TAKING THE PEOPLE'S SIDE
Written by: Isilay Civan MSc, PhDs, LEED AP O+M, as published in the Network
While considering Sustainability, we often forget the most
important component – the people.
Even though everything we do is supposedly intended to improve human experience
in the built environment, the things we tend to focus on, track, benchmark, and
manage are only subsets of such impacts (i.e. tracking indoor air quality or
managing noise or illuminance levels to ultimately improve human health and
employee productivity) .
Anything directly related to the people side, which attempts
to quantify and introduce metrics into the financial analysis, is presumed to
take away from the validity of the calculations by softening the reliability of
the payback analysis. Earlier attempts of specifically quantifying the people
side led mostly to unsubstantiated claims, labeled ‘green-washing’, and discouraged
the sector from determining better ways of understanding and measuring the true
implications. This also led to focusing solely on the secondary aspects that
have less complex relations that are easier to calculate and validate. However,
recognizing the progress we have made to date in the field of Sustainability,
it is time to go back to the drawing board and figure out more reliable metrics
that effectively measure the people side.
To underscore the need and importance of such an exercise, the
following list of facts, consolidated from notable sources such as World
Green Building Council (WGBC)[1],
The
Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE)[2],
and Terrapin[3], speaks directly to the people side and its
potential impact on an organization’s triple bottom line:
· Employee
salaries are the largest expense for any organization (often as high as 60-80% of the total cost of
operations and typically 10 to 12 times
more than maintaining the building’s infrastructure);
· Productivity costs (as also shown in the pie
chart, the cost per square foot of a given corporate office space being
overwhelmingly devoted to salary; 90.3% of productive and unproductive salaries
and benefits, while only 8.9% is paid toward rent and mortgage, and 0.8%
represents energy costs - BOMA, 2010, US Department of Labor, 2010) can be 112 times greater than energy costs in
the workplace;
· More than 90% of a company’s operating costs are
linked to human resources, and financial
losses due to absenteeism and presenteeism, a loss of workplace
productivity resulting from loss of focus, negative mood, and poor health, account for 4%;
· A 2% to
5% increase in staff performance can cover the total cost of providing for the
organization’s staff accommodation;
· Current metrics for calculating productivity,
engagement, and innovation are typically not
fully representative of today’s knowledge-based workforce;
· Employee
productivity in the knowledge economy is less a matter of improving speed
and accuracy of routine tasks and more a function of generating new ideas,
being creative, working effectively in teams, and generating knowledge that
adds value to the organization;
· The more
complex the function, the harder it is to quantify its impact to the
overall employee productivity;
· According to self-reported productivity data, for each 15% increase in workspace
satisfaction, there is a 1%-4%
increase in productivity;
· There is a strong relationship between perceived comfort and self-reported
productivity, with differences in productivity as high as 25% reported between comfortable and uncomfortable
staff;
· For every 10%
reduction in reported Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) symptoms, there is
likely to be a 1.1% increase in productivity;
· Daylighting design has been linked to a 15% reduction in absenteeism in office environments.
Increases in productivity of between 2.8% and 20% attributed to
increased luminance levels have been found in other studies;
· In 2010, the US Department of Labor reported an annual absenteeism rate of 3% per
employee—or 62.4 hours per year per
employee lost—in the private sector. The number is even more dramatic in
the public sector - 4%—or over 83 hours lost to absences per year;
· Loewen and Suedfeld (1992) report improvements of 38% in the performance of simple tasks and 27% for complex tasks when working in
an environment with white noise, as compared to tasks in unmasked noise
conditions;
· The
potential impact of design for buildings on overall productivity as +12.5% (improved performance) and -17% (hampered performance) for an overall 30 percent change in worker
performance in the best and worst buildings.
While there is a growing body of empirical evidence linking building design attributes to productivity, health, and well being, there has not been a consistent method to link the results to financial metrics. Consequently, the industry remains skeptical and continues to under-invest on the people side, causing us to miss out on what can potentially lead to the greatest return on investments.
Similar arguments are being made while discussing the benefits of biophilic design. The term biophilia, stemming from the Greek roots meaning love of life and coined by the social psychologist Erich Fromm, is used to describe the renewed design focus on bringing humans back in contact with nature, and by so doing, achieving much greater productivity goals. To establish evidence of these benefits, we need improved metrics that can better measure the relationship between the physical environment and the employee productivity. We need to find more direct linkages to accurately measure innovation, creativity, and productivity of knowledge workers, and rely less upon the traditional indirect measures (e.g., illness, absenteeism, staff retention, job performance – only as it relates to mental stress/fatigue, healing rates, classroom learning rates, retail sales, violence) that typically have many more variables playing into the overall success/failure of the findings. The failure to act now would do a great injustice to the true value of Sustainability and the ability to realize all that a holistic approach could offer when regarded as a core business target and measured accordingly.
