TRAVIS REVIEWS ‘HEALTHY BUILDINGS’ 

By the time you reach 80, you will have spent 72 years of your life indoors. This means that the people who design, build, and maintain our buildings can have a major impact on your health.

That statement is one of the most profound statements noted on the inside cover for a book that I recently purchased, published by Harvard University Press, titled “Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity.” The authors discuss a series of issues commonly encountered in commercial buildings that can profoundly affect indoor environmental health and customer satisfaction of the firms and people who occupy those buildings.

I recently found out one of the authors, Joseph Allen, is a keynote presenter at an indoor air quality program I’ll be attending in January. The Healthy Buildings America program is put on by the International Society for Indoor Air Quality and Climate (ISIAQ). ISIAQ is a multinational organization of academic researchers who provide tremendous insight through scientific research into the issues affecting IAQ. Since Mr. Allen is a keynote presenter at the conference, I decided to purchase an Audible.com, then hard copy, of his book.

Much of the book reinforced what I already knew. But I also learned a lot listening to it. I think the key audience for this book is commercial property managers, but developers, financiers, insurance providers, IAQ peers, and corporate facility managers will also benefit from its insight.

The initial chapters of the book make a case for healthy buildings. They discuss the health implications and the financial ramifications from a tenant’s perspective when poor indoor air quality is provided. Using information from BOMA and other property management associations, the authors define the average dollars per work hour for people who have offices in commercial buildings. They then expand on the dollars per work hour by explaining how an unhealthy building can affect the productivity and attendance of a tenant’s staff. They summarize this by showing the dollar impact an unhealthy building can have on employees health, productivity, and the employer’s bottom line. They also discuss how much easier it is to find financing or even recruit staff by offering a healthy building environment.

One of the strongest arguments involves the issue of ventilation and cognitive functions. Simply put, they lean on the research that shows how increasing outdoor air quantities can increase individual worker activity levels, individual focus, task orientation, crisis response, information seeking, and information usage — all things that make an employee more productive. The research presented and the data provided in this section of the book encourage you to consider the advantages of bringing in more outdoor air versus less.

Compounding that, building managers who only consider bringing in outdoor air when carbon dioxide levels rise may be hindering a large piece of a worker’s productivity. Yes, it does save energy but at what cost? When you consider the dollar value of an employee’s hour, using carbon dioxide to drive outdoor air levels may not be a valid method for making healthy building decisions.

Once the groundwork regarding the actual employee costs has been determined, the book goes into the nine foundations of a healthy building. I admit that I have not considered some of the nine cover issues as part of a healthy building strategy, but the authors make a good case for them. Those nine foundations include air quality, thermal health, moisture, dust and pests, water quality, noise, lighting, ventilation, and safety and security. The authors then detail each of these items to define what’s currently being provided, its potential impact on worker productivity, and how improvements can be made in each area.

The book also discusses efforts to certify a healthy building, including the LEED program, The Well Building program, Fitwel, and RESET.

The costs of certifying a healthy building are also discussed, and I was surprised to see how they vary. A property manager who’s been involved in a LEED certification understands that they pay a high price for the certificate they receive. The other programs, including The Well Building program, Fitwel, and the RESET program, come with varying costs, but each is consistently lower than LEED certification.

This book also considers issues beyond the four walls of the building. This includes commercial buildings’ impact on energy and climate. These are not seen (from my perspective) as being directly involved with a healthy building. Still, the authors discuss them to include financial incentives and energy costs into the healthy building discussion.

In all honesty, I have enjoyed reading and listening to this book several times over the previous months. I continue to comprehend more details on commercial building financing, operations, and maintenance each time I read it.

In my opinion, the book goes a bit too far when discussing the various chemicals brought into buildings on fixtures and furnishings. We are all aware of issues such as formaldehyde and total volatile organic compounds. This book, however, spends time looking at some of the lesser-known chemicals being used as replacements for those already shown to cause problems. This discussion could probably have been better handled through a separate book or article as it goes a bit off-topic in my mind.

Coming at this from the perspective of an indoor environmental consultant, I found 80% of the information in the book helpful. It will help me do my job and clarify the reports that my company issues. Much of that information will also help commercial building owners and facility managers. The remaining 20% of the book is probably more relative to developers or companies that finance commercial buildings.

This book was written before COVID-19 affected commercial buildings. It lacks that perspective, but that’s understandable. It does provide, however, some information on potential pandemic-related concerns that can occur in a commercial office environment.

I have enjoyed listening to and reading this book and now keep it handy for those downtimes when I need a little motivation (yes, I’m weird like that). I enjoyed the Audible version so much that I purchased a hard copy. This has allowed me to highlight the areas I feel are most relevant to my work. The addition of a hard copy of the book was worth the purchase price. I genuinely hope that the projectsBuilding Air Quality, Inc. engages in the future support these kinds of healthy building efforts!