COVID-19 and Healthy Buildings

by Marcy Marro | April 3, 2023 12:00 am

When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), the leading authority for transforming health and well-being with a people-first approach to buildings, organizations and communities, was part of the many organizations and groups that had to change the way they thought about everyday processes.

“What we noticed fairly immediately,” notes Jessica Cooper, chief product officer at IWBI, “was that it really reinforced the conviction we always had at IWBI: That places matter to our health and people everywhere were looking for ways to protect themselves, protect the people that they loved, and utilize whatever tools they had within their toolkit to try to get through this mess that we were all in. In the real estate community especially, people were looking at ways that they could use their buildings to create healthier, safer environments that could make people confident in returning to places outside of their own homes.”

COVID-19 Task Force

Once COVID-19 arrived, Cooper says the community turned to the organization quickly to inform them how they could respond to the pandemic, especially in the way in which they were operating and thinking about their buildings. To address these concerns, IWBI started up a task force, which included 600 experts across various sectors, with representation from 30 countries.

“The task force helped us see where we were already providing solid solutions around respiratory infections, including COVID-19, and really helping to manage acute health threats in buildings,” Cooper explains. “In this way, the task force reconfirmed what we already knew about WELL, but then even more importantly, they helped us see additional areas where we could positively effect change.”

Additionally, “The task force helped us see a path toward providing answers to the community,” Cooper adds, “which enabled our standard development team to get back into that research and see if we could define additional solutions to support in the fight against COVID.” This led to new beta features that helped strengthen the WELL Standard and informed the solutions the organization was putting forward to the global community.

Outcomes

Over the last three years, IWBI has been very busy releasing new reports, updates and rating systems to help achieve healthier buildings. Here’s a look at some recent accomplishments:

IWBI Special Report: One of the first things to come out of the task force was the IWBI special report on the power of place, which really focused on prevention and preparedness, resilience and recovery. The report summarized a lot of the research and feedback from the task force, and helped provide a call to action for specific, timely, relevant solutions that IWBI’s clients could utilize leveraging the WELL Building Standard. “The report helped the market better integrate actionable insights and proven strategies on how to manage buildings and organizations with health and safety top of mind,” Cooper says.

WELL Health-Safety Rating: The WELL-Health Safety Rating for Facility Operations and Management is a subset of criteria of the larger, more holistic WELL Standard focused on health and safety, stemming from a building’s operations and management. As Cooper explains, these strategies are a little faster to implement than some of the design-based strategies in WELL. “We were able to give people a very actionable, timely way to address COVID through this larger body of work that had already been in the market for a decade,” Cooper says. “The way the WELL Health-Safety Rating enabled the global community to get started with WELL was so inspiring to us. We started to realize that this construct of a rating could be a really useful way to guide our global client base toward specific topics within the standard that they could focus on over the course of their longer-term journey to take a more holistic approach to supporting health through WELL.”

WELL Performance Rating: Released in April 2022, the WELL Performance Rating recognizes building owners and operators for achieving excellence in healthy building performance aimed to enhance the well-being and experience of the people inside. Developed in collaboration with industry leaders in smart building technologies such as Carrier, Honeywell, Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric, as well as input from the IWBI Performance Advisory, WELL Performance Testing Organizations and WELL Enterprise Providers, the WELL Performance Rating provides a roadmap for organizations to demonstrate excellence in occupant experience and building performance across several key indoor environments quality indicators related to air quality, water quality, thermal comfort, acoustics and lighting.

WELL Equity Rating: The WELL Equity Rating is a new rating designed to help organizations act on their diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility goals, and also improve company culture and employee health. With its evidence-based roadmap, WELL Equity Rating empowers organizations to better address the needs of marginalized and underserved populations and take an action-oriented approach to creating equitable, people-first places.

The rating includes more than 40 features spanning six action areas: user experiences and feedback, responsible hiring and labor practices, health benefits and services, supportive programs and spaces, and community engagement. The rating validates an organization’s actions to advance health and well-being; celebrate diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and accessibility; and promote sensitivity while addressing disparities in populations that have been traditionally marginalized or underserved.

WELL at scale: Prior to 2019, the only way to utilize WELL was to pursue full certification. According to Cooper, the WELL at scale approach acknowledges that change around health is most impactful when it’s applied and committed to for all people at a strategic, organizational level. “WELL at scale gives organizations an enrollment pathway to efficiently and cost-effectively apply WELL to five or more locations, or ideally their entire organization or real estate portfolio,” Cooper explains. “It’s basically an all-in approach that guides you on your organizational journey toward health. Once locations are enrolled in the program, they can get recognized for each individual strategy they successfully implement. Every achievement gets documented as part of that commitment and reported through third-party verification.”

The WELL at scale pathway allows organizations to take an incremental approach and utilize WELL in creative ways to tackle their own goals around human health and well-being. For example, if enrolled at the organizational scale, companies will earn a WELL Score, which is a benchmark that indicates how the organization is doing against the WELL Standard as a whole and gives them something to strive for year over year to improve their commitment to health over time. “Each individual location that’s part of the program can earn achievements like WELL Ratings and WELL Certifications,” Cooper adds. “Whatever step an organization takes, from achieving one feature or a full platinum level certification, each strategy implemented marks an important step on the journey toward improving well-being and creating a culture of health.”

12 Competencies: Released in March 2022, the 12 Competencies for Measuring Health and Well-being for Human and Social Capital is a framework designed to help organizations lead with heath and humanity across their organizational culture, strategy and ESG performance. The 12 competencies focus on metrics that can scale with an organizations’ journey to prioritize human and social capital, ranging from the individual level to the global level. Based on specific needs, organizations can identify the competencies of interest and identify supporting metrics from the framework to track performance over time.

WELL v2

After delaying the release of WELL v2 from the first half of 2020, IWBI released the newest version of the standard out of pilot in September 2020. By waiting, the organization was able to incorporate the new beta features into version two.

“There are additional strategies included within v2 that we didn’t have on our radar if we had launched it pre-pandemic,” Cooper explains. “WELL v2 was informed by global feedback from advisors, as well as project teams around the world. At the point where we were developing and refining the pilot, our presence in the market had already grown exponentially from when we had launched version one. So, we had a lot of lessons learned and a lot of new exports at the table to inform the new version of the standard.”

One of the best things to come out of the new version Cooper says was the ability to make WELL much more accessible, especially to existing buildings. “The design-based strategies, which were dominant in version one, were complemented with additional policy strategies,” she says. “So, now existing buildings have an easier time achieving recognition through WELL Ratings and WELL Certifications. WELL v2 is also more adaptable now to accommodate different types of projects in different geographies.”

As part of the expansion of version two, the standard evolved from seven WELL concepts into 10. “Some of that was because we had additional strategies we wanted to tackle, but there were certain topics that were just becoming too large to be embedded within the original concept system,” Cooper explains.

“For example, material health is a critical focus in WELL, and related strategies were embedded in the Air concept under the original version. Now, under WELL v2, Materials has its own concept,” adds Cooper. “One way to source materials that contribute to good air quality is to select materials made of metal. This especially applies to flooring, ceiling and wall panels, as well as furniture, millwork and other fixtures.”

Milestones

With all the changes occurring in the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IWBI saw exponential growth in WELL adoption. At the beginning of 2020, WELL adoption was at around 500 million square feet. Three years later, Cooper notes they are at 4.6 billion square feet through more than 40,000 locations in 125 countries. “In terms of square footage, that’s almost a tenfold growth,” she says, which she attributes to giving people very timely, actionable and incremental solutions. “We then inspired them to think even more holistically once they took care of those fundamental health safety challenges, and how they could continue to support human health.”

Next Steps

If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that health matters and people matter. “The aspects of health that need attention will likely change as we continue to move out of being in a place of fear related to COVID,” Cooper says. “The pandemic really shed a light on the importance of prioritizing human health. And one of the ways in which you can do that is through affecting organizational culture and being more intentional about the ways buildings are designed, constructed and maintained. I think more people are looking for solutions like WELL, and they now have so many more ways to get started on their journey with achievements we’ve made available over the last few years.”

To support the global movement, IWBI tries to bring a global perspective to WELL from various sectors and audiences. This includes professionals ranging from designers to engineers to corporate real estate professionals, facility managers and sustainability specialists, as well as people from the education, industrial and corporate office sector. “We’re trying to make the solutions as relevant as possible across as many sectors as possible, giving people ways to take action through WELL,” Cooper says.

Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/covid-19-and-healthy-buildings/

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