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Proof of the pudding

Throughout the world, innovative designers and employers applying the Well Building Standard to create workplaces that are healthy for body and mind. Can it work and will we really know until the dust has settled, or been carefully filtered away?

text Francis Pearce photo
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The difference between wellness and wellbeing is a subtle one. Being in good physical condition does not necessarily mean that you are also happy and cared for. Until recently, beyond complying with health and safety rules, most employers were content to leave both states to individual workers to achieve on their own account. But a growing number recognise that wellbeing can contribute to staff retention, productivity and performance and are looking for ways to
create healthier work environments. The multidisciplinary engineering consultancy Cundall, for example, says, "our research demonstrates that in healthy office environments, productivity increases, absente­eism reduce and concentration improves. In the home, sleeping patterns improves, respiratory issues decrease and even fitness can increase."

The engineering consultant Arup cites changing demographics, tough economic climates, health imperatives, and technological advancements as reasons why "organisations are now facing the challenge of how to do more for their people", putting pressure on companies to use the built environment "to support and facilitate individuals, organisations and communities to thrive."

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Cundall's new London office at One Carter Lane was the first project in Europe to achieve the Well Building Standard in addition to a SKA Gold and BREEAM Excellent Ratings for sustainability. The Well Building Standard, administered by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), an American public benefit corporation, provides ways of measuring just over 100 features of the indoor-environment that affect both health and well-being. These come under the categories or "concepts" of air, water, nourishment, light, fitness, comfort and mind. "The most obvious point to note about the seven concepts is that they focus on people," says Cundall lighting director Andrew Bissell. "The concept of nourishment or fitness as part of the employee environment, for example, is not something you would see in, say, BREEAM or LEED."

In 2016, behavioural scientist Professor Paul Dolan of the London School of Economics developed a checklist for built environment design with wellbeing in mind; it carries the mnemonic SALIENT. This stands for sound, air, light, image, ergonomics and tint (meaning colour). By introducing elements that are related to well-being, the Well Building Standard arguably takes workplace design further, in the direction of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

In 1954, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote Motivation and Personality in which he described human needs as forming a pyramid with five layers, each of which needs broadly to be met before the one above can be attended to satisfactorily. The base of the pyramid includes physiological needs such as food and shelter, met in terms of workplace design by providing comfortable working conditions. Above these come safety needs, met in the work environment by good working conditions.

This is pretty well the limit of most building standards, guidelines and recommendations and roughly corresponds with the concepts of air, water, Iight and comfort, but the Well Building Standard attempts to address at least two more layers with its concept of mind. The social needs layer of Maslow's pyramid takes in group relationships, communication and informal activities. The top two layers encompass esteem, nourished by feedback, promotions and pay, and therefore relating mainly to the organization, and self-actualisation, which comes from responsibility, autonomy, challenges and achievement. Both sets of top level need may be met at least partly by the standard's focus on nourishment and fitness, both of which are linked to mental health.

As Derek Clements-Coombe points out in Creating the Productive Workplace, "there are subtleties here such as recognising the need to pay attention to circadian lighting and not just using functional systems assessed by lighting levels only, and the need to support mental and emotional health.However good the built environment is, it still requires people to have some responsibility too by eating, drinking and exercising healthily and not smoking."

The American Society of Interior Designers' headquarters in Washington provides an example of how this is put into practice. The 780sq m/8500sq ft office is the first anywhere to achieve both Well- and LEED-certification at the Platinum level, and acts as a living laboratory for the design community. "We began this project with a clear goal of show casing the many ways design can positively affect the health and well-being of employees while boosting resource efficiency. At ASID, we believe in research-based results in design and placed an emphasis on third-party validation of the space," says ASID chief executive Randy W Fiser.

The design by US architect Perkins+Will includes a circadian lighting system, sound masking systems, rigorous water quality standards and employs biophilic design strategies based on the idea that we are all drawn to nature and likely to be happier presented with, say, a view of greenery or office plants. These are coupled with policies and procedures that emphasise employee health and productivity such as providing fresh fruit and vegetables, sit/stand desks and a wellness room for mental breaks.

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After more than 60 years Maslow's theories have undergone scrutiny and revision, not least by Maslow himself, but they still provide a foundation for "human-centric" design. "Good design is about deve­loping an inclusive, user centred solution which will work for the majority of a building's occupants," says Sara Kassam, the head of sustainability at the UK Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers. In the end, though, any system only works as well as the people who have to live within it, and they are not all the same. "A major challenge for designers looking to provide a user centred focus is that there is no single agreed model of human behaviour that they can use," she cautions.

Reporting on the conclusions of a cross-disciplinary think-tank on design Kassam put forward eight principles, the top three being: "view human behaviour in the built environment as a complex socio-technical system; use collaborative methods and tools to involve all key stakeholders, especially end-users, throughout the design process, and include behavioural issues from the very beginning of the design process." At ASID's headquarters the design process started this way. "We went above the bar by providing novel best practice methodologies which included interviews, sessions for educational information for the occupants and personal interviews," says lighting design consultant Deborah Burnett of the Benya Burnett Consultancy. 

"We also regularly met with stakeholders to reinforce the bottom-line savings they would achieve through these wellness interventions, and their overall standing in the community in terms of stewardship and making the built environment protect all in terms of light and space."

Crucially, ASID reports that post-occupancy "research by Cornell University found that employee satisfaction on the environmental quality of the office increased significantly, as did overall job satisfaction, perceived support by the organization, and perceived organizational productivity." As the Well Building Standard is applied to workplaces from Stockholm to Shanghai and Sydney perhaps the true Maslowian test of whether it can achieve what it set out to do, which is to create productive, healthy environments, will lie in its use of post-occupancy analysis. The proof of the Well Building pudding lies in the eating, breathing, hearing, feeling, viewing, inhabiting and experiencing.

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