The Role of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in Business Transformation
29 February 2024 • 2 min read
Dilemma:
How to make transformative change in employee health, wellness and productivity, improve talent acquisition, and enhance your brand in the new era of ESG and sustainability – PLUS make money.
The Solution:
Optimise your business by strategically utilising data from the indoor environment as an accretive overlay on traditional financial metrics. The most overlooked and yet a key factor in the indoor equation is Indoor Air Quality.
We’ve all heard before the guiding principle of real estate investment: We’ve all heard before the guiding principle of real estate investment: “Location, Location, Location.”
Now in the era of sustainability and decarbonization, companies are faced with the conflicting challenges of reducing real estate-related costs whilst also investing to improve the work environment. The new rallying cry is therefore:
“Data, Data, Data.”
With cost reductions in sensor technology and ambient computing, it has already become highly cost-effective for companies to collect and aggregate indoor environmental data with traditional inputs to give transformative insights across the business and realise untapped efficiencies.
This strategic optimisation of combined data is, however, aimed not just at cost-cutting. It represents the cohesive key to unlocking hidden value and thereby:
Boost Staff Morale and Productivity: Reduce inefficiencies and create a more streamlined workflow.
Improve the Customer Experience: Harness the power of data to personalize customer offerings and address needs more effectively.
Predict Market Trends: Gain insights from the data to anticipate market shifts and stay ahead of the curve.
IAQ lies at the forefront of this opportunity. More than any other factor in the modern office environment, it is poor IAQ that gives rise to the widest range of health issues. These include decreased cognitive function and respiratory problems in the short term, with correlations having shown links between poor IAQ and decreased productivity and sick leave spikes. Over the long term, poor indoor air can lead to heart-related issues and even cancer.
Taking steps to reduce such health issues through proper air treatment and a more biophilic office design enables forward-looking companies to invest some of their data-driven savings and improve employee health while also showcasing a duty of care. The result is a virtuous cycle of increased productivity and employee - as well as client - retention and acquisition, and a better brand image.
The future belongs to those companies that make transformative change by optimising data into actionable insights to improve their business and the workplace.
The reality is quite stark: Optimize with “Data, Data, Data” …… or die.