogrid’s IAQ solution can help you to be compliant and offer a healthier and safer work environment for employees.