Environment
Improving Indoor Air Quality In The Post Covid Workplace
By Jamie Cameron, Director of Digital Solutions at Johnson Controls UK & Ireland
Clean air needs to be the top priority to ensure our workplaces, schools, and hospitals are healthy and safe for everyone. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of indoor air quality to reduce the chance of virus transmission and help ensure employees can return to work safely. This is good news, but the focus on clean air is long overdue – indoor air quality and improved ventilation should have always been a priority. Clean air is not just about reducing potential spread of the virus, but also lowering CO2 emissions, particulate matter, and volatile organic compounds, all of which are proven to impact our health and productivity.
The quality of the air in the places we live and work has a huge impact on our lives. In workplaces, it often goes unnoticed – but this is a dangerous oversight. Organisations should always be looking for ways to increase performance, happiness, and comfort, whilst trying to lower the number of staff on leave due to illness. Buildings have a significant effect on employee productivity, and having the right systems in place is essential and can even lead to a higher IQ1
for employees, benefitting businesses and staff alike.
Businesses must also now be thinking about mitigating the risk of infection indoors, and this begins with a focus on healthy buildings and improving indoor air quality.
The critical first step in making clean air a reality is a focus on building occupancy. Using technology to measure occupancy levels in real time, via apps or central dashboards, means businesses can adjust air change levels accordingly. Variable air conditioning systems and sensors can also provide flexibility depending on the occupancy of a room – if more people enter, more clean air gets pumped in.
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This is an industry wide issue: developers and building owners need to do better than designing ventilation systems around minimum occupancy levels, and thus minimum air change levels. Research2 shows that the greater the air change levels, the more productive, happy, and healthy workers and students tend to be. For businesses who want to get the most out of their people, indoor air quality needs to take precedence. Clean air is a cornerstone of healthy buildings, especially now – and we must not leave it by the wayside as pandemic restrictions are eased.
Achieving cleaner air indoors cannot come at the expense of the planet, and must go hand in hand with a business’ sustainability efforts. While humidity and temperature both have an impact on our health and comfort, having air conditioning on full at all times is counterintuitive. Instead, there must be a balance. Rather than focussing solely on sustainability or the employee experience, prioritising occupancy can help organisations get the most out of their employees while also meeting ESG and efficiency targets. Sensors and analytical platforms can do the hard work for us, using AI to measure and predict occupancy levels. These technologies can provide building owners with the data needed to calculate the real time costs for increasing the flow of fresh air into our workspaces.
In the last year, we’ve been spending more time than ever before indoors. As the pandemic has put the focus on public health, businesses must ensure our buildings are healthy places to be in as we prepare for buildings reopening. Organisations should revaluate the purposes for which they will use their buildings, the things that have changed over the past year, and the measures that must be put in place to ensure employee health and safety.
1 & 2
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.1510037
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