The big question many businesses are facing today is how can workers safely return to the office? While new guidelines and protocols are a key component of a safe return to the workplace, and healthy buildings are a prominent element in these strategies. 

What Are Healthy Buildings?

The World Health Organization defines healthy buildings as:

“A healthy building is a space that supports the physical, psychological, and social health and well-being of people.” 

Research has found that healthy buildings offer a variety of benefits and can help alleviate several issues. 

• Indoor health: On average we spend upwards of 87% of our time in enclosed buildings. 
• Productivity: there is a correlation between lower ventilation rates and higher instances of short-term sick leave. 
• Chronic disease: by 2030, a projected 52 million people will die of chronic diseases caused by poor lifestyle. 
• Air pollution gains: an estimated £25 to £150 billion in annual savings and productivity gains from improved indoor environments. 

Healthy buildings not only improve the overall health and well-being of the employees, but they can also help businesses reduce costs and improve company performance, resulting in benefits for both people and business. 

Key design features of healthy buildings:

1. Natural daylight
2. Operable shading
3. No smoking policy
4. Ergonomic furnishing

5. Green purchasing policies
6. No asbestos
7. Fitness rooms
8. Natural views
9. Indoor air quality

Cybersecurity

With a large percentage of employees currently working remotely, and some for the foreseeable future, as well as the increasing effort to introduce more technology to support this change, cybersecurity has never been more crucial.

Providing continuous monitoring and securing critical facility applications such as your BMS and other OT assets can be challenging. Because operational systems can be easy targets for cyberattacks, they often require enhanced visibility of vulnerable entry points and industry best practices to improve resilience and help keep your network secure. It’s important for building operators to not only be able to monitor but analyze critical OT servers, workstations, virtual machines and more to prevent any potential issues and react quickly when issues do arise.

Technology and well being are now hand in hand and the healthy buildings are contributing to a happy, healthy environment and lifestyle in and out of the workplace.

Wrkspace continuously strives to make sure that all our centres are healthy buildings. You can take a look at all of the different amenities on offer at our centres here.