Home Property Australia QED Better indoor air quality can boost business productivity and cut costs

QED Better indoor air quality can boost business productivity and cut costs

  • October 18, 2018

QED: BETTER INDOOR AIR QUALITY CAN BOOST BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY AND CUT COSTS

New studies have proven that intelligence really is in the air. QED Environmental Services can tell you how creating a better indoor air quality can boost your business’ productivity and cut your costs.

Did you know that we spend 90 per cent of our time indoors, and only 10 per cent outside? And yet we seem to focus so much on the quality of the environment for that smaller margin of our time, while rarely examining the situation we find ourselves in for the larger slice of our day.

THE FACTS

Thirty years of public health research has demonstrated that buildings have the ability to positively or negatively influence our health, however recent research has delved into the impact that the indoor environment has on cognitive function and productivity. We heartily support sustainable design and green building strategies, but QED are even more excited about that “green” interest being a catalyst for reinvigorating research into the specific factors in a building that create an optimised environment for BOTH health and productivity.

New studies by a group of researchers from The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, SUNY Upstate Medical University and Syracuse University have found that a poor quality indoor environment can weigh heavily on our cognitive function. The researchers set up a replica office with desks and cubicles in a lab setting, where they controlled key indoor environmental factors such as carbon dioxide, volatile organic compound gases and ventilation rate. They assigned subjects random mental tasks in different environments and found that their cognitive function test scores doubled in a favourable indoor environment.

How “green” a building is also has sway. The Impact of Green Buildings on Cognitive Function studies, also known as The COGfx studies, revealed that the occupant’s test scores averaged 101 percent higher in high-performing, green-certified buildings with enhanced ventilation compared to those in conventional, non-certified buildings.

THE BENEFITS OF BETTER INDOOR ENVIRONMENT QUALITY (IEQ )

For both building owners and the end users – the tenants/occupants – there is a need to be better informed about an holistic “buildingomics” approach, which means understanding the drivers of human health and performance in buildings. Simply put, people will be more comfortable, and more productive in a building with better IEQ.

Consider that from the tenant’s perspective 90 percent of the costs associated with a building are due to the people inside it. In a typical office building, the salaries of the occupants make up around 90 per cent of the cost, the rent is about 9 per cent and the energy consumption is roughly 1 per cent. So just 10 per cent of a building’s operating costs are attributed to energy, maintenance, and mortgage/rent, among others!

If a whopping 90 per cent of the costs associated with a building come from the people inside the building, simply by focusing on bettering the air they breathe could turn your building into your tenants’ most revolutionary human resources tool. It’s an opportunity to boost productivity through healthier, more productive and mentally sharp building users who take fewer sick days and engage better with their colleagues and their daily tasks.

For more information on indoor air quality and how to assess its impact on employee performance visit the QED website and download the free whitepaper:
The Air We Breathe: How indoor air quality can improve the cognitive function and productivity of building occupants.