Can healthy buildings make employees happier?

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more.

Regardless of whether your company has a strict in-office policy or supports a flexible schedule, the reality is that office attendance is at its highest levels in five years, according to Bisnow.

Nobody would argue the need for a healthy office, especially one with more people in it. And if you ask what makes a healthy office, most would say it is one that supports physical health and safety, well-being, collaboration, productivity, and social connection.

This is why so many businesses focus on factors such as air quality, ventilation, security, and employee wellness programs, for example. While these environmental and social indicators of health are important, they overlook one critical element: the ways that humans interact in a space and use the office.

Don’t make assumptions about in-office productivity

Employers make a lot of assumptions about how productive employees are in the office. Anecdotally, many employees say they look forward to spending time in the office to collaborate with colleagues. Yet top organizations want more than opinions and anecdotes. They want data showing the frequency of casual, impromptu brainstorming in the office and aligning that with productivity and efficiency.

Data on how teams collaborate is crucial in improving organizational productivity, as I’ve seen through numerous conversations with workplace leaders at Fortune 1000 companies. With the opportunity for more in-person collaboration, decision makers want to measure and understand the frequency of casual, impromptu discussions and brainstorming and how to foster more of it by creating the right office environment.

Not long ago, meeting and huddle data was based on how much time employees spent using online collaboration tools and video platforms. Today, with employees spending more time in physical spaces, understanding how and where employees collaborate is critical to improving the experience and eliminating silos.  

For example, compare the needs of an ad agency with a research think tank. We assume the agency needs more space for collaboration and client meetings, setting up the office layout to feature open desks, soft seating, and large, impressive conference rooms with high-end audio-visual capabilities.

At the think tank, we assume their employees need dedicated areas for individual, focused work. As a result, the office layout consists of rows of gray cubicles and a handful of different sized conference rooms.

Over time, an interesting shift happens at both companies. The ad agency employees come into the office in the morning, meet with their teams or participate in a larger company meeting, eat lunch in the break room, and then leave for the day.

The think tank employees squat in a conference room by themselves or in small clusters, participating in video conferences with colleagues and clients, spending little time at their desks. After a while, fewer employees come into the office, citing the ability to be more productive working remotely.

Business as usual, right? Yes, except for the long-term issues of these work arrangements. Along with having to heat and cool unoccupied spaces, negatively impacting the building’s carbon footprint, there is also the cost of cleaning areas based on scheduling, not usage. Safety also plays a factor should an emergency occur in the office, and nobody is available to respond. Add to this the expense of office leasing and the potential of squandered investments in an office redesign. Not to mention the critical, yet less measurable, missed opportunities of face-to-face interactions. 

Healthy buildings should encompass the entire human experience

When we think of healthy buildings, we should consider the entire human experience in them. Instead of making assumptions of how employees want to work, employers are starting to look more closely at how the office plays a role in the health, well-being, and productivity of employees.

Consider the idea that every business is a system unto itself, designed to produce outcomes. In that system, the office can be viewed as a product, one that is continuously refined to meet the needs of its “customers.”

In this instance, customers are the people using the office. Today, that product is improved by using AI in the digital space; the next era is improving it in the physical space by combining infrastructure data and intelligence on real-world spaces. Through a combination of AI and body heat sensing technology that ensures privacy, you can get a better sense of how the workforce uses the office. It is like having a touchscreen interface on a digital app, except in this instance, the office is the product. 

For example, a sensor that understands movement in a space can lead to insight about one-on-one and group interactions, frequency of impromptu meetings, and if large spaces are being used by an individual. This can show the subsequent impact on energy efficiency.

This isn’t about tracking attendance or keystrokes. Instead, by ensuring privacy and understanding how the workforce naturally moves throughout the office, employers can make better decisions about how to make the most of an employee’s time in the office.

They may learn that the best open desks are quickly taken, forcing most employees to work in darker spaces, and that the volume of chatter makes it difficult to be productive. This is why conference rooms are being squatted, and employees are working remotely.

These insights can lead to better management decisions about in-office work policies, layouts, leases, and even cleaning contracts. Employers that have amassed insights about office usage are feeding the data into GPTs to come up with office layouts and designs that more closely reflect their corporate cultures.

Instead of having employees conform to the office, there is a way to have the office conform to the needs of employees. As a result, the office can become a place, or “product,” employees look forward to going to, providing a healthy work environment.

Honghao Deng is CEO and cofounder of Butlr.

View the full article