CREJ - Office Properties Quarterly - July 2015
It’s no secret that the modern workplace isn’t the healthiest of environments. If you fight through traffic to get to your office and then sit at a desk in a cube all day with no access to a view of the outdoors and a dearth of options for decent, nonfast-food lunch, it is not surprising if you have some associated health impacts. If you have a stressful job or a stressful boss, then likely the impacts are only amplified. If you run a business, then this is a financial catastrophe because your biggest expense is your people, and if your people are sick, unfit, depressed or overly stressed, then you are losing money hand-overfist in terms of presenteeism – the productivity that is lost when employees come to work but, as a consequence of illness or other medical conditions, are not fully productive. Typically staff costs are 90 percent of a business’ operating costs, dwarfing utility, lease and other expenses, and the cost of replacing an employee is generally 1½ to two times the lost employee’s annual salary, according to a Brookings Institute report. Attracting and retaining the best employees and optimizing their productivity at work should be high priorities for any employer, and healthy workplace design is central to these goals. One study that measures the contributions of medical conditions toward overall presenteeism suggests that the biggest contributors are depression, allergies, heart disease and diabetes – all of which are conditions that are exacerbated by stress, poor air quality, lack of daylight, inadequate access to nature, few options for good food, and lack of places to walk or exercise. For other businesses, the key metric isn’t productivity, but creativity and collaboration. A business can live or die by the ability of its people to be innovative, which is why many employers are moving away from office spaces that kill productivity and collaboration – the rows of cubes, the lack of daylight, stifling air, ambient noise, exposure to toxins, and the paucity of places to huddle, have conversations and draw ideas. If the goal is to locate in work environments that embrace human health, creativity, productivity and collaboration, what do those workplaces look like? First, air quality is a basic and fundamental element to a healthy building, and if you’re in an existing building, you should make sure that you have a green cleaning program in place and do regular air quality assessments to make sure that you have enough fresh air for people to breathe (per ASHRAE standards) and are filtering the air appropriately. People often are surprised at how office spaces fail on this basic point. The impact is a workforce that is sleepy, stressed or has difficulty concentrating. New buildings generally are better in this category, but also should follow the LEED indoor environmental quality credits as a measure of quality control. Beyond the basics, the first key component of a healthy workplace is what many architects and planners call active design, which is about creating the infrastructure for people to be more active. “Sitting is the new smoking,” according to Dr. James Levine, director of the Obesity Solutions Initiative. So we need to find ways to get people up and moving. Active design includes selecting an office location in an area where people can walk to work and to places nearby. Look for locations with a walkscore of 85 or higher. Even better, locate near public transit so employees can get to work without their cars – one study showed that people that use transit are 81 percent less likely to be obese, are less likely to have a heart attack, and are even less likely to get divorced. Active design can include the design of the building itself, such that people use the stairs as their default choice to go between floors. Many new buildings are including “active design stairs” between floors of offices, and locating the stairs by the entrance so it is the first thing that people see when entering the building. And instead of using every last scrap of land for parking, buildings are using parking reductions to create outdoor tranquility areas, walking paths, community gardens or picnic lawns. Other offices include work out areas or gym memberships, some are instituting “walking meetings,” and others offer standing desks and treadmill desks to get people up and moving around as often as possible. As you’re reading this, when is the last time you stood up and walked around? Another key staple of a healthy workplace is daylight. Access to daylight reduces stress, helps us sleep better, reduces fatigue, depression and overeating, and is associated with every manner of increased work performance. A recent study found that workers located near a window slept, on average, 46 minutes more per night, while workers without access to daylight reported sleep and vitality issues and experienced dysfunction at work. Another study of employees at the Northwest University Campus found a correlation between access to daylight and 6.5 percent less sick leave taken. The challenge is providing daylight access to workers when you locate in a building with deep floor plates (where most of the floor area is away from the windows), or where the few private offices take up the perimeter and block access for the rest of the floor. Many companies are going through interesting introspection and cultural shifts when they ask the question, how can we provide access to daylight to all of our staff? Often it means going away from private perimeter offices, going to open plan offices, and rebuilding the quiet and collaborative spaces that are still necessary for privacy and concentration. This means that treating acoustics is a vital component to a healthy workplace. Poor acoustics, both internal and external, is one of the leading factors in workplace dissatisfaction and can cause as much as a 60 percent drop in performance. While daylight is critical, it is just a part of a broader category called biophilia, which is the notion that humans resonate with access and contact with natural system because we evolved with nature and are a little out of touch without it. In addition to daylight, things like vegetation, natural sounds and smells, and views of green, all contribute to reducing stress. Imagine opening your office window and feeling a breeze, smelling the rain or hearing the leaves – these are examples of biophilia. There is a significant amount of research that correlates biophilic aspects with improved overall health. One study showed that a quick glimpse of nature could improve overall productivity. Another study showed that exposure to bacteria found in the soil causes our brains to release a natural antidepressant – a strong argument for gardening or playing in the dirt. Lastly, it would be hard to claim a healthy office if everyone was sitting at their desks drinking soda and eating Cheetos all day. Giving people access to healthy food is pretty basic, but doing it well, and without being too paternalistic, can be a challenge. Part of the battle is changing the default choice, like making the salad bar the first thing that people see and hiding the desert tray from immediate view. You can label foods for calorie content and other health aspects, and include signs that encourage people to use smaller plates, which tend to mean smaller portions – all strategies used by Google’s cafeterias. But getting rid of the traditional vending machines and giving people some better options during the day is an easy first step. The concept of a healthy workplace is no longer a novel idea. Many employers understand that there is an issue and that they have a responsibility – both ethical and financial – to take on the issue. And the real estate and design industry responded with increasing attention and resources, including a Building Health Toolkit from the Urban Land Institute, an excellently updated Indoor Environmental Quality section in the new version of LEED (LEED v4), and a newly launched healthy building rating system called the WELL Building Standard, under which buildings and interiors may be certified as healthy buildings. There’s still a long way to get before the default workplace can be considered truly healthy, but every conversation about workplace environment and workplace culture will include the question of health.