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Truly healthy buildings have a focus on occupancy By Mark Bouldin, Healthy Buildings Expert at Johnson Controls
Health and wellbeing have come into the spotlight more than ever over the past year. We spend most of our lives indoors, and the buildings in which we live, work and play have a huge impact on our wellbeing. Now more than ever, it has become critical to ensure our buildings are healthy places to be.
We will never work in the same way again, that is an obvious one. Many businesses across the country are toying with the idea of implementing new working models, whether it be fully remote or flexible, or returning to their pre pandemic ways. No matter what they decide, the rule book for facility and building managers has changed dramatically.
Building occupancy is one of the key areas that facility managers (FMs) and building owners must focus on. This is how we can make healthy buildings a reality. Employees are no longer limited to fixed desks, work station sizes must be revaluated and meeting rooms and bookings systems overhauled. Moreover, the way we access, experience, and benefit from our workplaces needs to be reimagined. But this is only the beginning.
Where are we going wrong?
To provide healthy and collaborative spaces for employees to work, businesses often begin with the solution. This is where we are going wrong. In fact, the core problem needs to be fully addressed first, so we can work out how best to solve it. ‘Good enough’ is no longer enough.
In order to create healthier 34 fmuk buildings, we first need to understand the impact of unhealthy buildings. The World
Health Organisation has estimated that there are 12.6 million deaths1
worldwide each year attributable to unhealthy
environments, proving that the world around us has a huge impact on our health.
There are nine key factors that can affect health and productivity in buildings: light, noise, security, water, moisture, dust & pests, air quality and thermal health. While organisations are always looking for ways to increase performance and occupant comfort – and now mitigate the risk of infections too – these decisions must go beyond the impact on our productivity and happiness at work. They must also take into account wider issues like carbon emissions and air pollution. Not addressing these problems creates issues down the line that can be extremely detrimental to our health.
Put simply, the cycle needs to be broken: unhealthy buildings leads to an unhealthy planet, which results in unhealthy people.
Small changes for a big solution
In order to break this cycle and help improve building health, FMs and building managers need to focus on one thing first and foremost: occupancy. Who is using your buildings and how are they using them? Where does occupancy even come in when we need to improve issues like air quality, thermal health, noise, lighting, security, water, moisture, and dust and pests? In order to improve, we need to be constantly monitoring and even predicting occupancy levels. To do so, the optimum levels of occupancy of an area need to be calculated, taking air ventilation and air change rates into account.
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