Higher Education: Wellness and space

Wellness is one area where higher education is more evolved in its thinking than the corporate world, primarily due to the younger population in one community over the other, but also perhaps because some employers have historically seen this as someone else’s problem. Many employers are still struggling with how to make their staff happier (or less sad) so as to improve productivity. However, given that typically 55% of business costs are related to staff, and only 15% real estate, spending more on the latter to improve the productivity of the former is increasingly being seen as the sensible and economical option.

What Workers Want 2019 generally paints a picture of more people being happy than not. Men (62%) are more likely to be happy with their workplace than women (58%), and the percentage of satisfied employees increases with the employee’s age. 63% of the respondents aged over 55 years old are satisfied with their workplace against 58% for the respondents aged between 18 and 34 years old. There is also a wide discrepancy between countries: Dutch employees (73%) are significantly happier than workers from other nationalities, followed by Swedish workers (65%). On the other side of the spectrum, French (49%) and British (53%) are the least satisfied with their workplace.

Key environmental themes that seem to affect happiness include shorter commutes, less reliance on public transport, adoption of ABW, having control over your environment, and being asked your opinions about it.

However, the room for improvement in corporate workspace is still considerable, with 25% reporting that their workplace has a negative effect on their mental health, and 27% on their physical health. The survey does show that the proportion of workers that are happy with their workplace in the UK has risen from 48% in 2016 to 53% in 2018. This is a more positive trend than that seen in successive Student Academic Experience surveys, suggesting that the corporate workspace may be developing strategies that could be adopted by the HE sector.

Somewhat inevitably the early focus on health and wellbeing in the workplace has been on measuring it and trying to prove a link between improvements in wellness and productivity. The US is the birthplace of the two leading health and wellbeing frameworks for workplaces – the WELL® Building Standard and Fitwel® Rating System. They were initiated at a similar point in time in the early 2010s, developed separately and each tested through dedicated pilot programs. WELL v1 administered by the International Well Building Institute (IWBI) was first to release in October 2014, with Fitwel v1 following in December 2016 administered by the Center for Active Design (CfAD).

WELL and Fitwel broadly addresses similar health and wellbeing concerns but operate via different system structures, through different lenses, with different emphases, to differing levels of detail and documentation – and at different price points.

There is also some measurement cross-over between these two systems and the more established environmental certification systems such as Ska, BREEAM and LEED. However, the concept is, we believe, still very much in its infancy and will evolve as the costs of collecting environmental data in a building or across a campus fall, the quality of the data improves, and correlations between currently unconnected datasets become established.

We would also suggest that estates teams do not fall into the same traps that we fell into when the environmental sustainability debate began to emerge in the built environment 20 years ago. In retrospect, the industry was wrong to ask, “will a tenant pay more rent for a greener building?”, when the question should have been “will a more sustainable building prove more attractive due to lower energy bills?”. The equivalent trap in the wellness debate might be over-focusing on proving that there is a linkage between happiness, health and productivity when we all know that this is the case.

Going back to the typical 55:15% cost split between staff and premises, surely spending a bit more on the premises to boost staff wellness should be an easy decision to make? The challenge is working out where and on what you should make this extra spend. The 2018 report 'Wellness Matters' by the British Council for Offices makes a variety of recommendations for a different type of building and project.

The key findings of this report that we feel are most relevant to higher education estates projects are:

• Wellness matter to individuals, organisations, government and society;
  
  
• Wellness and sustainability are linked, but a green building is not necessarily a healthy building;
  
  
• Perceived (rather than actual) cost and lack of leadership are significant barriers to progress;
  
  
• Evidence base is strong in some areas, yet weak in others. It is also challenging to navigate;
  
  
• There is a lack of common vocabulary between medicine, wellbeing, and space design;
  
  
• Wellness is a team sport, and all stakeholders can contribute to a successful outcome;
  
  
• Asking users what does and doesn’t work is not only important for measurement and delivery, but the mere fact of being consulted on these issues improves people’s satisfaction with their spaces and environments.

_{Read the articles within Spotlight: UK Higher Education below.}