What you ask for is what gets measured.
These are the key questions to ask any service provider who offers to certify your workplace as a healthy environment. These best practices are applicable to employers, employees, and customers.
Our research in the public health sector and commercial real estate over decades has shown that a variety of Health Performance Indicators provide objective data on a building’s current state and can identify significant fluctuations over time. How are HPIs collected and interpreted by the HPIs? Combining settings, sensors, and screening for symptoms. Surveys, evaluation of statistics, and surveys. Here are some examples.
Setting: Airflow and other engineering steps. Checking on the basic metrics is important before you move back into your building. This includes fresh air volume, fan power, and filter effectiveness. Many organizations have cut corners to save money on electricity or replacement filters, but at the expense of lost productivity and thousands of dollars due to suboptimal working conditions. Air quality and ventilation are important tools for healthy buildings in terms of fighting viruses and maintaining your health.
Temperature and humidity have a significant impact on the transmission of disease. Although most people associate low moisture in the summer with winter, improperly tuned air conditioners can drop humidity levels indoors well below the recommended 50-60% to minimize viral transmission.
Sensors – Air quality and other measurable factors. Although it is not possible to test for coronaviruses directly in the air at this time, other measures, such as particulate counts and carbon dioxide concentrations or the presence of volatile compounds, are excellent indicators for system performance. They take your workplace’s pulse just like a doctor does and provide a quick check to ensure everything is working as it should.
As an example, CO2 levels in the air are approximately 410 parts per million (or ppm). Double-masked tests showed that concentrations up to 1,400ppm caused cognitive impairment. This is a level commonly found in classrooms or conference rooms. Rooms that are crowded or poorly ventilated often have higher levels.
John Macomber with Joseph Allen during a recent Books@Baker Event. Most commercial office buildings have fairly sophisticated air temperature and humidity sensors, but the data is seldom shared with tenant companies and individuals. However, in today’s tech-enabled world, apartment renters, concerned employees, and small-business owners can purchase their own low-cost indoor air quality monitors to measure these factors in real-time, independent of what the landlord or plant manager may be saying, giving them a measure of confidence that what they are being told about the health of their work environment is true.
Screening. Who is allowed in? Many companies conduct body temperature tests to determine who can enter a building. Some organizations go further and prepare for biometric testing via rapid tests for active infections to detect if someone is infected with COVID-19 prior to joining the building. Some commercial and government facilities, such as the White House and hospitals, already use this measure.
Surveys – Workers also need to be monitored. How will you and your workers feel secure? Will they feel comfortable at their desk or with the setup of their workbench? When people arrive to work or to shop, will it suffice to have physical distance markers on the ground or Plexiglass screens in elevators? Or thermal scanning? Will employees always stand too close to each other or fail to cover their nose and mouth when sneezing? Employers may want to start with the basics, such as conducting surveys to gauge employee satisfaction or asking workers to self-certify that they have no symptoms each day through an app.
Statistics – Is it working? Employers will also want to track the number of sick days accrued and health care costs. Statistics can be used to tabulate all of these. What legal actions are likely to be taken by workers, shoppers, or diners in the worst-case scenario? What perceptions or indicators of healthy environments have led to increased productivity, confidence, and revenue? In the media, “excess death” assessments are being used as a proxy to represent the COVID-19 fatality numbers. This is a simple statistical comparison of the current reading compared to historical trends. These same techniques can also be used to measure changes in healthy building performance over time.