Feature
Why wellness awareness is a must f engineers & managers – says Pr
Ask yourself a question: when did you first encounter the term ‘wellness’ in a workplace context? Five or maybe ten years ago – or even longer? Whatever your response, the truth is that it’s only in the last five years that wellness has begun to achieve serious traction as a market trend and a factor that informs decision-making in companies across the board. Several
important developments have
served to push wellness up the priority list. These include a growing awareness that current high levels of sickness in the workplace – totalling 30.7 million in the UK during 2017/18 (source: Health and Safety Executive) – have to be reduced, especially with the prospect of an ageing workforce that will increasingly be obliged to work into its late ‘60s or early ‘70s. Simultaneously, more workers are becoming aware of how their workplace
can impact upon their
physical and mental health, so wellness is more of a decisive factor in job-seeking and recruitment. Fortunately, these changes of expectation
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Making wellness an integral part of the decision-making process can be great news for employees business for building engineers, says Priva UK and Ireland sales manager Ga Inevitably, this has led to a sometimes
have taken place during a period when the level of understanding about working environments has increased significantly. Consecutive
studies have shown that
multiple parameters – such as badly designed workstations, poor ventilation,
excessive
noise, unsuitable lighting and inadequate communications systems – can all have a detrimental effect on wellness. For employers and building management teams this has translated to a greater desire for technologies that allow core systems to be optimised and managed more effectively, with an emphasis on solutions that enable the harvesting and extraction of wellness-related data. The good news is that the building technologies
sector has overwhelmingly
risen to this challenge over the last few years. Powerful yet accessible control systems that allow management teams to keep an overview of the building’s performance have become the norm, while high-efficiency LED lighting systems and more effective air- conditioning and filtration technologies have comfortably outpaced their predecessors.
steep learning curve for building engineers and technicians, who have had to negotiate a new level of integration in both installs and retrofits. Systems need not only to be optimised for current working conditions, but must also be sufficiently flexible to facilitate future expansion. In short, the expected shelf-life of new projects has tended
to increase substantially, and
these new requirements have had to be incorporated more fully into the design and planning phases. But whilst wellness is already a part of the debate surrounding many projects, an authoritative new report issued by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) indicates that we are only in a formative stage of a long- term transformation of how commercial developments are designed and implemented.
The workplace: a ‘picture of health’? Published to coincide with a sustainability forum event in Birmingham this summer, the report provides vivid
insight into
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