Colorado Real Estate Journal - September 2, 2015
Imagine you’re a first grader at the beginning of the school year. You hear from some older students that the school restrooms are haunted, and that lost souls from beyond the grave like to play with the lights. How eager are you to use the restrooms, especially alone? The lost souls in this case were actually lighting control sensors causing a delay in the lights turning on when kids entered the space. This tale of restroom poltergeists comes from a post-occupancy evaluation conducted by M.E. Group at a renovated, high-performance elementary school in New Mexico. As a result of the teasing from older students, facilitated by the lighting controls, the younger students avoided using the restroom or rushed through the process, resulting in the following performance, health and well-being issues: • Concentration problems in the classroom (from dread and delay of using the restroom); • Hygiene issues (from rushing through the process); and • Potential health problems (from consistently holding it longer than they should). This example falls in line with a significant amount of research demonstrating even green, high-performance facilities often fail to meet design intent in varying ways, from energy consumption to impacts on occupant productivity and health. And with the average annual cost for personnel ranging from 120 to 240 times the annual facility energy costs, even a fraction of a percentage change in productivity and health can dwarf any associated changes in utility costs. This is demonstrated by M.E. Group’s retro-commissioning and human factors evaluation of the Conrad Duberstein U.S. Post Office and Bankruptcy Courthouse in Brooklyn, N.Y. Proposed energy conservation measures were estimated to save approximately $872,000 in operational costs annually, with a simple payback of 10 ½ years. Considering just a limited number of indoor environmental quality impacts, those same measures were conservatively estimated to result in productivity and health savings of $3.57 million annually, reducing the simple payback to 2.1 years. Nor are benefits limited to energy use and occupant productivity and health. Studies have shown that certified green buildings meeting occupant needs command rent price rates 25 percent greater and occupancy rates 23 percent greater than conventional, code-compliant unrated office buildings. This growing realization of the importance of occupant factors has been one of the driving forces behind the development of the WELL Building Standard and other efforts to assess and improve our built environments’ impacts on productivity, health and general well-being. However, as these examples demonstrate, improvement hinges on evaluations of some form to verify if facilities are performing per design intent. Out of 14 POEs we conducted, an average of 105 lessons learned resulted from each POE. Many were related to performance not meeting design intent with impacts on occupant productivity, health and wellbeing. Evaluations must also be comprehensive in that they focus on both the building and the occupant. Otherwise we miss the complete picture and lose the opportunity to maximize both building performance and occupant productivity, health and well-being. To exemplify this, picture a shiny new high school with large expanses of exterior/interior glazing flooding daylight into spaces and exposing beautiful outdoor scenes for the teachers and students within. The media center depicted has internal glazing at an upper level, allowing views to the lower ground level, as well as beyond through exterior glazing. While this design allows substantial daylight penetration and view access, the space’s configuration also allows those at the ground level to see up the skirts of those standing next to the glass on the upper level. Beyond the embarrassment, this exacerbates potential conflicts surrounding gender and bullying, including sexual harassment, and helps foster disrespect for teachers and administrators among students. A focus on the occupant as part of the POE process, through methods such as in-context interviews and observations, facilitated the discovery of this issue. It’s also possible that involving some type of behavioral/ human factors professional during planning and early design would have seen this and suggested adding an applique to the lower portion of the glazing. Whether during planning or post occupancy, such comprehensive assessments illuminate the path toward aligning building capabilities and operations with occupant needs and behaviors. In this case, the design overlooked the building’s impacts on social aspects of occupant well-being. While the emerging WELL Building program touches on this perspective under a feature entitled Just Organization, focused on encouraging fair and equitable organizations, like any rating system it doesn’t specifically address how a building’s design itself facilitates fairness and equity among occupants. A positive change to this feature would add a requirement that professionals be included with expertise addressing occupant engagement and social factors. Expertise comes from learning from experience. Without evaluations, we don’t know what works, what doesn’t and why. Comprehensive POEs provide an opportunity to learn from our experiences and ensure buildings are performing well for their owners, operators and occupants. POEs also provide an important means for improving and growing certification systems, like WELL Building.