What is active travel as a healthy building strategy?
The active travel concept is now well established within the healthy buildings movement. Essentially it’s about supporting micro-mobility, and the facilities that such forms of transport to and from a building require from a landlord or developer. ActiveScore Certification is a way to benchmark such facilities globally.
Image courtesy of Active Score case study / Castlemead
Healthy buildings and active travel
The active travel concept is now well established within the healthy buildings movement. Essentially it’s about supporting micro-mobility, and the facilities that such forms of transport to and from a building require from a landlord or developer.
Micro-mobility includes jogging, cycling (be it on a standard, folding, or baby carrier bike) and e-scooters.
Supporting this active travel concept as a sustainability minded real estate developer equates to increasing the quality and range of on-site facilities available for active commuters as a way to encourage them away from private vehicle use or public transport.
All of this feeds neatly into additional green building and healthy building certifications but may require additional expertise beyond that offered by an architectural studio in order to truly future-proof a building in anticipation of further growth in active commuting - that is where ActiveScore and their community of ActiveScore Accredited Professionals can help.
See our 9-point guide to healthy buildings here.
how does active travel relate to real estate ‘esg’?
Environmental, Social & Governance strategies for a real estate asset are now a fundamental part of any forward thinking developer’s plans. By promoting active travel to/from a building, there are tangible reductions in CO2 emissions as less people rely on their own vehicles or public transport to travel to and from work.
By taking action to deliberately foster a community of active commuters, opportunities are created for social bonding and interaction, especially important in an era when working from home has become a viable alternative option to office life.
The health and wellbeing benefits, both physical and mental, are obvious - getting to work on foot, by bike or even on an e-scooter is simply a more positive experience in many ways than taking a busy tube or bus, even sitting in rush hour traffic.
Finally, the Governance piece involves a landlord / building management team taking responsibility for communicating the services and facilities they have available to all occupants, both new and existing, by leveraging a smart building app for example.
What is Active Score for Active Travel?
Based on the principle that a building’s health and wellbeing facilities are a strong driver of desirability for a potential tenant, and their workforce, the Active Score Certification offers a set of standards that help landlords, leasing agents and indeed prospective tenants know what a specific building offers by way of active travel facilities.
The certification is broken down by 70% infrastructure, 20% occupier engagement services and 10% future proofing. Benchmarks are taken against the WELL Building Standard, BREEAM and a local borough’s planning guidance.
In the first instance, a lack of basic facilities such as showers, parking and lockers can prevent cyclists, runners or those with an e-scooter from making their own way to work, thereby placing extra pressure on the roads, specifically in the form of public transport and car usage.
The impact of Covid has in fact meant a boom in the use of such micro-mobility options, so this is a particularly interesting time for commercial real estate developers to be dialling up on their active travel facilities in an office or mixed-use building, for example.
Occupier engagement services meanwhile can include bike repair on-site, cycle training, creating a cycling club and so on.
What is Active Travel Score?
Active Travel Score was set up by James Nash in the UK, we interviewed him for our Green & Healthy Places podcast here. He’s a serial entrepreneur in the cycling sector and the man driving the company today. A number of different ‘scores’ are on offer, from the basic 'Certified to Silver, Gold, Platinum and Platinum 100.
In 2021 they certified 85 buildings in eight countries. Amongst them was 100 Bishopsgate, a 181m high building in central London developed by Brookfield Properties. It received a perfect Platinum 100 score thanks to its dedicated Active Commuter Park (ACP) and extensive occupant facilities making it arguably THE reference point for healthy buildings and active travel in the UK today.
Adopting ActiveScore equates to engaging with them in one of three ways. Firstly, a basic level building certification for a minimum period of two years. This includes recommendations on how to improve the assets’ overall active travel friendliness, including infrastructure and soft measures, to ultimately make it a more healthy building
A second option includes all of the above with the addition of a consultation with an ActiveScore surveyor - including advice on the building’s existing plans and product specification.
Finally, the team can take a more proactive, design-lead approach by providing detailed drawings of active travel facilities, active travel product specification and advice on look and feel of the active travel area. In other words, they do the leg work for you, whilst also ensuring the building is maximized for wellbeing credits in WELL, BREEAM, etc. in the relevant active travel credit categories.
What is an ActiveScore Accredited Professional?
We recently completed the process of becoming an ActiveScore Accredited Professional and found it to build very much on such green building and healthy building certification standards as WELL and FITWEL, as well as LEED and BREEAM, so having prior knowledge of some or all of these is a considerable advantage. You will hit the ground running in other words, rather than coming at this subject completely fresh.
As an ActiveScore AP one is responsible for marking a project for its active mobility credentials, topics include the number and variety of bike and e-scooter parking spaces, security measures in place to protect them, the extent of the shower facilities and related services, community building efforts around active commuting amongst building occupants, the look and feel of such parking areas as well as their location, ease of access, and so on.
Benefits of active design in the workplace
The benefits of active design in the workplace, from standing desks, to gym rooms, active stairwell design and more.
Designing for incidental movement in the workplace or healthy coworking office
Instead of talking about workplace exercise it can often make more sense to think about how to foster and promote a culture of incidental movement during the work day - this is a combination of personal willpower and workplace design in the context of a healthy building strategy.
We were born to move, when you look back in nature in evolutionary time, we didn't deliberately exercise as such but we were active for at least a few hours every day, it was simply part of our survival strategy in a harsh environment.
We were moving around, gathering, occasionally hunting, and keeping busy when food was short, weather was bad or other animals made trouble for us.
Walking meetings / standing meetings
How does all that connect with workplace wellness and a healthy office culture? Steve Jobs was a big proponent of one-on-one walking meetings, he figured out that a short walk in the fresh air can be, in some cases as good as a caffeine hit.
Short, focused team meetings can also be taken standing, either in a meeting room or around a table. They can also help avoid those seemingly inevitable energy slumps, helping ensure your concentration levels don't wane mid-afternoon for example.
So, how do you make that happen. Well, you can, you can either try and instigate it yourself or perhaps it's leadership, the boss or manager leading by example. Again, each workplace needs to experiment here to find what works for them, the key is to be open to such workplace wellness concepts.
We've all felt that feeling of sluggishness at some point in the work day in an office environment and a long afternoon meeting in an enclosed room with poor ventilation is not going to help at all, there's really no need to suffer through that anymore!
We know too much about how to create a healthy positive meeting room designed for productivity for that to be happening.
Active design stairwells in workplace design
Moving through the office building, stairwells are often this forgotten corner typically just left white with no real design interventions or points of interest, it’s as if the office architects or designers just ran out of steam or considered the stairs to be back of hours, rather than a space to embrace into the workplace design.
Imagine what happens if you were to spend just a little time designing those stairwells with workplace wellness in mind, what would happen, even with a minimal budget?
Perhaps you've got music playing, there may be living plants or other forms of biophilic design such as moss walls and nature-inspired artworks, or large vinyl graphics, something cool is going on with the lighting so that it feels inviting rather than a harsh blue-white LED from morning until night.
All of that would be what's called active design in the workplace - you'd be implementing design strategies that are there to promote workplace activity just by making it a more visually pleasant space to use, to move through from time to time during the work day rather than this perennially forgotten and under-utilized ‘Plan B’ option for navigating the building.
active design signage prompts
Never under estimate the power of signage at the point of decision, office workers about to press the button on the elevator for the 10th time that morning can be easily reminded that “hey, we've got these really cool things called stairs just over there, why not walk up to the third floor instead?”.
If we each make it our personal mission to use the office stairs a bit more, it can cumulatively add up to a meaningful contribution to the so-called ‘10,000 steps a day’ (which just means - moving around plenty each day). So this is another example of incidental movement during your work day.
It can be as simple as not sending an email to someone five floors up but instead actually going up to see them, and then walking back down - over the course of a day, a month and a year, that can make a tangible difference. It is one strategy amongst many and not a complete fix but it’s completely free and within reach of everyone, so why not grab it with both hands?
Standing desks in the healthy workplace
Arguably the most prominent shift when it comes to creating a healthy workplace is what's happened recently around standing desks, immediately taking a large slice of those sedentary hours sitting hunched over a screen and injecting a degree of extra movement that is so critical to creating a culture of workplace wellbeing.
There's been a real change in perception of what is acceptable in terms of workplace furniture in recent years and implicitly what a standing desk can can do for us in that respect.
Endless sedentary days are linked to lower back issues, they generally do us no favors in terms of out energy levels and do more harm than good overall. It’s time to mix things up!
Standing for part of the work day stimulates your blood flow, helping to maintain energy levels.
You don't necessarily need to spend the entire day at your standing desk, it’s OK to lean on a stool as well to take the weight of your feet, we recommend using a standing mat (see accompanying image) so that there is something soft under the feet, that makes a big difference to comfort levels.
A great brand to look for here is Fully with their eco-friendly bamboo desk tops.
How to get started with a standing desk in your office
Like anything in life, this takes a little practice, so don’t start by trying to pull 8-hour work days without taking a seat, it’s just not going to work and you’ll crash or burn within a week.
Start with an hour, then two and before long you won’t notice the difference. Nobody says you can’t sit down for the afternoon after a busy morning either! Expect a transition period of around three months for this.
Creating the habit of exercise around a work day
The flip side to what we’ve been calling incidental movement in the workplace is deliberate exercise, a chosen period of activity that has been consciously added into the work day as an opportunity to vigorously move your body, to get your sweat on, or simply to do some stretching, mobility work and so on. It’s all good.
Key to making this habit stick is a systems approach rather than relying on willpower alone. No matter whether you're a beginner or an elite athlete there, it’s about removing obstacles to that exercise happening. Try scheduling a workout like a meeting in the calendar.
Prepare your workout gear the night before a morning session, perhaps engage with workplace colleagues who are going to train too so we can hold each other accountable.
Office gym design in workplace wellness
For home workouts, or office gym workouts, all you really need is a basic set of gym equipment with an exercise mat, a few weights, a kettlebell, medicine ball or sandbag - the rest is psychological, if it’s an underground bunker with no natural light, no fresh air, no sense of visual interest, no coach or workout partner around… that workout is simply not going to happen, let’s face it!
That’s why outdoor workouts are a safer bet, weather permitting, or making the effort to get to an actual gym - which then becomes a ‘place of practice’, somewhere to really get the job done, rather than a space that has been partially converted into a pale imitation of a true gym. This may mean more time from your day but the value it adds may well make it worthwhile.
Our psyches are sharper than we think, they are not easily fooled. So, understanding yourself, your own personal motivation and the recognizing the limits of your willpower are all essential steps in creating a healthy work day.
WELL MOVEMENT V04 Facilities for Active Occupants
Here we look at what a healthy building requires in terms of WELL / Movement / V04 / Facilities for Active Occupants
a consultant’s response to WELL Building Certification Feature ‘Movement V04 / Facilities for Active Occupants’
What is the WELL Building Standard?
The WELL Certification process for WELL V2 is now widely established as the leading healthy building and wellness real estate standard in the world today. It is essentially a series of guidelines backed by rigorous scientific research, that when taken together, will guide a real estate project, whether new build construction or refurbishment and fit-out, towards a final product that is aligned with human health and wellness.
Sections of the V2 standard are dedicated to Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Movement, Thermal Comfort, Sound, Materials, Mind, Community & Innovation.
What is WELL consulting?
A WELL AP or WELL consultant is there to assist a project team through the certification process, ensuring maximum points are scored along the way by offering expert advice not just on how to lock-in points but also the principles that lie behind them. As a result, the project has every chance of becoming a model of health and wellness in the built environment.
Additionally, a WELL consultant’s skill set might include wellness interior design, biophilic design, knowledge in healthy buildings and consideration for sustainability / green buildings, a WELL building’s close cousin, as well as expertise in health and fitness, or as WELL like to call it ‘Physical Activity’, ‘Movement’ and ‘Nourishment’.
What is main focus of WELL Movement V04 Facilities for Active Occupants?
Essentially we are looking at bike storage facilities for those wishing to travel to their workplace by bike, as well as changing facilities and lockers for all those arriving by other forms of active transport, whether it be jogging or simply in need of a shower after a long, hot commute into the office in summer!
Nowadays these are essential components in a healthy building, either with or without a WELL certification.
The target audience here is active commuters but also active occupants - those showers can also encourage employees to go for a run after work, take a shower and then head out for a social appointment with friends, for example.
What issue is WELL Movement V04 Facilities for Active Occupants addressing?
On one level, it is about facilitating the lives of those who wish to travel under their own steam, by jogging or cycling into work, an active commuter in other words. These employees will be generally fitter, healthier and more productive in the workplace, with less days off (unless they end up hitting the IronMan circuit of course!) and less sick days. We can imagine this being especially important in the US where car culture and the lateral spread of cities makes a cycle commute more of a challenge.
In another sense, these active commuters are also placing less pressure on the road networks, they are not polluting, nor are they using public transport, so it is a win-win for both sides.
WELL Movement V04 Cycling Network & Bike Parking
Cycling infrastructure for a healthy building going for WELL Certification can be linked to location, tapping into the cycling network such as cycle lanes and bike sharing schemes.
Additionally, bike parking can be split into short-term (i.e. a public bike rack) for 2.5% of peak visitors, with a minimum of four spaces per building.
Long-term parking would be something like a dedicated bike room or bike wall with space for 5% of regular building occupants and a minimum of four per building. Finally, this same bike room, should provide a basic set of tools for cyclists to fix a tyre. Basic stuff but any cyclist will be glad to find a repair kit one day!
An extension of this we have seen in some healthy building case studies is to bring in a local bike mechanic every three months or so to give the regular cyclists a free bike tuning to ensure they are riding on safe tyres, brakes and so on.
All of the above simply needs to be verified by on-site photographs and a Letter of Assurance – by an architect or designer.
WELL Movement V04 On-site Shower Facilities
Showers, lockers and changing facilities come as a cluster for obvious reasons, and these elements need to be co-located next to each other, with five lockers per shower and the only other variable being the total requisite number of showers on offer within the healthy building to secure another point within WELL V04.
Essentially the calculation is 1 + 1 extra shower for 150 occupants above 100 for any WELL project below 1000 regular occupants.
If you are interested in our services helping you create a physical activity space / equipped gym for WELL Movement V08, contact us here.
WELL Building Standard: V06 Physical Activity Opportunities
Biofilico specialises in group training classes to meet the certification 'WELL Building Standard: V06 Physical Activity Opportunities' for workplaces and schools.
We specialise in group training classes to meet the certification of WELL Building V06 Physical Activity Opportunities for workplaces and schools.
What is the WELL Building Standard?
The WELL Certification process for WELL V2 is now widely established as the leading healthy building and wellness real estate standard in the world today. It is essentially a series of guidelines backed by rigorous scientific research, that when taken together, will guide a real estate project, whether new build construction or refurbishment and fit-out, towards a final product that is aligned with human health and wellness.
Sections of the V2 standard are dedicated to Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Movement, Thermal Comfort, Sound, Materials, Mind, Community & Innovation.
What is WELL consulting?
A WELL AP or WELL consultant is there to assist a project team through the certification process, ensuring maximum points are scored along the way by offering expert advice not just on how to lock-in points but also the principles that lie behind them. As a result, the project has every chance of becoming a model of health and wellness in the built environment.
Additionally, a WELL consultant’s skill set might include wellness interior design, biophilic design, knowledge in healthy buildings and consideration for sustainability / green buildings, a WELL building’s close cousin, as well as expertise in health and fitness, or as WELL like to call it ‘Physical Activity’, ‘Movement’ and ‘Nourishment’.
What is the WELL certification looking for in Movement V06?
In short, the focus here is “no-cost physical activity opportunities led by a qualified physical activity professional” but as ever the devil is in the detail so let’s look at exactly how mied-use real estate, workplace and school projects can secure maximum points for this particular credit of the WELL healthy building standard.
Why is physical activity at work or school important?
It is well known that gym membership rates in most countries hover around 10-15%, and that is just membership, not even usage! WELL reference the fact that around 25% of the global population is considered physically inactive.
On the positive side, a more active workforce or student population has been shown to reduce healthcare costs and absenteeism whilst improving productivity.
Biofit carried out one study into the benefits of indoor green exercise on mental wellbeing showing similarly encouraging results as well as a similar study focused specifically on the mental health benefits of spending time in a green ‘Vitamin Nature’ restorative space (no physical activity this time) during a workday, again with highly positive results. See the results of those studies here.
The role of workplace wellness programs in WELL V06
Simply put, the workplace and businesses in general are are powerful platform from which to reach the adult working population, just as schools are for the younger generations.
There are various factors at play here such as giving ‘permission’ to take time out during a paid work day, the positive benefits of peer pressure and collective group activity (rather than trying to train solo at home in for example).
Employers also have the opportunity of sponsoring gym memberships, providing onsite physical activity spaces with equipment at the workplace (whether indoor or outdoor) and promoting physical activity programming.
What do we mean by Physical Activity Opportunities in the workplace?
Firstly these need to be free of charge for employees and regular occupants of the workplace. The type of activity on offer should also match the demographics of the target audience.
Group physical activity classes should also take place either on-site or within 650ft walking distance from the project boundary and last for at least 30-minutes but ideally for 60-minutes for a total of up to 150 minutes in total of the physical activity programming each week.
Examples of Physical Activity Opportunities for WELL standard V06
So, for example that might equate to a free weekly 45-minute yoga class in a dedicated recharge room or restorative space within the building, at no cost to participants.
Or it could be a bi-weekly natural fitness group class held in an adjacent park or indeed on a vacant rooftop of the building, using bodyweight only for simplicity an to make it accessible to all, again with those costs covered by the employer and the class lasting for 60-minutes.
The WELL standard specifies that classes need be given by a qualified professional, be that a certified yoga instructor, a certified Biofit training coach or someone with a REPS Level 2 or higher qualification in the UK (or local equivalent for group fitness classes in other countries).
NB: the training can also be delivered virtually, via a large screen and Zoom, for example, if there are issues bringing in a qualified teacher to the workplace due to health concerns, availability, etc.
Finally, the above needs to be verified for WELL Certification of MOVEMENT V06 Physical Activity Opportunities with a company policy or an operations schedule.
We hope this article has proven useful! Contact us here to discuss how we can help you with workplace wellness programs and the WELL Building Certification process
Free e-book: benefits of biophilic design in offices & coworking spaces
benefits of biophilic design in offices & coworking spaces
Biophilic design is a technique that respectfully harnesses the restorative, energizing properties of Mother Nature for physical and mental health benefits, so where better to implement this approach than in the workplace where many spend upwards of eight hours a day, five days a week?
Biofilico's method combines the three key 'principles' of healthy, natural and sustainable design implemented through eight 'applications' for a range of externally oriented attributes (for the company in question), internally oriented benefits (for the office workers) and value generation (for the brand).
Download our free e-book to discover the science behind this approach, what steps you can take to implement some of the basics, and four illustrative case studies.
CONTENTS:
DEFINITION: what is biophilic design?
RESEARCH: the science behind biophilic design
APPLICATIONS: 8 ways to apply biophilic design to your office
CASE STUDIES: Amazon offices, Barcelona, Spain; Second Home coworking, Lisbon, Portugal; Uncommon coworking, London, UK; Innovation Centre coworking, Montenegro