Feature
Freshening Up The Office Ahead Of Returning Occupants By Mark Grayston, Product Marketing Manager, Mitsubishi Electric
It’s hard to believe that it was over a year ago that office workers flooded out of their premises and headed home for the first of the COVID 19 lockdowns. In fact, it’s estimated1
The vaccine program is continuing to be a success meaning many businesses are putting steps in place to return to some semblance of normality through a flexible approach to office home working. In fact, 53% of UK workers2 understood to want some element of flexible working moving forward.
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While the pandemic has truly heralded the year of flexible working, many businesses, and their employees, will be looking forward to getting back into the office.
Over the next few weeks and months facilities managers need to start preparing their buildings for the arrival of staff again, whether in coworking spaces or as the sole tenants.
As FM’s head back, we take a look at some of the key areas and considerations they should be looking at when preparing to reopen their offices again.
Time For A Good Service & Maintenance Rundown
Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment has grown in sophistication, even from a couple of years ago. Designed to deliver maximum efficiency at high performance, there are lots of component parts, so ensuring your equipment is still up to scratch is vitally important.
It is essential that everything from the calibration of temperature and pressure sensors to compressor operation and heat transfer from exchangers is regularly checked.
Probably the first thing you want to look at in the building is the ventilation, as increasing the amount of fresh air into spaces is one of the best ways of ensuring you keep your businesses and staff as COVID safe as possible. It’s therefore worth asking how
20 fmuk
you can simply increase the airflow into those spaces and seeing whether your existing equipment is able to do this and do it energy efficiently, or whether you need to consider an upgrade.
After that, it’s worth looking at your heating system and flushing out any water systems. Check and clean all vents on ventilation, chilled beams, air conditioning, etc and give all components, including electrics an overall system check.
Check time clocks are still working if power has been off for any period and also take the opportunity to check that the set times are still relevant if you will be operating different occupancy patterns.
Whatever your system it is worth reviewing whether it is calibrated to ensure maximum comfort and reliability and it’s also crucial that these systems are regularly checked, so once you’ve got your systems back up and running to cope with occupied, rather than empty spaces, it would be worth getting the maintenance team in to double check everything – even if that means bringing forward the schedule.
It’s worth remembering that for those working in the office, productivity is directly linked to the temperature of the working environment. A study3
as productive working at 25o At 32o
in the US found that workers were twice C, compared with working at 20o
C.
C, productivity fell 85%, highlighting the importance of small changes in temperature.
that 60% of Brits are still working from home as we close in on 18 months.
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