When you think of all the jobs facilities managers do — running properties, operations and maintenance; managing budgets, contractors and staff — it’s easy to overlook one crucial role they play.
FMs are integral to the success of the business taking place within their buildings, whether the tenants are students or employees, patients or residents. And when those occupants are workers, the built environment has a direct impact on their productivity.
It’s a job with some pretty awesome responsibilities.
And we’re not even finished yet.
In FM World, Andrew Mawson, a founding director of management consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates in London, says the role of facilities managers should be to “create a culture in which the focus is on helping people be the best they can be.”
This is especially important, he argues, as organizations become more knowledge-based because an optimized environment directly impacts mental performance. Just by ensuring access to healthy food and drink, for instance, tenants can be nudged toward make healthier choices. Similarly, physical exercise can be promoted by workplace design.
By improving cognitive performance, Mawson says business performance will benefit.
Stewart Sill, writing for the advisory firm Performance pH, agrees that a healthy building does more than lower employee absenteeism and reduce healthcare costs.
“The larger value,” he writes, “often comes from workers having the capacity and resilience to perform at their best, being more committed to the organization, experiencing greater satisfaction, and therefore perpetuating both health improvement and optimal performance.”
Why Aren’t All Buildings Healthy?
The problem is that enhancing indoor environmental quality (IEQ) can be seen as too costly for a nebulous future payoff. “It is easier to focus on the first-cost of a project,” writes the Whole Building Design Guide team, “than it is to determine the value of increased user productivity and health.”
Nisha Sarveswaran, CEO of Ambience Data, a Toronto startup that offers air quality monitoring systems for buildings, agrees that going green can be a tough budget sell.
“If you correlate environmental conditions such as air emitting high levels of carbon dioxide with variables like productivity, you can start to understand the impacts and place a value on investments that improve our indoor spaces,” she tells Corporate Knights magazine. “It’s [just] hard to justify spending money and energy on things we can’t see.”
Low-Cost Changes
And while building green or retrofitting an existing facility can be expensive, some of the changes don’t require anything more than resetting a thermostat. Jaimie Giarrusso at Schneider Electric writes that FMs can boost employee productivity simply by making them more comfortable.
She points to a U.S. General Services Administration study showing occupant satisfaction is 27 percent higher in environmentally friendly buildings, and lab studies show “speed and accuracy tasks ... improved in buildings with high-performance ventilation, thermal control, and lighting control environments.” People are better at reading comprehension, creative thinking and numeracy when they’re in a healthier environment.
Other fixes that are easy to incorporate include daylighting. The effect of sunlight (or the lack thereof) on humans is well-known, with some half-million Americans affected by seasonal affective disorder annually. Depression kicks in with the shorter, darker days of fall and winter and is only alleviated by the return of spring sunshine. Those who suffer from SAD are not just depressed; they’re tired and irritable, and the condition affects every aspect of their lives, including job performance.
By allowing natural light into a building through skylights and large windows equipped with automatic shading systems, daylighting is easily implemented. Workers benefit by better health, and the business benefits by increased productivity and reduced energy costs.
Love Energy Savings, an energy price comparison specialist in the UK, advocates making use of natural light. With office lighting accounting for as much as 40 percent of a building’s overall energy usage, it makes sense to implement products like sensored lights. Just make sure the lights are programmed properly so portions of a room can be illuminated as needed.
Proving increased worker productivity due to better lighting is tough; it’s simpler to prove energy savings. BDC, a bank for Canadian businesses with a special interest in entrepreneurs, admits there are three reasons businesses should increase their buildings’ energy efficiency:
- It saves money on utility bills.
- It can raise property value.
- It can increase worker performance.
But they say the first step toward improved energy efficiency is to measure consumption. “Benchmarking is a great way to start seeing where you can make the greatest improvements in energy efficiency.”
They recommend using the online tool Energy Star Portfolio Manager. It allows you to measure and track consumption and you can compare your commercial building performance with others in North America.
The Harvard Study
And there are more studies proving the link between building environment and occupants’ cognitive scores, with one especially compelling study coming 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.
Results from the double-blind study, released last year and published in Environmental Health Perspectives, went both ways: “The findings suggest that the indoor environments in which many people work daily could be adversely affecting cognitive function — and that, conversely, improved air quality could greatly increase the cognitive function performance of workers.”
Chief sustainability officer John Mandyck at United Technologies, a company involved in the study, explained to AlterNet that the return on investment should actually be a non-issue. “The payback for improved indoor environmental quality far outweighs the investment, considering that more than 90 percent of the costs associated with a building are related to the people who work within it once construction is completed.”
Higher Student Performance in Healthy Schools
And, remember, it’s not just workers who are more productive.
The EPA recognizes the link between building health and student performance: “Schools without a major maintenance backlog have a higher average daily attendance, or ADA, by an average of 4 to 5 students per 1,000 and a lower annual dropout rate by 10 to 13 students per 1,000.”
Again, some of the fixes are low-cost and should be part of regular maintenance, such as using chemical-free cleaning products and ensuring HVAC systems are free of moisture or dirt.
Millennial Matters
While noise pollution can create a stressful atmosphere in which it’s hard for occupants to concentrate, FM World managing editor Martin Read doesn’t see noise pollution as the problem it once was.
He writes that we’re undervaluing the earbuds and noise-cancelling headphones that provide whatever privacy and ambience the user wants, whether that’s meditative silence or coffee shop background sounds.
“The point is,” Read explains, “that many knowledge workers, particularly Millennials, are today micro-managing their own hyper-personal working environments, technology enabling the extreme customisation of whichever audio and visual stimuli they require to attain required productivity levels. And it’s a personal working environment that can move with us to whichever first, second or third spaces we see fit.”
Couple that with the fact that Millennials make up more of the workforce than Generation X and Baby Boomers, says Entrepreneur writer Adam Toren. Workplaces and built environments will begin to reflect this shift.
“Millennials are considered to be digital natives, and they are more attuned to using technology-based tools and platforms for getting things done,” Toren explains. “This should mean a reduced reliance on office desks and even emails, in favor of remote or co-working setups and instant messaging.”
Still, these plugged-in workers need a healthy working environment to return to when emerging from their “performance bubbles” — as do all the other employees who don’t plug in for deep focus. Therefore, modern workplaces will still need to account for comfortable temperatures, clean facilities and good lighting.
You Can Lead a Horse…
A facilities manager can have the greenest, healthiest group of buildings on the planet, but if the organization’s leadership is missing, nothing else will work.
It’s the people who count, says management consultant John Bowen:
“Good leaders build good teams that will, despite what is going on around them, have fun. There is no doubt that to have a comfortable and well equipped place of work is enjoyable, but if the boss isn’t up to scratch it will soon lose its attraction. I’ll take a job with a star in a shed over one with a plonker in a palace any day.”
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Karolina Grabowska
