Prioritizing occupant well-being – Reducing vacancy rates and boosting employee satisfaction

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Commercial real estate continues to struggle with vacancy rates. In the U.S., the rate crept to 19.6% in Q3 2023, and decreasing these vacancy rates continues to challenge today’s building owners and tenants. While building owners seek increased tenancy rates, tenant companies look for environments offering comfort and services to tempt employees back to the office.

In this second post in our series, I’ll review how this balance requires a renewed focus on healthy and comfortable indoor environments. The daily work environment of building occupants wasn’t historically viewed as a foundational element of asset value when it came to commercial properties, but that is changing.

Healthy buildings, moving beyond human resources

Prioritizing employee comfort and creating healthy buildings encourages a return to the office and is also a sound business strategy. For example, room temperature, lighting, and relative humidity strongly correlate with health-related issues such as congestion, fatigue, and difficulty concentrating, which affect employees’ productivity and work performance. Studies have shown that improved air quality and overall comfort increase employee performance by 8-14%.

Businesses with higher employee engagement have higher customer engagement, a correlation that grows stronger during tough economic times when employees can be a major differentiator in customer satisfaction. 

Given the importance of employee comfort and satisfaction to corporate leaseholders, occupant well-being must become a priority if building owners hope to lower vacancy rates and attract high-value, long-term tenants for new or existing buildings in their portfolios.

What building owners can do

Building owners looking to improve the occupant experience and create healthy spaces should invest in an internet of things (IoT) sensor solution to continuously monitor and control key environmental parameters.

IoT-sensing devices equip commercial and institutional building owners with the ability to achieve enhanced occupant well-being by offering real-time data on a range of monitored environmental parameters, including temperature, humidity, CO_2, volatile organic compounds (VOC), air pressure, noise, light, and particulate matter.

Modern, multi-function sensors can further provide indoor air quality (IAQ) sensing needs in one device to:

• Reduce system complexity
• Simplify data collection
• Minimize visual interference of devices in the environment (improving aesthetics)
• Provide real-time space occupancy data, enabling automated and usage-based facility operations, like cleaning and maintenance services
• Contribute to securing green building certifications like WELL, LEED, and more, demonstrating owner commitment to sustainability efforts

How tenants benefit

For tenant organizations, these solutions:

• Support employee productivity, retention, and reduced absenteeism by addressing occupant comfort (i.e., IAQ, temperature, humidity, noise, space utilization, and more).
• Offer insights that can enhance employee health and well-being. Tracking CO₂, VOCs, and particulate matter can be remediated to prevent a host of negative health effects associated with poor IAQ.
• Enable energy savings by sharing IAQ sensor data locally in real-time with the BMS, providing a higher level of HVAC control.

Choosing a solution

When choosing any sensing or control device, consider these four points: 

1. Ensure you understand how and where the data will be collected and stored. Data will have limited value if it is inconvenient or difficult to access, so your sensors must easily integrate into your (and/or your tenants’) monitoring software or building management systems.
2. Landlords or tenants looking to retrofit to a healthy building should consider a single-vendor solution. Given the number of parameters involved, having a single point of contact for the solution makes installation, maintenance, and future upgrades much easier.
3. Choosing a wireless, battery-powered solution with a simple peel-and-stick installation (without wiring or wall-breaking) can speed deployment and avoid office disruptions.
4. Consider the solution’s openness and integration capabilities. Ensure the solution can be easily integrated with the existing BMS locally using standard protocols or third-party systems using APIs.

The current market challenges facing commercial property owners and tenant companies are substantial, but there are ways to address them. Adopting a strong position on occupant comfort is a major way for building owners to attract and retain quality tenants and for those tenants to attract and retain quality employees.

For more information on our EcoStruxure Building-IoT Sensor Solution, please click to visit our website.