Top Wellness Consulting Firms: Expert Guidance for a Healthier Workplace

recharge room designed by Biofilico for HERO corporate offices in Switzerland

As ESG, Social Wellbeing and mental health become increasingly important for corporations with a sustainability agenda, companies are recognizing that investing in their workforce’s physical and mental well-being is not just beneficial for the employees but also advantageous for their bottom line.

This has led to the rise of health and wellness consulting firms like us that specialize in creating healthier, happier workplaces. Such firms rely on teams of experienced professionals who have a thorough understanding of the challenges facing companies in the health and wellness marketplace.

Our specific approach to integrating wellness into workplace environments is to offer a combination of healthy interior design services and operational policies but there are many different ways to cut this cake clearly.

So, let’s delve into the world of health and wellness consulting and explore why these services are becoming increasingly indispensable in conscious workplaces.

What is Health and Wellness Advisory?

Health and wellness consultants offer a comprehensive approach aimed at improving the overall health and well-being of employees within an organization.

These consulting services are designed to address various aspects of wellness, including physical fitness, mental health, nutrition, and creating supportive work environments.

The primary goal is to foster a happier, more productive workforce by implementing strategies that promote well-being. Wellness consulting often involves concept creation for innovative wellness programs and environments.

The Importance of Workplace Wellbeing

Employee Well-being: Health and wellness consulting is pivotal in enhancing the quality of life for employees. By focusing on both physical and mental health, these services help reduce stress, prevent burnout, and promote a balanced lifestyle. Employees who feel supported in their well-being are generally more engaged, motivated, and productive.

Reducing Healthcare Costs: Investing in wellness programs can significantly reduce healthcare costs for companies. By encouraging healthier lifestyles and providing resources for managing chronic conditions, wellness consulting can lower the incidence of illness and absenteeism, leading to substantial cost savings.

Positive Work Culture: A focus on wellness fosters a positive company culture. It demonstrates a company’s commitment to its employees' health and happiness, which can boost morale, enhance job satisfaction, and increase retention rates.

Enhanced Productivity: Healthy employees are more focused, energetic, and capable of performing their tasks efficiently. Wellness programs that promote regular physical activity, healthy eating, and stress management contribute to higher productivity levels within the workforce.

Matt Morley - wellness consultant

Benefits of Working with a Healthy Office Consulting Firm

Partnering with a healthy office consulting firm offers numerous advantages for both employees and organizations. These firms specialize in developing and implementing wellness programs tailored to the unique needs of each workplace.

Comprehensive Wellness Services: Consulting firms provide a wide range of wellness services, from fitness programs and nutritional counseling to mental health support and ergonomic assessments. This holistic approach ensures that all aspects of employee well-being are addressed.

Consistent Support and Guidance: Health and wellness consultants offer ongoing support and guidance, helping companies navigate the complexities of creating and maintaining a healthy workplace. They bring expertise and experience to the table, ensuring that wellness initiatives are effective and sustainable.

Customized Wellness Solutions: Each organization has its own culture and specific wellness needs. Consulting firms work closely with companies to develop customized solutions that resonate with their employees and align with their corporate goals.

Boosted Employee Engagement and Morale: Wellness programs designed by expert consultants often result in higher employee engagement and morale. When employees feel their company is genuinely invested in their health and well-being, they are more likely to be loyal and committed to their work.

Types of Workplace Wellness Consultancy

Wellness consulting firms come in various forms, each specializing in different aspects of health and wellness. Understanding the different types can help organizations choose the right partner to meet their specific needs.

Occupational Health Firms

Occupational health firms focus on creating safe and healthy work environments tailored to diverse industries. They provide comprehensive health services, including physical and mental health support, workplace assessments, and customized training programs. These firms are adept at addressing workplace hazards, managing employee health risks, and promoting overall well-being.

Customized Wellbeing Solutions: Occupational health firms offer tailored wellbeing solutions that cater to the unique needs of various industries. Whether it’s a manufacturing plant, a corporate office, or a healthcare facility, these firms design programs that align with the specific requirements of the workplace.

Multi-faceted Approach: They employ a multi-faceted approach that encompasses physical health, mental wellness, and workplace safety. Services may include ergonomic assessments, health screenings, and stress management workshops, all aimed at fostering a healthier work environment.

Mental Health Firms

Mental health firms specialize in providing support and guidance for managing mental well-being in the workplace. They offer holistic programs that address stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. These firms often provide services like group therapy, counseling, and workshops focused on mental wellness.

Stress Management Programs: Mental health firms develop programs that help employees manage stress and maintain a healthy work-life balance. These programs may include mindfulness training, resilience-building workshops, and access to mental health professionals.

Holistic Mental Wellness: Recognizing the impact of mental health on overall well-being, these firms offer holistic solutions that go beyond traditional counseling. They may provide services related to nutrition, lifestyle coaching, and support for issues like eating disorders and weight stigma.

Expert Guidance: With a team of experienced therapists and counselors, mental health firms offer expert guidance tailored to the specific needs of their clients. They help organizations create supportive environments where employees can thrive mentally and emotionally.

Biofit design Fritton Lake Hotel Gym 2022 by Edvinas Bruzas photography

Physical Health Firms

Physical health firms, such as our sister company Biofit, focus on enhancing physical well-being through fitness and nutrition. They offer gym design as well as fitness programs and wellness advisory to address physical health issues and improve overall employee morale and productivity.

Corporate Fitness Services: These firms design and implement fitness programs that encourage regular physical activity among employees. From on-site gyms and fitness classes to personalized workout plans, they provide resources that help employees stay active and healthy. This is less what we do at Biofit, leaving it to those businesses with a specific focus on providing training sessions on a regular basis; our work is more strategic and design-oriented than that.

Holistic Approaches: Physical health firms often adopt holistic approaches that integrate fitness, nutrition, and wellness. They may offer services like nutritional counseling, stress reduction techniques, and wellness workshops that promote a balanced and healthy lifestyle. This strikes us the way forward, integrating a range of solutions, however it works best for large scale organizations where there is more chance of finding a receptive audience for all these different wellness concepts.

Specialized Programs: Services such as acupuncture, massage therapy, and yoga are also commonly offered by physical health firms. These programs address various physical health issues, including stress, fatigue, insomnia, depression, and anxiety, contributing to a less anxious / more relaxed workforce, at least that is the intention!

Services Offered by Wellness Advisory Firms

Wellness consulting firms offer a broad range of services designed to support the health and well-being of employees. These services are tailored to meet the specific needs of each organization and its workforce.

Training and Education

Education and training are fundamental components of wellness consulting. Firms provide comprehensive training programs that equip employees with the knowledge and skills needed to maintain their health and well-being.

Health and Wellness Workshops: Workshops cover a wide range of topics, from nutrition and fitness to mental health and stress management. These sessions educate employees on best practices for maintaining their well-being and provide practical tools they can use in their daily lives.

Employee Training Programs: Training programs are designed to enhance the skills and knowledge of employees in areas related to health and wellness. This may include training on ergonomic practices, mental health first aid, and strategies for managing work-related stress.

Leadership Training: Consulting firms also offer training programs for leaders and managers to help them support the well-being of their teams. These programs focus on building awareness and understanding of health and wellness issues and developing leadership skills that foster a supportive work environment.

Annual Assistance and Support

Wellness consulting firms provide ongoing assistance and support to ensure the long-term success of wellness initiatives. This continuous engagement helps companies adapt to changing needs and maintain a focus on employee health and well-being.

Spa and Wellness Centre Management: For organizations with on-site wellness facilities, consulting firms offer management services that include audits, mystery shopper evaluations, and recruitment and training for spa staff. They provide guidance to ensure these facilities are run efficiently and effectively.

Ongoing Wellness Support: Firms provide continuous support for wellness programs, helping companies address any challenges that arise and making adjustments as needed. This includes regular check-ins, progress evaluations, and updates to wellness plans to keep them aligned with company goals.

Spa and Wellness Services

Creating unique and engaging wellness experiences is another key service offered by consulting firms. They design bespoke wellness solutions that are tailored to the specific needs and preferences of each client.

Bespoke Wellness Solutions: Consulting firms work closely with clients to develop customized wellness programs that reflect their unique culture and values. This may include personalized fitness plans, tailored nutritional advice, and specialized wellness activities that resonate with employees.

Unique Customer Experiences: Wellness firms focus on creating memorable and meaningful experiences that enhance employee well-being. From designing serene spa environments to organizing wellness retreats, they craft experiences that promote relaxation, rejuvenation, and overall health.

Expertise and Accreditation

When evaluating potential consulting partners, it’s important to look for firms with a proven track record and recognized expertise in the field of workplace wellness.

Proven Track Record: Choose firms that have demonstrated success in developing and implementing wellness programs. Look for case studies, client testimonials, and examples of past projects to assess their capabilities and effectiveness.

Compliance and Certifications: Ensure that the firm complies with relevant health and privacy laws and holds certifications in wellness and health coaching. Accredited firms are more likely to deliver high-quality services and adhere to best practices.

The Power of Ergonomic Design: Boosting Comfort and Productivity in the Workplace

Ozana Business Club by Biofilico lounge area terrace view

In modern workplaces, productivity and wellbeing go hand in hand, so keeping workers comfortable and happy equates to improvements in a business’s bottom line; on this basis ergonomic design has a permanent seat at the table when considering workplace wellness.

Entire teams dedicated at medical universities such as Karolinska Universitet in Stockholm, Sweden are focused on ergonomics aiming to create a safe, comfortable, and productive workspace by taking into account human abilities and limitations, including body size, strength, skill, speed, sensory abilities, and attitudes.

This post explores the impact of ergonomic principles on comfort, productivity, and overall workplace satisfaction from our perspective as workplace wellness designers.

Understanding Ergonomic Design Principles

Definition and Importance

Ergonomic design involves tailoring workplaces, products, and systems to fit the capabilities and limitations of users. It aims to optimize human performance and well-being by minimizing discomfort and the risk of musculoskeletal disorders. Considering human factors and ergonomics early in the design process is crucial to creating safer, healthier, and more productive work environments.

In our coworking office design for Porto Montenegro for example, our aim was to create a number of different work environments for users, from low sofas, to high tables and high quality desk chairs by Spanish office furniture brand Actiu.

The Role of Human Factors Specialists

Human factors specialists apply ergonomic insights to develop ergonomic tools, equipment, and work environments that promote productivity and minimize health risks. Human factors engineering plays a crucial role in optimizing human well-being and overall system performance.

Ozana Business Club by Biofilico terrace marina view

Designing for Comfort and Productivity with Human Factors

Creating a Comfortable Work Environment

Ergonomic design alleviates physical strain and fatigue through well-designed workstations and tools. By fitting the user, it enhances comfort, reduces injury risk, and supports long-term health. Proper ergonomic design fits the human body and prevents repetitive strain injuries and musculoskeletal disorders.

Addressing repetitive movements is crucial to reduce ergonomic stresses. The prevalence of workplace injuries highlights the importance of ergonomic design in mitigating these risks.

Accommodating Diverse Needs

Ergonomic design considers the needs of diverse populations, including pregnant women, children, and the elderly. By adapting to unique requirements, it fosters inclusivity and accessibility. Ergonomic design helps prevent work-related injuries by considering the needs of diverse populations.

Testing and Feedback

Comfort Testing and User Feedback

Continuous user feedback and comfort testing refine ergonomic solutions, ensuring they effectively meet user needs and preferences. Comfort testing involves assessing the fit between ergonomic solutions and the human body.

Ozana Business Club interior design by Biofilico

Implementation and Policy

Implementing Ergonomic Design Principles to Prevent Workplace Injuries

Integrating ergonomic design into organizational policies ensures sustained benefits, fostering a culture of safety and well-being.

Emerging Trends and Opportunities in Ergonomics

The Future of Ergonomic Design

Technological advancements, such as AI and VR, present new avenues for ergonomic innovation. Sustainable design practices also shape the future, emphasizing eco-friendly solutions.

The International Ergonomics Association (IEA) plays a crucial role in advancing ergonomics science and practice, promoting the elaboration and advancement of ergonomics and human factors to improve the quality of life and overall system performance.

Conclusion

The Importance of Ergonomic Design

Ergonomic design is indispensable for creating workplaces that prioritize human comfort, safety, and efficiency. By embracing ergonomic principles, organizations foster healthier, more productive environments that adapt to evolving needs and technologies.

Explore how Biofilico integrates ergonomic expertise into wellness-focused interior design, enhancing your workplace’s comfort and productivity. Contact us to discover how ergonomic design can transform your environment into a hub of well-being and efficiency.

Green Building Barcelona: Best Sustainable and Healthy Office Interiors — Biofilico Wellness Interiors

entegra office building barcelona

The six best green and healthy office real estate developments in Barcelona are all located in the PobleNou district. This ex-industrial area, the avant-garde centre of the city, is rapidly evolving into the hub for sustainable construction.

Barcelona is a model for sustainable urban development through its implementation of superblocks and sustainable architecture, creating pedestrian-friendly spaces, reducing traffic congestion, and improving air quality.

Each one of the buildings reviewed, is built with its own ESG approach and priorities such as energy efficiency or environmental and public health first, often achieving renowned certifications like LEED and WELL.

The office developments covered below are:

• Badajoz 97

• Entegra building

• Green Business District

• T3 Diagonal Mar

• Wittywood

• Lumen Offices

what is a sustainable office interior?

A sustainable office is part of the broader concept of sustainable architecture, which encompasses eco-friendly and energy-efficient workspaces designed to reduce the carbon footprint and promote sustainability.

The concept of sustainable office interior design has gained popularity in recent years, especially in the real estate industry, as businesses are increasingly becoming aware of the impact of their operations on the environment.

Sustainable office interiors are designed to conserve energy, minimize waste, and use environmentally friendly materials throughout the space.

what is sustainable office interior design in sustainable architecture?

The design of a sustainable office interior includes various sustainable practices such as natural lighting, energy-efficient systems, and the use of sustainable materials. These features encompass energy-efficient lighting systems, water-saving plumbing fixtures, and HVAC systems that consume less energy. The use of sustainable materials such as recycled wood, bamboo, and other renewable resources is also a key aspect of sustainable office interiors.

The workplace design should also incorporate green spaces, such as plants and green walls, which not only enhance the aesthetic appeal of the workspace but also contribute to air purification.

benefits of sustainable office interiors with energy efficiency

Sustainable office interiors have several benefits, including reduced energy costs, improved indoor air quality, increased employee productivity, and enhanced brand reputation.

These benefits are driving more businesses to adopt sustainable office interiors as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives.

what is a healthy office interior with natural light?

A healthy office interior is an essential aspect of any modern workplace focused on improving the mental and physical wellbeing of employees. The interior design of an office can have a significant impact on employee health, meaning an office space will affect their productivity, creativity, and to some extent overall job satisfaction.

On this basis, a healthy workplace should be designed with the aim of creating a comfortable and stimulating work environment that supports the physical and mental health and emotional needs of employees while they are in the office building - how they deal with their home office environment is a subject for another blog post!

how to create a healthy office?

The interior design of an office should provide ample natural light, fresh air, and comfortable temperature levels to promote a healthy environment. The use of natural materials, such as wood and stone, can create a soothing atmosphere that reduces stress and anxiety levels.

Additionally, incorporating plants into the office decor can improve indoor air quality, promote health, and create a calming effect on employees.

Ergonomic furniture is a crucial aspect of a more healthy office design and interior. Chairs, desks, and other office furniture should be adjustable to accommodate different body types and promote good posture. This can help prevent back pain, neck pain, and other musculoskeletal issues that can arise from prolonged sitting.

The color scheme of an office interior can also impact employee wellbeing. Bright, bold colors can be energizing, while muted tones can be calming. It is important to strike a balance between these two extremes to encourage employees and create an environment that is both stimulating and relaxing.

In conclusion, a healthy office interior is essential for promoting the wellbeing of employees. The design should prioritize natural light, fresh air, and comfortable temperature levels, incorporate natural materials and plants, feature ergonomic furniture, and use a color scheme that balances stimulation and relaxation.

By creating a comfortable, productive and stimulating work environment, employers can improve employee productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction.

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green business district, barcelona

Green Business District healthy office development Barcelona

The Green Business District is a 15,507 sqm project developed by Glenwell Group that offers a sustainable balance between life and work. The four office buildings comprising the complex are connected through an extensive natural environment that highly improves the quality of life of those working in the District.

This innovative complex designed by the architectural firm BCA offers a unique combination of historical heritage and highly innovative contemporary buildings, as the existing modernist architecture is beautifully restored and included as part of the project.

The different buildings are harmoniously merged together into one stimulating environment through the natural landscapes.

The interiors are designed as state-of-the-art flexible office spaces ready to meet the unique needs of each of their users. Still, despite the versatility, each space provides thermal and acoustic comfort as well as the highest standards of quality, sustainability and health. The use of innovative air conditioning systems, such as free-cooling units and sensor-regulated systems, achieves energy efficiency and reduces CO2 emissions.

The different biophilic and environmental design features have contributed to acquiring a LEED Platinum Certificate and a WELL Gold Certificate.

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entegra office building barcelona

Entegra sustainable office building Barcelona

Entegra is an eight-story, sustainable office building of 4,138 sqm designed by the architectural studio Batlleiroig and developed by Urban Input. The singular look of its facade is granted by a charred wood cladding as the project enhances a connection with nature.

The offices aim to enhance the well-being of the users by providing space to breathe. Each storey offers a spacious open floor plan interior that expands into a large wooden deck offering a  limitless perception.

The expansion provided by this experience, as well as the presence of vegetation, inspires the users to take a breath and rest which positively influences their physical and mental health and well-being.

The different sustainability features included in the Entegra design contribute to the LEED Gold Certification. Additionally, the application of different bioclimatic strategies such as thorough insulation and smart automated natural ventilation highly reduces the energy demand.

This energy efficiency is supported by a solar power installation, including photovoltaic solar panels, enabling it to achieve a near Net Zero Energy Building (NZEB).

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Wittywood, Barcelona

Wittywood sustainable office design Barcelona

This 3,600 sqm project developed by Colonial is the first Spanish office building built entirely of wood. Betarq, the architecture studio in charge of Wittywood‘s design, chose to raise this construction with a wooden structure as a solution to lower its environmental impact as well as to contribute to a healthier work environment.

Using wood as a construction material reduces the carbon footprint by as much as 50% but also provides a good thermal resistance which helps improve the energy efficiency of the building. Additionally, the project produces its own renewable energy with solar panels, cutting down the energy demand considerably.

Such green building strategies contributed to obtaining a LEED Platinum Certification, though given the commitment to prioritise the user’s well-being, Wittywood has obtained a Well Platinum Certification as well.

The interior spaces are thought to create a natural work environment and offer spacious open floor plan designs, finished with prime natural materials and floor-to-ceiling windows to maximise daylight indoors.

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Badajoz 97, Barcelona

Badajoz 97 real estate development Barcelona

As part of the 2019 Urban Improvement Plan, this 14,000 sqm building developed by Conren Tramway and designed by Batlleiroig architects harmoniously integrates past and future.

Located in a rapidly evolving neighbourhood, Badajoz 97 embraces its industrial heritage with a black ceramic facade while opting for a highly innovative structural solution that enables modern-looking large open floor indoor spaces.

This sense of openness is enhanced by the addition of a wide terrace at the end of every floor. These exterior spaces are designed as gardens and aim to enhance the connection to nature, contributing to a healthier environment with improved air quality.

The different strategies utilised to improve the well-being of the users have granted this building a WELL Certification.

https://www.batlleiroig.com/es/projectes/oficines-badajoz-97-a-barcelona/

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Edifico Lumen, Barcelona

Lumen Offices office real estate Barcelona

The presence of extensive vegetation contributes to the environment as well as promoting biodiversity and helps maintain stable temperature and humidity levels.

Other sustainable strategies such as passive design features and the installation of photovoltaic panels help reduce the energy demand and grant the building with a LEED Gold Certificate.

This unique office building is conceived out of the sustainable idea of repurposing an existing structure. Designed by Batlleiroig and developed by Heptaprim-Odiseus, the Lumen Offices maintains an early 90's garage structure and turns it into an example of sustainability and efficiency. 

Aimed to improve the well-being of its users, this office building enhances an indoor-outdoor relationship and uses different biophilic strategies to integrate nature into its design.

The terraces and exterior spaces are essential to this project as having been designed as gardens, contribute to an improved air quality.  

The broad extension of plants surrounding the building provides a filter protecting the direct, hot sun rays from overheating the interiors.

As a result, vegetation helps maintain a temperature of comfort cutting down energy consumption. The energy efficiency of the Lummen Offices is further supported as it produces its own renewable energy with photovoltaic panels.

https://edificiolumen.com/equipo/

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T3 Diagonal Mar, BArcelona

T3 Diagonal Mar green and healthy offices Barcelona

This innovative project developed by Hines and Hendersons Park is designed to meet the highest standards of sustainability and well-being. A combination of wood, vegetation and avant-garde technologies has led the team behind this building to receive three distinguished certifications: LEED Platinum, WELL and WiredScore.

Designed by Batlleiroig this 3,610 sqm project is divided into four open floor plan stories. With the intention and focus of providing a healthy building, the interiors are finished with warm wood, equipped with ventilation systems, and flooded with natural light.

The floor-to-ceiling windows and terraces contribute as well to creating an indoor-outdoor transparency offering a sense of connection to the city. 

To increase productivity and minimise energy consumption T3 Office building is designed using passive strategies. Yet, the self-production of solar energy and the usage of the latest industrialised systems contribute to a reduced energy demand.

The Mental Empowerment office Gym with Katharina naumann

In episode 57 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today, I’m in Germany talking to ex-sprinter Katharina Naumann who is behind a new office gym concept focused on mental empowerment.

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if you are interested in the wider subject of healthy co-work offices in general see our article here and for our thoughts on ergonomic furniture in a healthy office see here

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Transcript courtesy of Otter.AI (excuse any typo errors!)

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Talking mental fitness at work

Matt Morley

Welcome to the show. I'd love to start with a little background on how you made the transition from an Olympic athlete, from elite level sports, to the world of business coaching and mental fitness.

Katharina Naumann

Yeah, thank you for the invitation!

There were two reasons for me. So first of all, I had a very negative experience in my first job after my studies. At that point, I just had finished my career as an athlete and suddenly, I found myself sitting full time behind a laptop, which sounds for many people very normal but it was quite a shock for my body.

Imagine that I was used to training about 10 times per week before that, and now I was sitting eight hours a day, just not moving anywhere. So of course, this caused some physical and also mental stress for me.

I had a very well trained body but I will never forget what it felt like to lose all my muscle tone. It really didn't feel right or healthy at all.

So after six months, I found myself in a very bad condition, especially mentally. I decided to quit, and to look for a job which not does take place in front of the screen all the time. Eventually I decided to start a training program to become a personal and business coach.

I now combined fitness training with life coaching, to help people become mentally and physically healthy and hopefully happy!

Finally, I knew from my athletics races that mental empowerment is so very important to reach goals. There are a lot of mental techniques that I want to carry further into society, I think mental empowerment should actually be a subject taught at school! I know my kids would love that.

At an emotional level there is no difference between the nervousness or stress we feel doing sports to the nervousness or stress we may experience at work. But while the athlete will relieve that stress while moving, the employee remains seated and has no way out.

Matt Morley

Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, so you were training 10 times per week, in terms of hours, just to give us an understanding of how that dominated your life, what did that equate to?

Katharina Naumann

Yes, I trained like 10 times a week as an athlete doing the physical training stuff and the mental part was actually not not included in this, that was extra, working with a coach on psychology and mental empowerment.

Matt Morley

And the mental empowerment, that then becomes the transition in a way, right, from the world of athletics to the world of work? That's the bridge between the two for you?

mental empowerment in the workplace

Katharina Naumann

Yes. So I really got to know how important the mental empowerment is, it doesn't matter what goal you want to reach, you know, and even it's a goal at work, yes, just to do a good presentation or something like this, you need to be mentally empowered.

mental health as an entrepreneur

Matt Morley

Yeah, I sympathize with that as after eight years now working as an entrepreneur by myself, which is almost as stressful, in a sense, as working in a big company where you have to deal with the politics of being part of a much wider network of staff.

When you're solo and building your own business, then that comes with its own challenges in terms of mental empowerment, and there's no one around to help unless we go and look for a coach or we find people who can play that role for us like, like an ex-boss, or an elder who we can rely on for help and advise occasionally.

I think that's actually one of the techniques that I've used in the past or had to do for myself, because otherwise, it's a very lonely path as an entrepreneur.

Having a corporate structure, having a team around you, obviously has challenges too, but I think can also be very, very rewarding. Obviously one needs to know how to navigate and sail through those waters, because no one teaches you that part. It’s all soft skills.

Goldkern mental coaching services in Munich, Germany

So your services as a mental empowerment and fitness coach based in Munich, what type of services are you offering? And then who are you working with as clients?

Katharina Naumann

Yeah, at the moment, I'm training teams in one or two day workshops about how a healthy life would look like for them, and I also coach one to one people to help them find a better, healthier and happier life.

So many companies now realize that mental health is suffering in Germany, already 20% of the population suffer from some kind of mental stress issue each year.

Matt Morley

And do you see that as having changed greatly from the pre COVID times? Everyone's talking a lot more open now it seems about mental health at work, it was a far less common subject just 2-3 years ago.

mental wellbeing at work post-Covid

Katharina Naumann

Now is the moment where mental health should be destigmatized and as a society we need to look for solutions for these issues. So many people struggled with post Covid mental issues. We not only talk about real mental illnesses. Everybody handled the Covid time differently.

So there is the type of people who are introvert for example, and actually like to stay at a safe home and they are now struggling much more to get back to the office and into the community, they are forced to get out of the comfort zone now.

Then there are the extrovert people, for example, who felt a deep hole while staying at home. And they are also not happy by now.

The opportunity for a company is now to integrate a new, healthier and more flexible working flow. Most companies recognized that online work, remote working really works as an alternative to being in the office every day.

So a nice way now would be to keep some of with the tools that made the life easier during the pandemic while going back to the best of work life before Covid too.

I always see this at my time management workshops. The online meetings are planned from hour to hour and without any opportunity for course. So you don't need to be a coach to recognize that this won't work in the long run.

Also the working conditions are very far away from nature, from our essence as human beings able to use body and mind so much more. This makes me sad, actually. And this is part of my mission to empower people.

mindful techniques in the workplace

It is wrong to put mental techniques like meditation, for example, in an esoteric corner and ignore them - many very successful people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and so many more, are or were meditating every day as part of a successful morning routine.

My belief is that offices should, when space allows, provide a place for this to happen during short moments of the employee work day, perhaps with some stretching and gentle movement opportunities as well.

the mental performance office gym

Matt Morley

Well, that neatly opens the door to my next question about the project that we've been collaborating on over the last few months, the idea of you setting up your own studio, whether that be a temporary pop up space within an office building in Munich, where you live, or perhaps taking on your own studio space and realizing that vision by yourself for office workers nearby.

What I found interesting when we first started speaking was from the beginning, you were very clear that this was not a gym in the typical sense. You envisage more of a ‘mental gym’. This is about mental and physical wellness, and we need a space that can represent that at that vision of wellbeing both in the mind, the body and the soul to some extent.

Katharina Naumann

Yeah, I was thinking about a way to really empower people mentally and physical in the daily lives. Yes, this is very important that it it helps in the daily lives because just subsidizing a fitness studio membership is not enough. It’s the easy way out,. a way to check the box, but not the most effective solution.

I am creating a place where the employees can practice mental and physical tools that are helpful also at work, not just for their own fitness levels or personal wellbeing. It is much more effective to do these exercises three or four times a week just for 20 minutes, then training once in a gym for two hours per week.

By providing a space in the office, for example in the lobby or an unused meeting room, allows the employees to choose if they need some stretching one day or a 20 minutes meditation, or more intensive 1-on-1 support from my team.

We have planned morning and lunch routines, one to one coaching to solve psychological concerns and group sessions to get the background knowledge for these techniques that are applicable to their productivity and happiness at work.

So over the time of three or four months. during our pop-up in an office building in Munich, the employees will be able to stay in a healthy routine both mentally and physically. The benefits will be less mental anxiety, more confidence handling difficult situations using these mental tools, and also self confidence.

Of course, if the company wants to keep this pop up place apart from it, this won't be a problem. The pop up is composed of natural materials, and the most discreet and technical way, I think, yes, we made a good job.

Reinventing the office gym membership

Matt Morley

The part that really interested me is that gap between what is often a very easy task for a company for a business to do, which is to provide access for staff to the local gym, they tick the box that way, I’ve even recommended it to clients as a healthy building consultant in the past! It certainly gets you the credits you need in your healthy building certification scheme.

The issue though, is that you don't really know who's using it, how often, what they do when they get there, and therefore how much benefit it’s actually having on their lives.

People who enjoy exercise are probably doing it already anyway so offering a more bespoke solution for office workers makes complete sense in theory- the challenge is that creating a dedicated space within an office can also be a big step for a business, even for a large corporation.

I think that is the strongest point in your pitch and the proposition that you just made - the idea of it being specifically about not just getting people to exercise more but also to be healthier, happier, less stressed and more productive. By offering this on-site and with a curated experience, there is a far higher chance of making a meaningful impact on the lives of employees who might not ever make it to a local gym, even if the membership is free!

How to really make an impact via workplace fitness

Matt Morley

Basically I don't know if someone running an hour extra week is going to be more productive or that much happier at work… maybe not so much. So the idea of creating something specifically for the office environment, rather than just saying that access to gyms, or exercise in general, is going to do the job.

Your proposal is that we need to think a bit harder, and commit to tailor making a concept specifically for office workers.

What type of mental. preparation training will you offer and what type of physical training practices combine best with that? What do you recommend for office workers, is it more about mobility or neuromuscular activities focused on reaction times or 30-minute High Intensity training sessions for example?

Katharina Naumann

The connection is actually most of many people go for training just because it is yes. In the daily plan to get it done. I did my sports today, but often it is even more stressful on the body if you go for a run 10 kilometers after a hard day at work.

Actually everyone is able to feel about the body needs intuitively but many have lost that connection and that is what I want to bring back to people, so they know what type of activity to do for every situation, then they know what they actually need for this moment.

Movement and active design in the workplace

It doesn't have to be very complicated, we are made to walk, run, lift and carry things. So the most important thing is to integrate more movement in the first place into the daily lifestyle, all kinds of movement, to bike to work, take the stairs, work at a standing desk, take movement breaks.

functional fitness in office gyms

After that, the next important training I recommend is the functional whole body workout, just with bodyweight, or with some medicine balls and light weights. It trains the whole body together, and it is easy to integrate some mobility and balance exercises too.

I'm not a fan of training each muscle separate at a machine like most of the fitness studios offers, these movements are not very natural, and they miss out to train the interplay of our muscles.

Also, explosive strength training should be not ignored. This is what you need when you don't want to fall when older.

Office workers all have in common that they often have a stiff neck, or they also have very often low back pain because the abs are not strong enough. So they need core training and mobility training.

An office gym for mental wellbeing

Matt Morley

We're talking ultimately about typically, like 10 to 15% of the population who actually use a gym, right? That I think Germany is one of the highest in, in Europe in terms of gym membership. So not everyone's going to be interested in this but by adapting it and making it more accessible you open it up to a wider segment of the working population.

These classes you're describing are not so much about how fit anyone is, you’re not promising weight loss but rather mental wellbeing right?

Katharina Naumann

Yeah, it’s about feeling good and doing what your intuition tells you, whether that be movement, healthy food, meditation or mobility exercises for example.

Matt Morley

I guarantee you that type of internal dialogue is not happening for many people while at work. I think that's a real benefit that you can answer such questions for office workers who perhaps do not necessarily see the connection between a lack of movement in their life or too much of a particular food at lunchtime and a general lack of energy and positivity in their mental life. By taking a more 360 degree approach as you do, then you can really make more of an impact.

Katharina Naumann

I think that's it yeah, a way to handle our lives more healthier than we do at the moment by developing positive habits.

Matt Morley

This looks like the future of fitness at work. for me I think it's a very different concept you have here, it’s what workplace wellness needs!

So if people want to read more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to contact you?

Katharina Naumann

They can find me on LinkedIn here and my business Goldkern here.

Best Examples of Biophilic Design Office: Sustainable Interior — Biofilico Wellness Interiors

best examples of Biophilic design in offices

Benefits of biophilia in a sustainable office interior

Biophilia is deep rooted within the human consciousness. A positive psychological affiliation with nature is a key element of human happiness that is all too often neglected in buildings and interiors today but the recent boom in biophilic design, sustainable interiorswellbeing design is redressing the situation.

Biophilic design elements can have a positive impact on employees’ physical and mental health. Incorporating biophilic design into the office environment can significantly enhance employee well-being and productivity. The use of natural elements, natural lighting, and greenery improves air quality, reduces stress, boosts happiness, and increases relaxation, ultimately leading to higher levels of productivity and job satisfaction.

When designing an office space or workspace, from our perspective as biophilic design consultants it is fundamental to create an interior in which occupant wellbeing is maximized while also minimizing environmental impact - a magic combination made possible by biophilic design.

Why is this important? The best office designs provide a way to increase employee happiness and productivity, reduce anxiety in the workplace and attract then retain top talent while respecting the planet around us - it should not be ‘people first, planet later’, or vice versa.

Here we review some recently completed or soon-to-be-completed examples of biophilic design and sustainable interior design offices from around the world that have caught our attention for their aesthetics, creativity and evidence-based approach that pushes the boundaries well beyond a plant wall and some desk plants…! Read on for more office design ideas.

• Citibank Wealth Management offices, Singapore

• Shui On WorkX,* Shanghai by M Moser & Associates*

• Welcome, Milano* by Kengo Kuma Architects for real estate developer Europa Risorse*

• Fosbury & Sons Harmony Coworking, Antwerp, Belgium

• Uncommon Coworking Holborn, London, UK

• Andyrahman Architect Office, East Java, Indonesia

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CitiBank Wealth Hub, Private Wealth Management Offices, Singapore

Designed by Singapore-based Ministry of Design, the increasingly famous biophilic interior designers, the CitiBank Wealth Hub looks more akin to a Silicon Valley tech giant’s headquarters than a banking space… but then this is Singapore, the garden city, and CitiBank clearly wanted to make a statement.

The result is a rare blend of banking and biophilia, with dense indoor landscaping that breaks up the double-height loft-like space with expansive views of the city skyline and abundant natural light to keep the indoor forest flourishing.

Rather than creating internal walls, the main space is peppered with separate meeting pods for one-on-one client meetings, each surrounded by an individual soil bed packed with lush foliage that both purifies the air and provides additional privacy, whilst also helping to boost mood and reduce anxiety. For more on the benefits of biophilia, see here.

A deliberately sumptuous range of materials choices from reception through to the ‘feature’ bar’ and office areas ensures that the private banking clients feel at ease. We see plenty of prestigious marbles, wood cladding, ergonomic furniture, subtle overhead lighting and yet more indoor planter boxes loaded with greenery.

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Shui On WorkX - biophilic offices by M Moser associates, Shanghai

As you walk through the front doors of the Shui On WorkX realistate office located in Shanghai, the presence of biophilia is immediately prominent.

Plants line a welcoming corridor and the large design of a sun illuminates an otherwise drab sidewalk.

Biophilic design fills each and every corner of the large building located deep within the industrialized, busy urban environment of Shanghai.

The reception protrudes down from the ceiling with diverse plants falling from a curvilinear, organic form. Living walls are incorporated to bring nature into the workspace, enhancing well-being and encouraging interaction among employees.

A natural color scheme fills each room with a pallet of greens, tan-browns, and stone-grays. It’s illuminated by walls of large windows filling the space with natural light. This light gives the vegetation a perfect place to flourish. The office is not only lined with small house plants, but entire living trees and moss floors.

Biophilic interior design elements embellish the office with leaf shaped lamps, stump shaped stools, large boulders, and a digital waterfall cascading down from a high ceiling. The elements of nature are brought into the interior space with sophistication and intention creating a masterful, biophilic space.

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Welcome, Milano by kengo kuma associates - the biophilic office of the future

We have watched the development of this ambitious biophilic office park development by the Milano-based real estate developer Seagreen with great interest, not just for its commitment to nature but also for the role of the lead architects, Kengo Kuma Associates, without doubt one of the most consistently impressive design firms in operation today and increasingly famous sustainable interior designers. This project aims to seamlessly integrate the natural world into the built environment, creating a harmonious and sustainable office space.

Made up of 43,500m2 of healthybiophilic offices, 2700m2 of co-working space, 1100m2 of meeting spaces, 2000m2 of food & beverage spaces and 1800m2 of commercial spaces, it looks set to make a tangible impact on Milano’s office landscape.

Solar panels on the rooftop, pocket parks and open-air courtyards, terrace greenery and a 360m2 bioclimatic greenhouse will all ensure a constant connection between the office-worker and nature within the built environment.

Where the Welcome project truly distinguishes itself is in making the connection between biophilia, sustainability and real estate ESG objectives - it may seem obvious but a building that goes out of its way to integrate nature through its architecture and interiors, only to harm nature by using materials that harm the planet in their extraction, manufacturing or transportation to the site would make very little sense at all.

As such, the project espouses both ‘organic architecture’ and people-centric design.

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Biophilic interiors with natural elements at Fosbury & Sons Harmony Coworking, Antwerp, Belgium

In Antwerp, Belgium, a modernist cathedral was stripped down to its concrete bones and rebirthed into what we believe to be an aesthetic marvel of an office that displays subtle influences from the world of biophilic design.

Is it 100%, declaredly nature-inspired? Probably not but it perhaps represents how such organic interior design cues have become a part of our interior design canon in recent years.

Towering six meter high windows line the building illuminating the main, open workspace. Outside of these windows, there is a natural view of King Albert Park - in green and healthy building standards such as the WELL certification and LEED green building standard such views onto nature are rewarded with credits in the final scorecard for their restorative powers on potentially anxious, stressed out office workers.

Areas designed for different settings of productivity, relaxation, and collaboration are incorporated to make the space a healthy office design that is versatile for its patrons. Most furniture is wooden and wooden artworks suspended from the ceiling bring natural elements into the space, helping to frame the experience from floor to ceiling.

The use of natural materials, including sustainable wood and indoor plant walls, further enhances the biophilic design of the Fosbury & Sons Harmony Coworking space.

A large amount of the furniture is vintage making it inherently sustainable. Biophilic elements such as lush greenery, oval shaped windows, and leafless branches adorn the environment.

Overall this a prime example of how an existing building can be diligently restored and converted into a design-oriented coworking environment that gently, almost imperceptibly brings the outdoor space in to create a calm, uplifting environment for productivity. Chapeaux Fosbury & Sons!

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Biophilia at Uncommon Coworking Holborn, London, UK

Uncommon adopted biophilic design into their DNA early on and have consistently delivered interior spaces that overflow with organic design details and living plants - their forthcoming site in central London’s Holborn district looks set to push the boundaries even further in that direction.

We previously interviewed Uncommon’s CEO for our Green & Healthy Places podcast -listen to that episode here.

Scheduled to open in 2023. Located just outside the city bustle of London, the center is sustainably designed for its members to work and thrive within.

The green building, sustainable design has declared three main objectives: Reduce their emissions, achieve net zero, and be carbon negative.

If these objectives are achieved, the coworking space would be one of the first of its kind to achieve a positive environmental impact.

The execution of these plans to realistically obtain their goals is a holistic strategy of the reduction of waste, use, and purchase. Waste reduction includes proper and safe disposal alongside the maximization of reuse and recycling. Use reduction will be executed through regulated energy and water usage.

Finally, purchase reduction will be minimized through expending fewer consumables and purchasing sustainable consumables to ensure a reduction of single use items.

The Holborn coworking environment will be a biophillic space filled with an abundance of plants from floor to ceiling that is created with organic, environmentally friendly materials, and filled with sustainable items. It is the sustainable, biophillic coworking space of the future. The biophilic design also aims to improve air quality by purifying the air, reducing indoor pollutants, and controlling humidity, which contributes to better physical health and mental well-being for its members.

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Andyrahman Architect Office, Indonesia - an example of biophilic office design

In Sidoarjo, Indonesia an architecture office was created with the wellness of their employees as the top priority. The biophilic office design was brought to life with nature around every corner.

The Andyrahman Architect Office also features green walls, adding a dynamic and inviting element to the workspace.

A living garden filled with plants ranging from grasses to hard wood trees is centered within the first floor of the structure creating a view of greenery for all.

Alongside this, a koi pond gurgles with the natural sounds of flowing water. On the second floor of the building resides a movable, breathing wall.

Using a local weaving technique, the bamboo walls allows for the transparency of light and air. It can be opened completely to the outside world.

This truly biophilic office gives workers nooks of relaxation and community such as the rooftop social area for employees to engage in conversation and relaxation in the open air.

Summary

Through these diverse examples of office biophilic design, we can see the tangible aspects of biophilia at work, visually, but we have also tried to highlight the intangible psycho-emotional responses these environments evoke in building occupants. the intangible is paramount.

The nature of biophillic office design is founded within the happiness and wellbeing of those who spend time there, while also respecting the environment with sustainable materials. Ultimately, such tangible connections with nature boost quality of life and work.

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Further Reading

• healthy coworking offices

• home office desk and ergonomic furniture

• What Are Sustainable Office Buildings?

• The Best New Green & Healthy Office Buildings In Barcelona, Spain

• Sustainability Strategy & Sustainable Design Consultants

• Sustainable Office Space - Make Your Office More Eco-Friendly

• What Are The Benefits Of Healthy Coworking Space Designs?

• Coworking Space Design - A Secret To Productive Coworking Space

• A Guide To Biophilic Design In Offices & Coworking Spaces

• Posts Tagged Sustainable Design

• Biophilic Design For People, Planet And Profit

• Benefits Of Biophilic Design On Cognitive Performance In The Workplace

• Nature In The Office Workplace

• Benefits Of Biophilic Design - Why Is It Good For You?

• Free E-Book: Benefits Of Biophilic Design In Offices & Coworking Spaces

• Becoming A Biophilic Design And Healthy Building Consultant

• An Introduction To Biophilic Design - Nature, Wellbeing And Sustainability

• About Us

• What Are Biophilia And Biophilic Design?

• Biophilic Design In The Well Building Standard

• Best Architecture Studios For Biophilic Design

• 5 Best Examples Of Biophilic Design

• Best Examples Of Biophilic Commercial Developments

• Wellness Interior Design Consultants

• Homepage

• A Guide To Workplace Wellbeing Design

• How To Know If Your Workplace Fits The Wellness Office Concept

• Furniture In Workplace Wellness Interior Design: The Ultimate Guide To Choosing Ergonomic Office Furniture

• Sustainable Design Consultants

• An Introduction To Biophilic Design In Sustainable Buildings

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Acoustic performance in WELL buildings

acoustic comfort / acoustic performance / sound design / WELL rating system / healthy building

WELL Certified / SOUND CONCEPT

acoustic performance with ethan bourdeau

Welcome to episode 48 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate.

I’m your host, Matt Morley of Biofilico Healthy Buildings and in this episode we’re in New York talking to Ethan Bourdeau, the Sound Concept Lead at the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) - the organization behind the WELL healthy building rating system. 

An architectural acoustician, Ethan also holds down a role as Executive Director of Standards and Built Environment for Quiet Parks International (QPI).

Ethan and I discuss the role of acoustics in creating a comfortable environment for building occupants; how pink noise can cover up unwanted background noise, sound zones and spatial layouts; the all important distinction between sound, silence, and noise; the role nature sounds can play in promoting wellness; and the main causes of noise in a building that need to be mitigated in a comprehensive healthy building acoustics plan in line with the WELL Sound concept he helped conceive.

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acoustic performance / conversation highlights

• Acoustics is just one element of a holistic platform of comfort metrics that are operating in synchronicity.

• In WELL we look at spatial layout, acoustic thresholds and criteria for optimal performance (pulled from the leading acoustical standards) and in some cases, include novel requirements for acoustical design and acoustical comfort that have yet to really hit the market outside of the WELL rating system.

• Not all sound is noise - sound is just sound until it annoys you, then it becomes noise!

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WELL acoustic performance conversation with Ethan Bourdeau, Sound Concept Lead, International WELL Building Institute (IWBI)

full transcript courtesy of OTTER.AI (excuse any typos)

Matt Morley

Ethan, a pleasure to have you here. I'd like to start with some basics, if we may - what was your path into sound design and audio engineering? For people who are perhaps not entirely familiar with how that relates to real estate, perhaps you could give us a quick intro to that bridge between those worlds?

Ethan Bourdeau

Sure, thanks, Matt. It's great to be here. Happy to discuss this. So my background in acoustics and sound goes back to my days as a musician growing up. I've practiced and spent a lot of time performing on the folium, which is a low brass tube like instrument that carried me throughout a degree in Music Performance and Acoustical Engineering at the University of Hartford.

So, yeah, constantly listening to my own sound really led me to want to better understand the way that interior environments sounded and to what degree architects and designers have the ability to manipulate, shape and improve the sound of spaces that we spend our time in.

Nature sounds, quiet and wellbeing

Matt Morley

As context, the work you're doing with the Quiet Parks International (QPI) might give us a starting point of the best case scenario, as in a perfectly quiet, natural environment. Does nature provide a baseline of excellence in terms of sound and noise?

Ethan Bourdeau

My work with Quiet Parks International is my latest endeavor. It's been the result of a year's worth of collaboration with those folks, field recorders that have come together behind this one mission of preserving and recognizing quiet in the natural and built environments throughout the world.

Their expertise so far has brought them to places like Glacier National Park, Haleakala Crater on Hawaii, and various other urban and wilderness quiet parks throughout the world as potential candidates for meeting our criteria that denotes and best exemplifies what quiet really means to the surrounding or indeed visiting populations.

We have, over the past year, worked to define what that criteria looks like, how do we define quiet from a physical, a parametric and even a subjective standpoint.

To what degree do we assess using audio technology, sound level meters, audio recording devices, and even just anecdotal and colloquial evidence that we can get from people with boots on the ground in those areas to describe ‘quiet’.

Over time, we're planning to develop a better understanding of how quiet and the definition of silence and tranquility changes around the world. So we're actively recruiting and finding candidate spaces, including a site here in New York City, actually, that we're hoping can add more flavor to understanding and unraveling that narrative.

Nature sounds for wellness

Matt Morley

So these are areas where there's no obvious intervention of a built environment, you're effectively out in a completely isolated natural corner of the world, in which case ‘quiet’ is not necessarily ‘silence’ . It's the sounds of nature with no man-made interventions.

Ethan Bourdeau

It is, for the most part, we do find ourselves in instances where the term ‘silence’ could perhaps be the only classification in the case of some remote places like Haleakala crater, but you're right for the most part, we are entering places where the soundscape is defined by sources of sound that are not manmade, they are a part of the natural landscape, they could be geographical features, they could be animals, migratory birds, insects, etc.

Well Certified / SOUND CONCEPT

Acoustic comfort in buildings

Matt Morley

So if we then use that as a bridge into the discussion around interiors and buildings, the idea of acoustic comfort or acoustical comfort, do you see that as being a fundamentally objective measure? Or is it all to do with how each individual responds to noise and their personal reactions to whether it's too quiet or to silent or is it and then measures that you can use that would say, Well, this is the optimal acoustic comfort to perform a certain task.

Ethan Bourdeau

When we think about occupants within a space, we can learn a lot about where are those people are coming from if if they're entering a new office environment that's undergoing renovation, to what degree can their past and prior experiences with the acoustical quality or even just the indoor environmental quality of where they're originally used to, how does that inform the way that we as designers can approach facilitating better sounding spaces.

Acoustics is just one element of a holistic platform of comfort metrics that are operating in synchronicity.

Acoustics in the WELL Building Standard

I think one great example is how the WELL rating system has been able to break this down into the various concepts among which includes SOUND is a key feature.

In WELL we look at spatial layout, acoustic thresholds and criteria for optimal performance (pulled from the leading acoustical standards) and in some cases, include novel requirements for acoustical design and acoustical comfort that have yet to really hit the market outside of the WELL rating system.

It’s a huge opportunity, I think, for not just acousticians, but really architects, designers, folks who are consulting in the space of biophilic design to really ask those questions of what is it about the sonic environment that maybe even I don't quite fully understand or can convey to occupants in clients who are coming from those areas where that was a large concern and maybe an obstacle towards a better productive and more fulfilling workplace experience.

Possible sources of noise in a healthy building

Matt Morley

Okay, so what are the typical causes of unwanted noise in buildings be that an office, hotel, learning or residential environment? How does the WELL standard concept of sound mapping mitigate for those sources of noise?

Ethan Bourdeau

There are many different sources, for the purposes of an initial review of a building, we'll look at environmental impacts from exterior noise intrusion that can be sources such as traffic, aviation noise, pedestrian noise depending on where this place is located.

We also look at Interior mechanical systems design and the way that building services can potentially impact not just any one given space, but the building at large which introduces sound in a number of ways.

Sound can travel through air, it can can travel through vents in HVAC systems, even through structures. If you have large, rotating pieces of mechanical equipment that are delivering air throughout a building, or even filtration systems, the vibration of air and movement can enter the structure and then radiate throughout an entire building.

We can also talk about occupant generated noise in the office that can be as one of my friends likes to say, the person next to you with the Frito lays chip bag in the middle of the day making sounds while you're on one of your 100 Zoom calls for the week. Or it could just be any combination of activity that's happening again throughout the building.

So while sound travels through air it can also travel through structures and with the proliferation of fitness areas and CrossFit gyms, things like impact noise from weights can travel through an entire building as well. Those lead to distractions and other obstacles to productivity.

Sound mapping in a healthy building

Matt Morley

So the process of sound mapping then would be an attempt to prevent the construction of the eventual fit-out on a building project being completed before a plan is in place for acoustics.

So you're talking to the HVAC engineers, the architects, quite a few people around that table to try and get a sense of what the acoustic environment will be like in a space especially on a on a new build construction?

Ethan Bourdeau

So when it comes to acoustics, there's something that's generating the sound to the source, which can be controlled or maintained, in some instances, it gets a little difficult when we talk about occupants, for instance, but for mechanical noise or exterior noise intrusion, there's ways to investigate noise control at the source.

There's the path so what is between that source and the receiver with HVAC, we mentioned ductwork there's also structural components - are we reducing vibration caused by circular mechanical equipment.

In the case of occupant noise, what's blocking you from not just the line of sound or the the path of the sound, but also even the line of sight with you and another person that plays a role in what we call psycho acoustics or the role that acoustics plays in our own mental and cognitive, health and wellbeing within the built environment.

Then there's the receiver. And so that's us the listeners, the final crux in the acoustic comfort equation of - who is receiving this sound? How are they responding to it and then how can we qualitatively assess the subjective outcomes of such sound.

Not all sound is noise, sound is just sound until it annoys you, then that becomes noise!

Biophilic design and acoustic comfort

Matt Morley

That brings to mind a project that I was involved in, in Switzerland, it was a round shaped, concrete and glass corporate headquarter building for a natural food business. We were called in to assist both on the biophilic design side, but also trying to fix the incredible noise issues.

They had a lot of hard surfaces, double-height central atriums that were allowing sounds to bounce around from the ground level reception up to almost the second floor of the building. We looked at options for introducing acoustic materials and everything from acoustic paint on the walls to sound absorbing plant walls.

Noise control and sound absorbing solutions

I'd love to hear how you think about what the tools are available to a consultant in that type of environment, as a specialist really, in that type of thing, you're going into a space, they have a problem with noise, and it's already happening. What's in your toolbox?

Ethan Bourdeau

Well, the biggest question that I would ask at the start is the one that I hoped the project team would have asked before creating a space like this, it's what is it the intent of this space? Why are people congregating here? What exactly are the activities and the experiences that have happen happen in this particular environment, then from there we can define criteria.

We’d work with the team to say, unless you do this, you will not be able to achieve XYZ. So you know, in the case of this building that you're describing, it sounds like there could be issues with speech intelligibility, or potentially even issues with too much speech intelligibility, where there are areas where you want to hear someone speak, and you simply can't.

Then when you're working at your desk, you might be hearing more conversations than you would may like to, and so that's where we pull out the really specific solutions based examples for acoustic and interior design and noise control. So in these cases, we would look at how do we reduce the sound in that path equation that we were talking about and source path and receiver?

Speech intelligibility for acoustic comfort

How do we bolster speech reinforcement, if someone is giving a presentation if they're giving a lecture, or even if they're talking on a simple zoom call, we're now starting to add tools to our toolkit that address this.

This in this hybrid workplace lifestyle, where we can communicate with others around the world like you and I are right now and not necessarily need to be in a studio that has acoustic panels like mine, you can be in a place that considers speech intelligibility without really breaking the bank and creating something that's a studio quality space.

There's no one element of acoustic comfort that should be focused for every single project, every single project is different.

WELL Rating Standard on sound in open plan offices

Matt Morley

So the WELL rating standard is especially strong on mixed-use buildings, and particularly commercial office buildings. Imagine then an open plan, office space for a creative team, the intent was originally to foster collaboration but there has been kickback on that over recent years around productivity taking a hit rather than a boost. Do you think there's still space for open plan offices like that with certain acoustical interventions?

Ethan Bourdeau

So a hot topic in the acoustics industry, right now, I'm fortunate to sit on a few Working Group committees for ISO and other standards groups that are specifically looking at Interior acoustics in the open work plan environment. And these conversations get very complicated very quickly, because the culture of Open Office acoustics and open office use in general changes so much as you go into different regions throughout Europe, and especially between North America, Europe and the rest of the world.

Acoustics in a workplace wellness strategy

Where we pull this criteria from to develop, and design, better acoustics and open offices changes quite a bit. So what I like to do, again, is really take it back to some fundamental steps. And on a lot of these working group discussions, I bring up what I feel the WELL rating system has done so well in breaking down into the fundamentals of what types of zones could you potentially think about, and what are the lowest common denominators for acoustical comfort when thinking about spatial layout, from a workplace strategy perspective in an open office.

Acoustic zones in a healthy building plan

So we have a few categories in this WELL feature. So one, we break it down into quiet zones, where focused work is the priority, or that could also include places like bedrooms, for instance, what is an area that you want to protect in terms of acoustic comfort and make entry as a sensitive space, we then have mixed zones, which could be a combination of any of those things and include collaboration, not all collaboration necessarily has to be boisterous and loud and, and people shouting over a desk of a floor plans, or, or whatever, it could also just be, hey, we're going to meet together as a team in this open environment and discuss XYZ amongst ourselves at appropriate levels.

Then we have loud zones. And so these could be any combination of areas where you have noisy mechanical equipment that just needs its own isolated, dedicated space to be moved away from any other sensitive environments, are these gonna be places where you have amplified speech, you have maybe a very active teleconference room that uses amplification. So these are areas that you really need to keep separate from your quiet zones.

In the precondition, this is required for every single project in the sound concept. Now, we have found that when people approach from this lens they have a better idea of WELL, I know now what I should probably be pursuing with our subsequent optimizations in the wall rating system.

Spatial layouts in the WELL SOUND concept

Based on the spatial layout that we were required to do. I know that speech reinforcement is going to be important. I know that speech privacy in my Open Office is going to be important. So what do I need to do to then show up and make sure I'm meeting those needs for my occupants? And those conversations become very fruitful, we learn a lot more about acoustics than we would if we were just meeting criteria. If we were just submitting documentation, saying, from an acoustician, you pass, here's the checkmark. Here's the check in that box of acoustic comfort.

So I would encourage folks who are in that position of rethinking the Open Office, from an acoustic perspective to really focus on the lowest common denominator, how many spaces do you intend to have there where focused quiet work is a key function of the holistic open office design, and start from there, because if collaboration is the leading draw to creating an open collaborative space, the folks who rely on quiet zones to complete their work aren't being there. The folks that are relying on quiet zones to achieve their work, have needs that aren't being met by the design team and the organization who put collaboration first, when in reality, people want a healthy balance of both.

Sound masking systems in a healthy building

Matt Morley

And we also mentioned the idea of sound masking systems - the idea of there being a level of white noise that can be pumped into the background to create a baseline that can help cover some of the mechanical systems. How does that work? Is that about the frequency? Is that about the the intensity of the sound? And would some nature sounds fit into that category?

Ethan Bourdeau

Yes, so sound masking is a very tried and true technology that as a consultant, I've been able to deploy quite a bit in open office settings with great success. And what it really focuses on is delivering a Pink Noise signal, which is somewhat calmer than white noise, which, if you were able to compare the two on YouTube I guarantee you will have a preference over over pink noise to over white.

Why we choose pink noise is because you can you can also go into the sound source itself and adjust the contour of the equalization curve, so that it can really match and really perform in accordance with preferred occupant acoustic comfort parameters. Now that's that's more of the technical side of how you would deploy a system like this.

A sound masking system is a network of loudspeakers that are directly mounted hung from or otherwise located throughout a ceiling, plane or even plenum, they can be directly exposed or be behind an acoustic ceiling tile. So it's a very useful tool when we try to address speech privacy from a signal to noise perspective.

Sound masking for productivity in an office

Signal to Noise - meaning you have a ‘signal’, which could be another person talking, their voice carries throughout an office that you don't necessarily need to hear. And then ‘noise’ being what is the background sound level that allows you to discern that signal or the sound of another person's voice.

So as we raise that background sound, the difference between the ambient level and the signal is then reduced. And so that helps with reducing the total impact of hearing another person's voice encroaching on your ability to focus and be better productive in a in a workplace.

Natural soundscapes in the built environment

Now to your other question about natural sounds as a sound source, I'm, as a designer and in working with folks who are field recordists and who are architectural designers. I'm actively trying to indicate that introducing natural soundscapes into the built environment is a new format of introduced sound. Sound masking is a form of introducing sound that focuses specifically on speech privacy.

Natural soundscapes have a number of potential benefits to them as well being immersed in and hearing soundscapes of birds, wind, waves, etc. In a spatially uniform environment that can elicit emotional response in ways that addressing speech privacy, for instance, isn't necessarily going to do.

There's some really tremendous examples of new technology that's emerging that focuses on this. There's actually a company there's a couple companies one is MoodSonic, who actually sits on our advisory board for the sound concept that focuses on delivering soundscapes from a natural sound source perspective.

There's a new company that I've heard about called spatial, who I'm trying to learn more about in the coming weeks that is providing a similar solution and has worked with some hospitals and then North America to create spaces for respite for nurses and people who need a moment of Zen or peace or tranquility to to continue their daily work.

Biophilic sounds for wellbeing

Matt Morley

Yeah, I've certainly used it in an intimate nature space in the central business district of London called Canary Wharf. We did a month-long biophilic design research study.

Sound was definitely part of what he called a multi-sensory wellbeing design strategy along with aromatherapy, and smart lights and various other things. But I found it was all too easy to just accept that, you know, a Spotify playlist of English bird songs, as we were in England, would be sufficient, I felt that there was more to be done in terms of perhaps matching place, season and the situation or the desired emotional response. And so I could see how those type of services could perhaps add that extra layer of detail, right?

Ethan Bourdeau

In reality, the ear is not dumb. The ear knows when it's in an office and crickets are playing from a Sonos speaker in the corner. The brain understands that when it is truly immersed in an environment, only then can it naturally respond and react to it the way that we would if we were there in reality.

I am an aspiring audio engineer and more of an architectural acoustician. But audio engineers are really looking at this from the perspective of, of how do sounds really travel in the sound field? And how can multiple loudspeakers and an array of loudspeakers help to create and elicit those environments.

I've seen examples where in software, they can create sound sources and an XYZ grid and just have them move around. And you know, not too dissimilar to going to the theater and listening to a Dolby system where you can pinpoint exactly where the sound is in the given cinema. So we're seeing that enter places like workplaces, hospitals and public public areas where sound installations can better interact with humans and vice versa.

WELL Rating System on SOUND

Matt Morley

In terms of how the WELL rating system positions the sound concept, the ultimate aim here, when you get all of this right, is primarily a boost in comfort and productivity, worker happiness? What are your desired outcomes in terms of a healthy building strategy and the acoustic component in particular?

Ethan Bourdeau

It changes per project type. So in a typical workplace, yes, we would talk about workplace satisfaction, we've talked about productivity, we would talk about ability to collaborate, if if there are more spaces, if there are more areas throughout a given office floor plate, where a person can interact with different types of acoustic environments to better support their work, there is a sense of fulfillment that we can we can draw from that and indices indicating surveys that are indicating that noise is a top concern.

Or pointing to that the lack of choice and the inability to be in a place where you can speak when you need to without worrying about other people hearing you or vice versa.

That is the primary focus that is that is something in the workplace environment that that is a key outcome. Absolutely. And especially now when we think about how do we return to that type of environment where you you are looking someone directly in the eye from across a table and your voice doesn't have to go through a series of digital signal processing through Whatever you can describe the software for this hybrid environment, I think there is a real learning that we will have to undertake when it comes to thinking about how we communicate in the workplace, for instance, and then that will ultimately describe the way that we address acoustics from the onset and design.

Acoustics for improved sleep in residential and healthcare

Now, with places like healthcare and residential, we see noise as a concern as it relates to sleep. And with acoustics being a top contributor to sleep disturbance, it's important that we can see the key outcomes in things like fitness trackers, and other types of technology that can measure and better assess our quality of sleep.

This is very important with healthcare where patient surveys that are administered, especially here in North America, indicate the performance of a hospital based on a patient's ability to sleep and spend their time recovering in some instances.

The links between acoustic comfort and patient recovery are many, it's actually where a lot of the research in acoustics and health and wellbeing derives from.

So over time, as we see places like hospitals, Senior Living outpatient facilities, adopting more of these health and wellbeing metrics into their design, the more we're going to see these uptakes in patient satisfaction surveys.

Matt Morley

In summary then, the WELL rating standard for me is a such a helpful marker it has given me at least a minimal level of understanding in sound and acoustics planning. So congratulations on everything you've done so far. How can people reach out to connect with you?

Ethan Bourdeau

You can find me on LinkedIn of all places. I'm usually posting the latest updates with all of the outfits that I'm involved with there.

mental health & wellbeing in healthy buildings

The WELL Standard MIND concept

Urbanization and the shift away from nature towards a lifestyle dominated by the built environment has led to a plethora of human health issues, some obvious, others less so. Many of us now spend 90% of our time indoors, making the spaces around us of surprising relevance for mental wellness.

mental wellbeing in a healthy building

Strategies such as biophilic design, mental health programs, the encouragement of an active lifestyle and the provision of restorative spaces can all be used to increase mental wellbeing for building occupants.

In addition, it is helpful to have a designated mental health champion within a workspace, school, or other community to encourage building occupants to engage with mental health issues openly.

For our take on the specific components that make up a healthy building see our dedicated article here.

Biophilic Design for mental wellbeing in a healthy building

Biophilic design aims to connect people to nature through interior design, reinstating the increasingly distant relationship between us as human beings and the natural environment. Our ancestral affinity with nature ensures exposure to nature, even in indoor environments, provides a range of restorative mental health benefits.

The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) states that spending time in nature helps to reduce mental fatigue, increasing focus and restoring optimal cognitive function (Kaplan/Jimenez).

The Stress Reduction Theory (SRT), on the other hand, focuses on how our stress or anxiety levels can be lowered via immersion in a natural environment, whether ‘living’ or, implicitly, indoors thanks to biophilic design interiors that bring the outside world in (Ulrich/Jimenez).

Strategies such as introducing botanical motifs, organic materials, air-purifying plants, wabi-sabi finishes, living walls, Circadian lighting systems, biophilic sounds and forest aromatherapy are all possible examples of biophilic design for improved building occupant mental health. 

nature, Greenery & green spaces for mental wellbeing

Plants are one of the most important biophilic design elements as they provide a plethora of health benefits. Air-purifying plants are especially relevant in this sense, as are rooftop gardens, moss art on walls, hanging Japanese kokedamas and so on.

Besides the obvious characteristic of natural beauty, such botanical greenery in interior spaces increases the human connection to nature as part of a healthy building experience, and also improves indoor air quality.

In addition, a visual connection to such indoor vegetation has been found to reduce stress and anxiety, and even increase healing rates for hospital patients in one often cited study (Bratman).

Also, memory and creativity are augmented with the implementation of green space, especially notable in children as these factors are important for brain development. 

Overall, greenery increases our ability to concentrate and facilitates workers being able to find a quiet space for recharging during the work day.

Daylight for mental wellbeing in a healthy building

Daylight is an essential building block of health buildings and wellbeing interior design.  In addition to reducing a building’s energy consumption, natural light has been found to improve mood, synchronize us with our circadian rhythms, and increase alertness and concentration (Determan). 

Natural light can be used to align us with our circadian rhythms, also known as our natural 24-hour internal clock. When our bodies follow the natural daylight cycles of the day, our health is positively affected through improved sleep by night and cognitive function by day.  

In addition, natural light increases the prevalence of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which improves mood (Kaltenegger ch 13). Due to these positive influences of daylight on our health, daylight has led to lower levels of absenteeism and lower dropout rates in schools, according to one study (Kellert). 

Additional healthy building considerations such as the quality of any external views via external windows (out onto blue or green nature?) and whether the building’s windows are operable are important to factor in. Operable windows can provide the co-benefits of natural ventilation and the potential to increase thermal comfort, while nature views provide additional biophilic benefits, all proven to improve human wellness. 

Mental Health Programs in workplace wellness

Mental health programming is an increasingly relevant workplace provision. To name a few, offerings such as mental health educational programs, stress management and support group programs, encouragement of healthy nutrition and fitness, and childcare support are all viable solutions.

Workplace wellness programs are good for employee health and for the business’s bottom line too - studies have shown that employees perform better when they are less stressed. 

Mindfulness and stress management

Strategies such as mindfulness programs and stress management courses can reduce employee anxiety levels. Mindfulness workshops can be achieved through digital or in person means, for example using employer-designated digital applications, or through in person meetings and exercises.

Educational courses focused on stress management can support employees and encourage them to take breaks and reset as needed throughout the workday. 

As with any benefits program, it is important that the resources are not only available but are being used by building occupants so the benefits can be reaped. Learning materials should be accessible 24/7 to help avoid any lingering stigmas around engaging in mental health issues.

a mental health champion in a healthy building plan

In addition, the designation of a mental health champion within the company can increase awareness and ultimately engagement. These mental wellness advocates can lead informal meetings, facilitate outside speakers and ensure that any mental health issues that emerge are directed to an appropriate expert - a mental wellbeing champion is not expected to be a psychologist, far from it, they just need to know the right person to call, discretely, when needed.

a Biofilico concept design for a nature inspired office recharge room for peace and quiet

recharge rooms in healthy buildings

The provision of restorative spaces in the built environment is extremely important to maintain appropriate mental health levels for building occupants. Especially in work and school environments when long hours of concentration are required, places of refuge are essential to allow students to recharge and reset throughout the day. These rooms can include spaces such as a nap pod, meditation room, or a restorative space for quiet time.  

Many restorative spaces utilize biophilia in their design, due to the proven mental health benefits that come with nature connection. Recharge rooms have been proven to promote feelings of vitality and reduce stress and anxiety, promoting rejuvenation through respite. 

WELL building standard on restorative spaces

According to the WELL Building Standard’s Mind concept, “restorative spaces should include natural elements and have thoughtful lighting, sound, thermal and material choices. In addition, an element of privacy and the inclusion of calming colors, textures and forms is beneficial for recharging and refocusing.” See our own example of this above.

In addition to designing these spaces in buildings, concern must be taken to facilitate their use, creating a company culture that is accepting of their benefits and therefore time spent in a recharge room by staff members - rather than it being stigmatized.

active design and fitness spaces in healthy buildings

Boosting healthy habits such as physical activity and nutrition can be encouraged through building design and have the potential to improve mental health and wellness. Workplaces and schools in particular can benefit from finding ways to promote healthy habits through interior design, active furniture choices more tactical, promotional strategies such as signage prompts. 

physical activity for mental wellbeing in a healthy building plan

Physical activity provides not just physical health benefits but a mental boost of positive mood, enhanced energy and self-esteem, as well as camaraderie if performed in a group setting. Studies show that exercise helps maintain a healthy sleep cycle at night, ensuring deep rest and recovery. 

Strategies such as incorporating fitness facilities or gym rooms in buildings, as well as places to change and shower on site (as part of an active design plan) can all encourage physical activity.

In addition, offering fitness classes, encouraging the formation of community running or biking groups, or employee fitness related challenges can boost activity levels of building occupants.

Finally, more indirect strategies such as promoting stair use through thoughtful design or smart signage can increase activity and physical and mental health. 

nutrition for mental wellbeing in a healthy building plan

Nutrition is also a very important aspect of physical health that has been shown to be linked to mental health. Studies show that mindful eating is correlated to better wellbeing, which can be encouraged through designated eating areas.

Other strategies such as providing access to healthy snacks, providing cooking or nutrition classes, and encouraging communal eating through designated lunch times have all been shown to increase nutritional health (WELL), this in turn helps foster happy, healthy students or staff. 

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Sources

Bratman, Gregory, and Gretchen Daily. The Benefits of Nature Experience: Improved Affect and Cognition. Tech. Vol. 138. Stanford: n.p., 2015. Landscape and Urban Planning. Stanford University Libraries. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.

Determan, Jim, et al. “THE IMPACT OF BIOPHILIC LEARNING SPACES ON STUDENT SUCCESS.” Oct. 2019. 

Jimenez, Marcia P. et al. “Associations Between Nature Exposure and Health: A Review of the Evidence.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18.9 (2021): 4790. Crossref. Web.

• **Note**: this source was used for ART/SRT info (although original theory names given credit above)

Kaltenegger, Ingrid. "Integration of Mother Nature into Smart Buildings." Integration of Nature and Technology for Smart Cities. By Helen Santiago Fink. Switzerland: Springer International, 2016. ch. 13,18. Print. 

Kellert, Stephen R., and Bill Finnegan. "Biophilic Design-The Architecture of Life Viewing Guide." (n.d.): n. pag. Biophilic Design. Tamarack Media and Stephen Kellert. Web. 7 Dec. 2016.

https://v2.wellcertified.com/en/v/mind

The role of sleep in healthy buildings & workplaces

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charlie morley / sleep / healthy sleep / healthy buildings / workplace wellness / cognitive performance

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Welcome to episode 46 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate. 

I’m your host, Matt Morley of Biofilico Healthy Buildings and in this episode I’m talking to none other than Charlie Morley, a bestselling author and teacher of mindfulness, lucid dreaming and all round sleep expert whose latest book deals with resolving trauma affected sleep through a set of practices called ‘Mindfulness of Dream & Sleep’.

Charlie, who is as you may have guessed my brother, was “authorised to teach” within the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism by Lama Yeshe Rinpoche in 2008. Since then he has written four books, delivered retreats in more than 20 countries, spoken at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, as well as the Ministry of Defence Mindfulness Symposium and The Houses of Parliament. 

Our conversation explores the connections between my world of healthy buildings and interiors, and Charlie’s world of healthy sleep. We discuss sleep hygiene, the physiological impact of sleep on our bodies not to mention our brains, pre-industrial age sleeping habits vs todays, the power nap as a productivity tool, how to create restorative spaces or sleep pods in an office or educational environment that people will actually use, and the role of meditation and restorative deep relaxation practices in improving rest.  

https://www.charliemorley.com/ 

Charlie Morley instagram

Full transcript courtesy of Otter.ai

“Unless you are part of the ‘sleepless elite’, which is less than one percentile of the world’s population, who can do very well on five hours or less sleep, almost everybody in the world, needs seven to nine hours per 24 hour period - this is still the golden standard of sleep. ”

— charlie morley

Matt Morley

When thinking about sleep the building blocks of creating a healthy night's sleep in terms of how much we need, the risks of poor sleep hygiene and what you've described as the ‘sleep delusion’, how does one evaluate and measure a good night's sleep?

Charlie Morley

So the measure of sleep is inherently subjective. How do I feel upon awakening? What are my energy levels the next day? What is my cognitive ability the next day, so we can look at it like that.

They've done some interesting tests where people who are very high achievers are only getting kind of six, or five or six hours sleep, great social lives etc who say, this is all I need, I work perfectly well on six hours sleep, but then you put them into a brain scanner, or you give them cognitive ability tests. And although they say they feel optimal performance, their brain shows significant sub optimal neurological performance.

Now, that's one of the scariest pieces of research I came across, because it shows that even if you think you feel fine, in fact, a state of sleep deprivation has been so normalized by ourselves and by society that are natural, I feel fine state is actually one of suboptimal neurological functioning.

Sleep and cognitive performance in the workplace

So what's the next step, you force these people into position where they have to have one extra hour of sleep per day, it can be a nap during the day or an extra half an hour at night, but you get one extra hour per 24 hour period. Their cognitive performance went through the roof, the descriptions they have is like it feels like have access to a superpower. They're social lives, become more vibrant, their interpersonal relationships get better, or their performance at work gets better, just through one extra hour. So yes, it is subjective. But also there are very objective measures that show seven to nine hours for most people is 17 hours will allow us to function optimally. And crucially, just one extra hour per night can do massive, massive benefit to everyone.

Matt Morley

And how do you see then in terms of integrating an element of tech so that you're able to literally see the sleep quality over the course of the evening that otherwise we're over the course of the night that otherwise you might not? You might have a sense of how you slept, but you don't really no? Are you buying into this? Do you think there's there's real value in it, or were we being sold product and service that frankly, we've managed pretty well without all these years. And we're, in a sense trying to create a desire that, that we don't necessarily need to own these things.

Sleep trackers for health metrics

Charlie Morley

So at the moment, one of the higher end sleep trackers called the AURA ring, who sponsored a sleep science study that was part of even the aura ring, which is really the top end of the market is still only 60 to 70% accurate, which means is a crucial 30 to 40% of the time where it's just getting it wrong. And that's that worrying, let alone most people have a much cheaper version, the kind of, you know, the wrist based ones that hook up to your iPhone and stuff like that.

So if sleep trackers are benefiting your sleep, if they are making you feel more refreshed, if they are leading to more healthy relationships with sleep, then continue to use them. For a lot of people, they lead to a real neurosis around sleep. So take them with a big pinch of salt. I mean, in my new book, The first chapter is about becoming your own sleep tracker. So in the morning, taking most of how do I feel upon awakening? What are my energy levels throughout the day? Yes, what time do I go to bed?

What time do I wake up any dreams, I can remember, becoming your own sleep tracker to create a baseline is far better than that than the level of tech we've got at the moment. However, there is something on the market that we use when we do this sleep science studies called the Zed max or the Z max. Now that's about $600. And that's like a mini EEG machine. That's very, very accurate. So give the technology five years when we can get the technology of the XEmacs into an aura ring or into the to the app on your phone. And then sleep tracker data will be very, very accurate. But at the moment, we're just a little bit behind. So yeah, I wouldn't take don't take it too seriously.

Matt Morley

So if we then jump into establishing exactly what's going on during a night's sleep, you have what you've described as light, light sleep, the dream phase, and then deep sleep. So sort of the top line concepts for each of those three, and how is the sleep connecting with our health during the rest of the day? Like what are the processes going on? Sure. So there's

Charlie Morley

Actually two there's the gateway in and out either side to the hypnopompic and hit sorry hypnogogic hypnopompic. So stage one of sleep is called the hypnagogic state and is experienced by most people. Less is asleep stage proper, more a state of drowsiness. So you can still hear the sounds of the room, you can still feel your body in the bed. brain goes into deep alpha and theater, the brain looks almost indistinguishable to a brain that is in hypnosis.

So every time you fall asleep, the gateway into sleep, whether in a nap in the middle of the day or at night, you go through this natural state of hypnosis. And it's actually in that state that we can do a lot of really beneficial stuff for asleep because it's in the hypnagogic state that we can practice ns a nonslip, deep rest to us, humans term, or yoga nidra practices or my term hypnogogic mindfulness, which are the states of deep relaxation that happened just before we enter asleep.

So we have the hypnagogic state, really good for you, deeply relaxing, but a state in which people who have stressed out sleep will spend a lot of the night you know, you're kind of tired enough to be in that drowsy state, you can't quite pass the threshold. Eventually, though, with normalized sleep patterns, you'll move from hypnogogic into light sleep, light sleep is named for the quite untechnical reason that it's just quite easy to wake people from, you know, back in the early days asleep science, they would register the depth of sleep just by poking someone and saying their name.

So light sleep as it sounds, you're easy to be woken from it, you are now blacked out, you can't hear the sounds in the room. Unless they're loud enough, you can't feel your body in the bed. But you're yet to be dreaming. Light sleep is really good for procedural memory integration. So sleep is all about memory. That's why there's a direct link, as we know, with our with our mum, between sleep and Alzheimer's, and sleep and memory. So let's say you're learning to drive a car, it's light sleep, that you'll be processing the memory of how to do this, the stick in this and the the gears and all of that, and the pedal in the gas and everything that will be happening in light sleep procedural memory, whereas if you were in a car crash, that would be processing dreaming sleep.

So dreaming sleep is about processing emotional memory, memory reconsolidation, especially traumatic or stressful memories too. So we have the hypnagogic state stage one, then light sleep for procedural memory and learning, then we move into deep sleep. Deep Sleep is very, very interesting. This is where the brain is almost entirely switched off. So your brains never fully switched off. But if you look at the brainwaves of the waking state, they're very close together ticket ticket ticket ticket, if you look at the brain wave of someone in deep sleep, this will delta wave is dominant brainwave, and are very far apart.

I know people can't see me, but I'm making slow deep waves, signals with my hand. So in deep sleep, the brains almost entirely switched off, very unlikely to be dreaming very little happening in the brain. Apparently, but actually, if you look at the neuroscience of what's happening, loads is happening. Deep Sleep is when cerebral spinal fluid is flushed up into the brain. And it actually removes toxins from the brain a bit like imagine he had a fruit smoothie, and he drank all the fruit smoothie, but there's still kind of the remnants of the fruit smoothie in the bottle. And then if you put a bit of water in that bottle and shook it up, you could get all the remnants of the fruit smoothie out, right.

That's what's happening in deep sleep, the cerebral spinal fluid is flushing through the brain. And the blood capillaries go big, small, big, small, big small, which creates this kind of flushing motion. And that directly flushes out amyloid plaques, which are what cause Alzheimer's and many other forms of dementia.

So also a human growth hormone is released. So I know you're really into your fitness. If you have like a big workout during the day, like you're you're kind of working out you're lifting weights in the gym. Unless that night you get enough deep sleep, your muscles will not grow, there'll be massive reduction in muscle gains. And the same goes for losing weight.

So if you spent your whole day dieting, but then at night, you don't get enough deep sleep, you will lose weight based on the calorific deficit of not eating that much. But you won't actually make changes to your metabolism that leads to long term weight loss. So deep sleep so so important for memory for toxins flushed out for changing the body in any way we want.

We have that period of deep sleep, and then we'll move into dream. So dream actually comes at the end of the cycle, we think of dream as being a very active sleep state. And it is but by the time you get the dream, you've been knocked out for at least 6070 minutes. And if you put those together that makes up the 90 Minute sleep cycle, the cycle continues throughout the night. What changes is the amount of time you spend in each one until you get to the last two hours or you're almost in full dream for like two hours.

sleep for human performance

Matt Morley

Okay, so I think that's really given us the kind of foundations between these connections between sleep like what's happening at night and how are we performing? How are we feeling, how we cognitively how we functioning during the day so effectively that is the basis of sleep as a form of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Charlie Morley

“Yeah, there is no biological process that is not adversely affected by insufficient sleep - anything less than seven hours per 24 hour period, yet we don’t teach kids about this in school, we have a sense of almost pride that we can get by off of a lack of sleep. It’s crazy. ”

— charlie morley

Certain parts of America lost an hour because the daylight saving. So like 1.6 billion people do this every year different times, but based on your countries, but on that day where people lose one hour of sleep, the next day, American Studies have shown as a 22% increase in cardiac arrest the next day, just by robbing people of one hour asleep. That's 10s of 1000s more death, because of one hour lost sleep. There's also a massive increase in traffic accidents the next day, when you take one hour of sleep.

Conversely, when the clocks change, and you gain an extra hour of sleep, there's a 22% decrease in heart attacks the next day, and a 15% drop in traffic accidents. Now, when you roll that out in 26 countries around the world that have these daylight savings, that is millions of people live longer, or live shorter lives based on robbing or giving them one extra hour of sleep.

Sleep health in a historical perspective

Matt Morley

Yeah, that's powerful stuff. If if we can take a step back to a slightly sort of, let's say, a historical perspective, just to understand the connection between pre Industrial Age sleep cycles, modern sleep cycles, and the potential benefits in accepting and embracing the idea of a nap, a siesta, or sleeping again, after the amount, number of hours you managed to get during the night. So when do you draw the line between how things were before the Industrial Age? And how things are now? And is that necessarily have the optimal version of our sleep pattern?

Charlie Morley

Sure. So I'm sure many of your listeners have heard about this. heard this before. That before the Industrial Revolution, so about 200 250 years ago, most people in Western Europe slept very differently. They didn't sleep all in one, they would obviously this depends on seasonal fluctuations. And a lot of research was done in England, actually, especially the British Isles, where it can get dark as early as 4pm in the nighttime, in the wintertime, so people get asleep within about two hours of sundown.

So because candles are really expensive. They're made of whale oil, only the wealthiest people could have these candles and kerosene was difficult to come across, or whatever they use back then. So people get asleep within about two hours of sundown. So it could be 6pm 8pm. But like early, right asleep for about two, three hours. And then they would wake up again, like fully awake, pubs would reopen.

People would have these like tobacco circles, you kind of sit around and smoke, people would go into the field and milk their cows, they believe the quality of the milk. If you milk them at this time was better people would have sex they felt you're more fertile. That actually true. There is a fertility booster at that time. There are hundreds of these records is oh, there's even a 15th century prayer manual from Portugal, full of prayers especially to do in the second sleep. Sorry, between the first and the second sleep.

So you get this reference the first and second sleep. The way it actually came about was a crime researcher was looking at records in courts and other crimes were committed after the first sleep basically the middle of the night, you'd get your three hours sleep you got Rob someone's house and then go back to bed again. It was like perfect crime. Right. S

o this is how it first came into, into public awareness. Now is that the best way Oh, sorry. And then you would go back to sleep after two hours until sunrise. seasonal fluctuations. So you'll still be averaging about like 678 hours sleep but Krushi with a two hour gap in the middle. Fast forward to the modern day, the most common form of insomnia. In western societies, the most prevalent form is not sleep onset insomnia, which is where you just can't get to sleep. It's actually sleep maintenance insomnia.

Now, here's a description of sleep maintenance, insomnia, the ability of the subject to fall asleep upon first awakening. Within two to three hours, the subject awakens again, feeling fully awake and conscious for up to two hours. The subject is then able to fall asleep again till morning. That is flippin exactly the same description as the pre industrial sleep cycle.

So could it be that there are millions of misdiagnosed insomniacs, who aren't actually insomniacs, they are showing from an anthropological point of view a much more natural sleep cycle than the rest of us who are trying to blackout for eight hours. Does it mean that blackout of eight hours is not the way to do it and we should all be having that nighttime waking No, not at all, perhaps is a chronotype thing perhaps type thing. But it is important for people to know, if they do have that sleep pattern, you're probably not insomniac.

And actually just knowing that it's okay to be awake in the middle of the night moves us out of the fight or flight sympathetic response that keeps us awake and allows us to fall asleep. And secondly, there are a lot of people who have that sleep pattern, but they don't know that there's a second period of sleep waiting for them in the wings. So they don't stay awake for two hours, they just get up and Assad do there is another four hour sleep waiting for you.

But you have to allow yourself to slip back into it. Interestingly, the term insomnia was first produced in print as a, as a kind of a coined term in the New York Times in 1901. It was called the new fangled malaise of insomnia, within 30 to 40 years of us changing the way we sleep, we suddenly have this term insomnia cropping up. So very, very interesting. So no, I wouldn't say we should be sleeping like that. But if you are sleeping like that, it may not be such a bad idea. It may be just the way your body is, is working. And the main thing to know is there's nothing wrong with it. You know, nighttime wakefulness is not a pathology. For some people. It's just the way they're built.

Matt Morley

We introduced the idea of bi-phasal sleeping or perhaps sleeping for X number of hours during the night, and then catching up at another stage during the day. And interestingly, that's one of the connections between your work in healthy buildings / workplace wellness and you work, right. So when I'm looking at, say, healthy building concept of trying to create spaces within a building that are designed to foster wellness, and wellbeing for people spending eight to 12 hours of their days or nights, if it's a residential context, or if it's an office environment, then it's a place where they go to work and to be productive.

With the leading healthy building standard, that's called the WELL Standard, they have an entire concept around MIND. And one of the features there is the idea of restorative opportunities and, and nap policy.

So we're starting to see the way sort of trickle down effect from the top whereby the certification systems that are becoming increasingly common now in the world of real estate are encouraging and completely accepting the concept of a nap being a healthy part of a workday, it might sound confusing for some people, but it's out there.

But for sure, it's already happening. It's already coming. Now, once you have that policy as a as an employer, you then need to offer some kind of a space where that happens. So yeah, that might be an area where I'd say okay, well, I'm going to try and introduce some, some natural elements, biophilic design, I'm going to think about light, I'm going to think about the thermal qualities of the temperature in there and think about the acoustic isolation.

When you think about what I know you've turned sleep hygiene. And so the restorative environment in which one goes to sleep like what are your your key touch points there? Like what are the essential elements that we need to think about when we're creating an environment, whether it's at home, or in a potentially office space, where it's congenial to having a 20 or 30 minute nap during the day?

Restorative spaces in the WELL standard

Charlie Morley

First of all, before I answer that, I just like to say, that's so good to hear that that's part of, you know, you building regulation and part of what businesses are thinking about.

“Apart from any kind of philanthropic aim that the business might have, your employees will be 30% better at anything they do after 60 to 90 minute nap. That’s the science. That’s a fact. ”

— charlie morley

It's like if you want to make more money, give your employees a nap because they will make better deasl. They make better trades, they'll have better interpersonal relationships. It is very good for your employees. Yes. And also you will make more money. It seems crazy. They aren't implementing this. I did a thing at Deutsche Bank at Deloitte. I was telling them you will make more money if you do this, and hasn't been implemented. Not that I know. But really anyone listening?

The science is there. This isn't hippie dippie stuff, your employees will be better at whatever they do after a 60 to 90 minute nap. So rant over next bit. I would say when you people sleeping in public is a really vulnerable thing to do. So actually, your question is not so much about the bedroom at home, but actually sleeping in public, which is very different sleeping and public. I would save for Start, you need something that's lockable, if possible, something that's lockable.

So I know the are these great sleep pods in I believe it's Munich Airport, you can rent them for like an hour, a pop, and these little kind of micro pod beds, but they're lockable. And it's really important that that it's not just quiet and dark and all the sleep hygiene II stuff. But they're lockable. And a lot of the traumatized populations I work with, like veterans and people with C PTSD. simply placing a lock on your bedroom door can increase sleep quality by up to half an hour, an hour a night. Because there's something about humans, we need to no one's going to come in, we're in this deeply vulnerable state of rest.

So I would say they need to be not only private and a correct temperature for sleep, and yes, dark and quiet if you can, but also lockable. There was one rest port I went in, and there is a difference in arrest port and asleep port, where my legs were exposed, there was kind of a big bubble thing over most of my body in my head, but my legs were exposed, very difficult to fall asleep. And one of those, you know, my feet, people could brush by they could do something to them, I wasn't able to fully sleep.

So yes, it would be enclosed, it would be lockable, it would be private. Just to say that those rest pods, you know, there is a difference between NSDI non sleep deep rest and napping. Non sleep deep breath has loads of benefits, too. So even if you can't provide a full private, lockable, even just a space for rest and mindfulness like they have in the Google offices in London are really, really good.

Recharge rooms in tech offices

Matt Morley

Yeah, it is often the tech companies that are approaching the and saying, Well look, we want to create a space in a sense, in your terms, clearly that they will then actually be breathing a multifunctional space where there can be some of that depressed slash napping going on. It can also be a space where it's congenial to restorative practices, whatever that might be taking some time out of your day, perhaps to meditate perhaps to do your prayers, or just simply take some time by yourself.

And in fact, there's often the term the quiet room, or a restorative space where the idea is really just to take some time away from your key tasks to recharge, to go back. And then I think within that there's perhaps a subgroup too, which is the the nap pods or sleeping pod? The issue there with my sort of design head on is okay, you got to think about hygiene.

Now, post COVID, you got to think about ventilation. If it's lockable, and it's an enclosed space, then the best thing to have their own fans and and suddenly, you know, the prices do go up. But I think there's there's real value in that. So we've established you mentioned temperature just to dig into it. So thermal comfort typically is actually cooler than we think, isn't it in terms of the ideal sleeping temperature.

Thermal comfort during sleep

Charlie Morley

I can't remember the exact temperature ideal to seven temperature. First of all, they differ from men and women. I remember a brilliant chapter in a book called The The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry. And the title chapter was air conditioning is sexist. Now you see that the title chapter anyway, I'll come on straight to that chapter. He's absolutely right, the average the default setting of air conditioners across the world are set to the male preferred temperature at room temperature. And women need it about up to one to two degrees warmer. So actually, air conditioning is sexist.

So the first thing your points would need to be would you need to adjust it because women would want a slightly different to men. Basically, if you're in bed, and you can stick your foot out from the blankets or out of the duvet, and it's warm enough to keep it outside your rooms too hot. Your bedroom should be pretty cool, but not cold. But if you stick your foot out, it should feel cool. And your nose should be cool. You know this is cooler, the better many people with sleep problems, they just have the room too hot, it becomes the Princess and the Pea.

You know they pile up loads of blankets and and they get really really hot and you can't you know sleeps about thermo regulation. Remember the we used to we now know actually that human beings used to even hibernate for long periods of time where the deep sleep state would go for a massive percentage. And you could actually move into these almost hibernation states for days or weeks. And of course, what's hibernation about thermo regulation? So yeah, temperatures, pretty important.

Matt Morley

There is a there's a really interesting book was published recently by the Harvard Chan School for public health by Dr. Joseph Allen, in which he discusses exactly that point around the sexual or sort of the differences between the two sexes in terms of body temperature and therefore thermal comfort within a space and it seems that a lot of the regulations that were still in place or to have guidelines in the US and in fact, even in older buildings how the HVAC aircon systems have been programmed, referring to some data that was plucked from sort of 1980s office buildings were so slick as well. What was happening in 1980s, it was male dominated, they were probably wearing a suit.

And there's now just much more sexual, let's say equality. And therefore, as the man in the three piece suit or in a shirt, a tie, and a jacket is completely different to me sending in a normal summer dress. So some of the solutions around that seem to be around, ultimately creating almost sort of microclimates within or having clusters or microclimates where it's adjustable, if they're getting there with the HVAC and aircon systems, it's sort of within the next five to 10 years, it seems like that would be in a really smart building. So like sort of high performing building where they're able to adjust and allow each individual occupant to have some say over the temperature in their space, just by you know, the kind of airflow that's going on within that.

So yeah, another crossover between Your world and mine. Let's talk about mindfulness. Again, it is something that's part of the healthy building concept, the idea that a allowing time within the day and allowing a space within an office environment, for example, where meditation or mindfulness practice and perhaps breathwork, and can take place is positive, again for productivity, but also for worker well being. So how do you integrate mindfulness and meditation with sleep?

Because obviously, once once we're asleep? There's, in theory, for most of us, at least, there's no active meditation or mindfulness going on, right until you get to like next level, Tibetan Buddhist practice of dreaming. Yeah. But before that, yeah, how what's the connection between mindfulness and improve sleep quality, so that if someone's perhaps practicing or finding time during the day, they're also able to have a positive impact on the sleep at night, which is, I think your another gain, isn't it?

breath work and deep relaxation for rest and sleep

Charlie Morley

Yeah. So mindfulness has a whole wealth of benefits. As far as sleep goes, actually more than mindfulness, it's about regulation of the autonomic nervous system through the breath, and through deep relaxation. Those are the two things that you really find affecting sleep. And it's all based on this thing called parasympathetic drive.

So there's a system within the autonomic nervous system called parasympathetic drive, which is, think of it like a battery, which is charged up every time you do anything relaxing during the day, you charge up this parasympathetic drive battery. Now the reason most people tend to sleep slightly better on holiday than in their working day is unless you're screaming kids and stuff, on holidays, you're probably doing more relaxing things. So every time you do anything relaxing the day zap, you get a little charge to the parasympathetic drive. If you spend at least half an hour a day doing something really, really relaxing, that moves you into a deep parasympathetic emphasis, such as yoga nidra, slow, deep breathing, coherent breathing, other forms of non sleep deep breaths, you're spending 30 minutes charging up that parasympathetic drive.

Now what happens is then when you go to sleep at night, even if you charge it at 11 o'clock in the morning, or 10 o'clock in the morning, that battery will store the drive until you choose to go to sleep at night. So when you fall asleep at night, the brain kind of downloads that battery power from parasympathetic drive, allowing you to fall asleep quicker and stay asleep longer.

This means we need to completely reconfigure the way we view sleep. Sleep is not about oh, it's half an hour before bedtime quick put on some sleep hygiene tips like not looking at my phone, going wearing my fancy red sunglasses, all this kind of stuff. It's like That's too late dude. Like if you if you've got high levels of stress or trauma, but again, who hasn't got high levels of stress off last two and a half years we've been through as a global society. Sleep good sleep begins during the day.

How much time can you spend charging up that parasympathetic drive battery, and that's where periods of mindfulness but especially slow deep breathing, and NSDI, non sleep, deep breaths, kind of the hypnogogic, mindfulness practice, those really, really work to regulate the nervous system and help you sleep well at night. So that's the link mindfulness is good, because it can help create a habit of mind that sees not getting perfect sleep as more okay, but as mindfulness creates, fosters an attitude of okayness with myself and compassionate acceptance if it's taught in the right way. But the link between just standard mindfulness and sleep is quite tenuous. The link between non sleep deep rest and slow deep breathing and sleep is very, very direct, because it's based on this parasympathetic drive.

Sleep quality for productivity in the workplace

Matt Morley

So then you you see that there is effectively a short term benefit. That is, if you like he's reaping those benefits. Well, first of all, the person in question so the worker the occupant, and indirectly, the, the employer, that's more than that. So the people who are then that they're producing for once they go back into their work environment and are just sort of recharged and fresher and able to do more or get through the rest of the day without hitting X number of coffees.

But then that same building Brunt that same worker gets their own slightly more medium term benefits later on in the day, that's an entirely private matter once they end up trying to get to sleep that also suggests, you mentioned sort of the three hours, I think there's often, you know, there's practical considerations, of course, around when you work out an exercise, right. But when I see people exercising at 9pm, and the best hours of sleep seem to be between about sort of like 11 and 1am, right. There's just it's a crunch between the late workout, getting to bed and getting good quality night's sleep. So it's that would then suggest if, if at all possible exercise should happen lunchtime slash middle of the day.

Charlie Morley

It depends what the exercise is. So for it again, this is about the sympathetic and parasympathetic system. So for example, lifting heavy weights, like you're doing a big weight session actually can lead to such a parasympathetic hit off with this deep tiredness that comes out was it could be reasonably beneficial or at least neutral to do in the evening. However, as we both do a lot of martial arts like Thai boxing, kickboxing, something really fight or flight II like Krav Maga at 10pm, you want to go to bed at midnight? Yeah, you're going to be while you're going to be in that state.

So it's not so much the exercise, but the type of exercise the effect that has on your body, and you can feel it after your workout. Do you feel deeply relaxed? Do you feel that sense of calm? Or do you feel it's kind of jittery? You know, you've still got your pre workout shake in your system or something like that. So it's kind of subjective and personal. But generally, exercise is really good for sleep. But yeah, if you can do it within like three hours of your preferred bedtime, that's best. Sorry, I would do it not, not over three hours before your preferred bedtime. That's best.

Matt Morley

Cool. Plus, I think we can carry on for a while yet, but we're gonna wrap it up there. So if people want to follow along, see more of your work, or reach out with any questions or buy the books like where is that all happening online?

Charlie Morley

Yeah, my website, Charliemorley.com

I'm also on Instagram So check it out.

company culture and the healthy workplace

How to create a corporate culture geared for a healthy workplace or healthy coworking office

Creating a healthy workplace or healthy co-working community culture

It can be hard to draw general conclusions about the state of workplace culture at a country level or indeed industry because ultimately it comes down to brand culture above all else.

Each organization and its leaders have the power to create their own distinct way of working, perhaps rallying behind a visionary mission statement for example, or defining a set of values designed to guide staff towards some higher goal.

That said, there is a tangible sense that Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) principles are now taking hold like never before and, in some cases, are already well embedded in the workplace experience.

a return to the office post-Covid

Post-Covid we are seeing a range of different approaches to the return to the office, some hard-driving bosses insist on 100% staff presence, full time at their desks, while others have recognised that the hybrid model is here to stay.

Creative industries and start-ups, as well as other more youthful corporate cultures have been early adopters of new approaches to both working from home and flexible hours.

The role of ESG in worker wellbeing

Bigger picture, we’re seeing a real surge in interest in connecting the indoor office environments with Environmental, Social & Governance strategy. In other words, placing People and worker wellbeing closer to the centre of a company wide ESG plan.

So whereas before there was more pressure from below, there is now almost a perfect storm whereby investment groups, VCs and pension funds want to see a plan in place for a transition to a more ESG-aligned business, if it wasn’t there already. This is partly to future-proof their investments in business, partly in a response to the events of the past two years.

On the other sie, HR teams are rightly pushing for a healthier work environment, from indoor air quality, to lighting, nutrition, access to nature, acoustics plannings and so on.

If there is a silver lining to the massive shake-up the world of work has been through during Covid, it is the fertile soil it has left behind for playing catch-up in offices that were stuck in the 1980s without any worker wellness priorities in place.

Evaluating worker wellbeing in the workplace

In term of how we put numbers on that, it's typically a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, so we may combine indoor air quality monitors allowing for a deep dive analysis in real time of exactly what's going on around the workplace at any given time for example with a workplace satisfaction survey.

Biophilic design & healthy design in the office

The benefits of biophilic and healthy design in the workplace might include improving the purity of the indoor air with enhanced ventilation filters, air purifying plants and removing any chemical-laden materials, fabrics or furniture believed to be off-gassing Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).

Even simple 2.5m-3m walk-off mats at a building entrance can help curtail the dust and dirt brought in from outside that is then potentially inhaled by workers later in the day.

Green cleaning & green procurement policies

This same biophilic concept can go all the way through to a workplace cleaning policy that uses eco-friendly liquids containing no harmful chemicals as a way to. create a healthy building.

From there we expand into a green procurement policy throughout the workplace, so that anything new coming into the office in future, be it cleaning products, whiteboards or new furniture, all aligns with this same principle of removing or reducing harmful VOCs.

If this isn’t done, there’s always a risk of taking one step forward and two steps back, almost without noticing.

For a look at a healthy furniture brand, see the Spanish brand ACTIU.

Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ)

Commercial grade indoor air quality monitors located at least 1m away from windows or air intakes, wall-mounted at head height, are now a tangible reality for any workplace thanks to democratized technology in recent years. We work with RESET AIR as one of their Associated Professionals.

Acoustics in workplace wellness

A bad echo in an open plan space, overheard conversations, a noisy kitchen, a receptionist with an especially loud voice, there are any number of acoustic landmines waiting for us in the workplace, so how those interiors are designed and what acoustic, sound-absorbing materials they implement can make a considerable difference on worker productivity.

Get it wrong, and there will be a low-level anxiety present amongst those who prefer quiet, almost silent workplaces in order to do their best work.

Soft surfaces such as furniture fabrics, and upholstery, rugs, carpets, wall or ceiling panels, even dense collections or plants can all help act as sound barriers, reducing the amount of sound bouncing around in an office.

The discussion around open plan vs a return to more cubicles is inherently connected, once again, to company culture, what we can say with certainty is that in the knowledge worker economy there are clearly very different types of task happening at any given time and an office should ideally adapt around that scenario.

In other words, having task specific spaces for deep work, others for collaboration, and still others for taking a quiet moment to recharge the batteries alone or with a colleague is now the gold standard in office layouts and workplace design.

Active design in a healthy workplace culture

For anyone who has been hiding under a rock for the past decade, sitting at a desk all day long is simply not good for our mental or physical health, it leaves us with reduced mobility, back pain and an unhealthy aversion to moving around as much as possible whilst at work.

Active design can include creating those different task specific spaces around an office as a way to encourage workers to move from one to another as they change tasks.

A company culture that encourages that, is implicitly encouraging a little extra movement as well. Easy win.

A company culture that either implements standing meetings or makes it acceptable for staff to stand during a meeting is also doing its part in fighting back against sedentary workdays.

Going a step further, literally, would be to encourage walking meetings of 2-3 people as a way to take in some fresh air, find a different perspective on a problem or simply to find a more personal, one on one moment outside of the classic ‘face to face around a table’ meeting scenario.

That can happen from the C-suite down, in fact if it isn’t seen in company leadership, it is unlikely to stick, except for the more renegade thinkers. And thank goodness for them!

Standing desks in company culture

For anyone who's ever experienced back pain at work or on long flights, just being on your feet several hours each day, perhaps with a small mat under your feet too for comfort, makes a massive difference to. energy levels, and removes the back pain issue for those hours at least but it can also help avoid the mid-afternoon energy dip.

A sit-stand desk with a stool that can change height is going to allow for moments of deeper concentration as well as for example taking a phone call standing up or doing admin work standing. Once you are standing, it is so much easier to move around your workspace, almost without thinking.

Smart lighting in a healthy office

Strategically using blue-white light on our desks when energy levels are low and you need your A-game is now as easy as adjustable a dimmer on a smart light, such as those made by the Philips HUE, amongst others. As a general rule though, we want softer amber hues after ark in order not to. disrupt sleep patterns at night.

Being sensible about exposing oneself to natural light is a simple but effective way to maintain energy levels at work as well, just being near a window with a view can help give us a mini energy boost, rather like taking 20 minutes of sunshine outside, but on a smaller scale!

Air purifying plants and indoor air quality

The use of a variety of different air-purifying plants in a workplace, advanced HVAC carbon filters, on-desk mini air purifier units, operable windows, the options for enhance ventilation and improved indoor air quality are more now readily available than ever before. There are no excuses for poor quality air in an office anymore but if we don’t measure it, we can’t improve or troubleshoot!

Movement snacks at work

We all have an opportunity when we work from home to play a bit more with our day and how we divide our time so we can try to find space for just five minutes of movement as a way to prevent fatigue or simply to break away from an intense task.

Be it jumping on a trampoline, doing a little yoga, burpees or jumping jacks, it’s all beneficial and it helps to reset energy levels that may otherwise flag at certain times of day.

Equally, the company culture can help to inform staff about their options here, most may not think to do something as wacky as this but just shaking you arms and legs out for a couple of minutes (ideally in the fresh air or by a window) makes a difference, everyone should try it!

Think of it like a healthy and nutritious movement snack, you have it with you wherever you go and at any time of day - it’s an empowering thought

Further Reading:

• Benefits of healthy coworking offices

Benefits of active design in the workplace

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.

Biophilic design in the WELL Building Standard

what role does biophilic design play in the well building standard for human health?

The verdant rooftop courtyard of Montoya co-working and event venue, Barcelona, Spain, exemplifies a biophilic environment as outlined by certification standards like the WELL Building Standard. This approach addresses health and wellbeing issues in urban environments by integrating natural elements to improve overall quality of life.

What is the definition of biophilic design?

Biophilic design is about combining nature, sustainability, and well-being interiors by integrating the natural world into our built environment to create spaces that are better aligned with our evolutionary history, that offer some kind of nature connection rather than turning their back on Mother Nature completely. Biophilic design principles emphasize integrating natural elements into designs to enhance well-being, sustainability, and the human-nature connection.

Biophilic elements play a crucial role in enhancing well-being and sustainability by incorporating natural elements into architectural and interior designs.

Tools available to us include indoor and outdoor landscaping, vertical garden walls, air-purifying plants, natural aromatherapy, natural soundscapes, circadian lighting strategies, providing views of nature, creating scenes of natural beauty, the deliberate use of natural patterns, colours, textures, materials, fabrics, and natural elements - to name just a few.

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 and sustainable design principles, 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.

To gain in-depth knowledge about integrating biophilic principles into WELL-certified projects, consider enrolling in a biophilic design course or an online course. These courses provide comprehensive guidance on incorporating nature into architectural and interior designs, focusing on residential spaces, workplace environments, and public spaces.

Sections of the V2 standard are dedicated to Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Movement, Thermal Comfort, Sound, Materials, Mind, Community & Innovation.

What services do WELL Building Standard consultants offer?

Consultants specialising in the WELL Building Standard for real estate are likely to come from engineering, architecture & interiors, sustainability and/or real estate development backgrounds.

In our case as Biofilico, we have a combination of creative design and real estate development experience, we also have a niche in biophilic design consultancy as well as integrating health and fitness into the built environment.

This means we approach projects from a very different perspective compared to say, a team with an engineering background.

Although we have a wellness architect on our team, we are consultants first and foremost, meaning we are accustomed to working alongside and advising large-scale architecture studios, project management teams and developers on wellbeing design, healthy interiors and biophilic design. We also help clients implement biophilic design principles effectively in their projects. Consultants can benefit from biophilic design online resources to stay updated with the latest trends and practices.

Does the WELL standard favour biophilic design with natural elements?

The short answer is ‘yes’ it does, and likely in more ways than you might think as there are both direct and indirect references to ‘nature’ and ‘biophilia‘ in the standard, just as there are ‘direct‘ and ‘indirect‘ forms of biophilia at our disposal when designing an interior space.

Knowing how to make the most of biophilic design strategies therefore requires in-depth understanding not just of its breadth and depth as a design concept, but a combination of creativity with rigorous knowledge of the standard itself.

Fundamentally, biophilic design contributes to a wider healthy building strategy by benefits on air quality, mental wellbeing, healthy materials, nature connectedness and more, just as it contributes to a green building strategy in terms of sustainability, and so on. The WELL standard encourages designers to incorporate biophilic design to enhance these benefits.

What credits can biophilic design principles help with in the WELL standard?

There are obvious places to go hunting for credits in the WELL building standard as a biophilic design consultant, most notably in the MIND section where connection to nature is referenced in Precondition 02 Nature and Place as well as M09 Enhanced Access to Nature. So, let’s address these before moving on to the arguably less obvious credits that biophilic design can contribute to in the standard.

MIND / Precondition 02 Nature & Place

Here we are on our home turf, this is the main biophilic design credit for all intents and purposes, as it rewards the use of natural materials, patterns, shapes, colors, images or sounds as well as the integration of plants, the presence of water features and nature views into the project.

Part 2 of this WELL Standard Precondition is a more cerebral concept yet also provides considerably more creative freedom for architects and designers to interpret the brief through the lens of biophilic design as we are tasked with creating design elements that celebrate company culture or that of the local community, a celebration of place (connecting to the location in other words), elements of art and, wait for it, ‘human delight’.

MIND / Enhanced Access to Nature M09

M09 is then a continuation of this as it gives specifications of what percentage of workstations on each floor of the project should have direct views of indoor plants, a natural landscape or indoor water feature. If we play that one through to its logical conclusion, the extent of the indoor biophilic design interventions will depend greatly on the availability of external views onto natural landscapes.

If none are available as the project is in a densely populated urban area such as a business district, then the focus will of necessity have to be on bringing the outside world in, if the project is to secure these two credits for M09 by integrating natural elements.

MIND / Precondition Promote Mental Health & Wellbeing and MIND / M07 Restorative Spaces

One possible component of Part 1 in the MIND Precondition is a dedicated restoration space or recharge room.

We specialise in creating biophilic, nature-inspired restorative spaces such as the one above that we created for the HERO Group headquarters in Switzerland in 2019.

One restorative space can then double-up for credit scores in the M07 credit as well, provided it adopts a multi-sensory design covering lighting, sound, thermal comfort, seating, biophilia and ‘calming colours, textures and forms’ (this is clearly open to interpretation but a biophilic approach is always going to be a winner in this regard, with proven science behind its calming properties).

In 2017 Biofilico carried out a own scientific research study into this very subject for EcoWorld Ballymore in London for their Wardian Residences:

NOURISHMENT / N01 Fruits & Vegetables

Part Two: Promote Fruit & Vegetable visibility - create enticing displays in an office canteen or kitchen area that takes on near sculptural form, just a little creativity can go a long way here.

NOURISHMENT / N07 Nutrition Education

A hydroponic garden wall or individual hydroponic towers of edible lettuce leaves and herbs for example can provide opportunities for gardening / planting workshops with staff as well as additional biophilic decoration for the office on an ongoing basis. This strategy also doubles up as a solution for N12 Food Production, see below, as well as N13 Local Food Environment - contributing food produced on-site back to the local community.

NOURISHMENT / N12 Food Production

The provision of a gardening space within 0.25miles of the project can be easily solved either with a hydroponic farm set-up in the lobby or with an urban garden on the rooftop of the building if feasible. Such a facility needs to be accessible to regular occupants during. the daytime and be between 200ft2 and 1500ft2 in size according to the number of regular occupants in the project.

LIGHT / L03 Circadian lighting design

Circadian lighting is a foundation of biophilic design as the key aim is to align our body’s clocks with the regular cycle of dawn and dusk. We have written elsewhere on circadian lighting strategies and how to implement them. L03 in WELL specifies “appropriate exposure to light for maintaining circadian health and aligning the circadian rhythm with the day-night cycle”.

MOVEMENT / V08 Physical Activity Spaces & Equipment

Here WELL are looking for evidence that there is a gym or fitness facility available at no cost for regular building occupants to. use, either in the building itself, nearby or in a nearby outdoor space such as a park.

We specialise in designing green fitness spaces that secure additional points within the WELL certification for MIND M07 Restorative Spaces and MIND M09 Enhanced Access to Nature (using biophilic design that brings the outside world in).

MATERIALS / X06 VOC Restrictions and X07 Materials Transparency

To secure these credits requires an understanding of healthy materials and indoor air quality as well as biophilic design.

The key concept is that all natural materials such as stone, wood, bamboo and cork do not contain any VOCs and come with their own material transparency.

Our main issue here is ensuring that we specify the finishes and fit-out substances such as primers, glues and adhesives as these can inadvertently carry chemicals containing VOCs, thereby negating the good work done by specifying an organic materials in the first place!

To enquire about our services as biophilic design consultants for WELL certified projects, contact us here.

Employee health wellness with Wellable

The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast series covers sustainability, wellbeing and community in office, residential and hotel real estate today.

Welcome to episode 030 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we explore the themes of sustainability and wellbeing in real estate, workplaces and hospitality today.

I’m your host, Matt Morley, Founder of Biofilico wellbeing design and Biofit Health & Fitness.

This time in Boston in the US to talk to Nick Patel, CEO of Wellable employee wellness.

We discuss how Wellable are aiming to be the Netflix of wellness content, how existing trends in workplace wellbeing have simply been accelerated by COVID, how mental health at work has become less taboo than ever before, his views on healthy building certifications as a communications tool for brands that care about employee wellbeing and his thoughts on the role technology, culture and physical spaces play in creating a truly healthy workplace experience.

GUEST / NICK PATEL, CEO

• https://www.wellable.co/home

• https://www.linkedin.com/company/wellable-inc-/

• https://www.facebook.com/GetWellable/

HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CONVERSATION

Being healthy to the earth often equates to being healthy to yourself

Companies are starting to invest in community health initiatives, so not just helping their employees who are living in those communities, but helping all local citizens

There's a shift happening from ROI, return on investment, to VOI value on investment

Healthy people are typically still very active and alert in productivity terms at 4pm

No one ever asked us to create content, on the health benefits of gratitude for example, the health benefits of finding purpose in your life, or the science of happiness, but we did it!

---

Talking workplace wellbeing with Wellable

FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI (excuse typos!)

Matt Morley

Nick, thanks so much for being here with us.. I want to start with how you’d pitch a real estate developer landlord or a corporate executive to describe the problem you're solving.

Nick Patel

Yeah, fundamentally, we're in the business of making individuals healthy, happy and more productive, not just professionally but in their personal lives as well. And so our goal in terms of fulfilling that mission is working with employers on a health plan for their properties, really they’re the sponsors, who can support tailored wellness programmes for their constituents, whether that's their employees, or their tenants, whoever that may be.

Now, if we're talking to an employer, I usually always open with the fact that having a wellness programme is the right thing to do for a number of different reasons. There are benefits in terms of business success,. So having a thriving workforce is also associated with having employees who are excited about coming to work every day, excited about giving 100% of themselves into that job, that results in more creativity, more engagement, more retention, all these things will translate into the bottom line for those companies.

When we're talking to a property manager or building owner, it's the same concept, it's just a different channel to that individual. In that case, if you're a property manager, or building owner, your client is the employer. So assisting them in critical things for their business is helpful to attract and retain those tenants, garner higher rents, things like that. So implementing programmes that help their employees lead healthy lives, takes one thing off their plate or supports them in their own personal initiatives or company initiatives, all of which results in just better business success.

Matt Morley

Very cool. I like the way you're presenting it not just as as filling a gap or reducing a negative impact. But in fact, spinning on the upside, which is adding to the business and generating positivity, generating revenue, whatever it might be, rather than just preventing bad things from happening. I think that's a fundamental point on that topic.

We’ve just been through a roller coaster of a past 16 months, how have you at Wellable had to adapt within that employee wellness space? And how have you had to adjust your products and services in line with what's been going on?

Nick Patel

Great question. I think, depending on when you would ask me this question, during the last 18 months, the response would be somewhat or significantly different. I think right now, we're in a place where we're looking backwards, and kind of reflecting on these moments, for us least in America, the vaccine rates are high, we're feeling people coming back to work, things like that. And so as I look back, even coming into March until today, I felt like we're going through three different phases.

I think most businesses went through this in some way, shape, or form, even ones that were thriving in a digital world, and ones that were heavily impacted in the sense that they were on site, or had to be physically present. But they all had this element that no one escaped this. And so there's this recovery phase, right, there's a response phase, and there's reimagined phase.

The recovery phrase for us specifically, we are a comprehensive wellness provider. So what that means is that we are offering a number of different solutions, all independently, that employers or properties can implement in their programme. So that includes software, and that includes services, which were at least pre COVID, delivered primarily on site.

So for us, our recovery phase dealt with helping our clients transition to digital solutions. We had an airline as a customer and as you can imagine, every aspect of their world was turned upside down. I couldn't imagine being in the call centre for that company. And so, they were concerned about health and workplace wellbeing, they're doing it for all the right reasons. But practically, it was something that they could not even think about addressing in the month of March, April, May.

There's a response phase once we realise what was happening, and how we're going to respond. We tried a number of different things. We launched a programme almost initially. So it was very impressive that by mid March, we're launching a new product, we called at the time Wellable LIVE and it was the alternative to our on site services business. It was a streaming service. We were doing effectively Zoom fitness classes, Zoom webinars and things like that, that were throughout the day, five days a week that anyone can watch recordings of.

We were concerned about bandwidth, internet, microphone access, and we're sending out iPads to improve their quality because they were using home computers and things like that. At the end of the day, I think we're proud of that product. But it wasn't something that we saw that was going to be long term.

Now we're entering that reimagined phase of what the world is going to look like, in the short term being 12 months or so also in a very long term. So pretty quickly by May we said, we think the solution if you're going to do digital products, or data content, ‘live’ is nice in many ways, but you are missing out so many the benefits of being able see someone's yoga posture, for example, in a live session, right? So we end up launching what we call Wellable on demand. It is our version of what we think is going to be the future, like most products that are in this early stage, it's still in its infancy, and it's still growing and changing. But really, it's thinking about Netflix for wellness content.

So for us, we initially launched in July, a full library of high quality, you know, multiple camera angles, miked up instructors, things like that of all fitness classes for everything Pilates, yoga, prenatal / postnatal workouts, things like that. And from there, we're exploring additional content, is it healthy cooking, is it just written content in terms of recipes, we already launched a mindfulness and meditation series as part of that. And that's what we're thinking the future of like this digital concept, because what we're seeing is a lot of our clients mainly are still trying to figure out permanently what it looks like. But for the most part, in general, there's going to be more remote work than there was before. And whether that's employees in the office only three days a week, full time remote, every wellness programme is going to need some type of digital element and content delivery. And I think that's what the future for on demand product is going to be.

Matt Morley

So with the shift then to to a largely digital platform in terms of the interface itself, how are your different audience groups interacting with Wellable? Is it via a specific app? Is it essentially online?

Nick Patel

Yes, that's a tough question to answer, because for our perspective, how we deliver health and wellness solutions, is that structurally, we offer a number of different products and offerings, all of which can be purchased independently, and mixed and matched. And so the way we think about is that every employer is unique culturally, you know, where are they based, geographically, the physical space, things like that. And they're comprised of very unique individuals. And in most cases, it's a very diverse subset of people, all of which want different things right.

For some people, having group fitness classes is a great opportunity. Others prefer a digital engagement experience and mobile app, and we try to offer all those independently of each other. So if you look at 100 of our customers, and look what they're doing broadly with Wellable, for the most part, they're doing things that are at the very least, different in small ways, and in some cases, very significantly different. No one's right or wrong. There's not a wellness programme that's perfect for every group or every building. And so that's what we're experiencing.

When you think about how people are interacting with our our solutions, in general, it's not always necessarily a digital interaction. Although that is our primary product, we are known as a software provider, but it could be, you know, pre COVID groups that are just doing things on site, that was everyone, whether it's a warehouse company, or things like that everyone was always on site. And that's the way they felt the best opportunity to deliver was. And so it's just terms of how we communicate our programmes and things like that. It really again, depends on the programme for us, we are an end to end provider so that includes the promotions of the programme , the delivery execution, capturing and responding to feedback.

So to the extent our clients give us that authority to message and communicate directly with the employee, we take advantage of that with tailored messages for people who aren't even participating to people who are very active and we don't want to disrupt their way they're interacting with that programme. For our best clients. Like I said before, they're individuals or their employees are very unique and different. They all want different things. They offer a very diverse mix of our solutions to their clients, or their employees, knowing that someone gravitate to some type of solutions other gravitate to others. And so our communication strategy kind of matches that depending on what it is, depending on who that demographic is or trying to a diverse set of outreach and things like that to capture just a broad audience and then hopefully allow them to self identify what makes the most sense for them.

workplace wellness trends

Matt Morley

I think it connects very neatly with the idea that workplace culture and to some extent the brand itself, as in how the individual company's brand values and mission statement is reflected in terms of how they operate at a corporate or other employee level. So that makes sense.

There's there's just so much happening in this workplace wellness space right now. And there's there's a lot of players emerging, a lot of content being created. You've been in the game since 2012. How have you seen the workplace wellness scene evolve? Obviously, there's sort of there's going to be presumably a pre COVID and a post COVID. Right. But I mean, like just sort of looking at it or bigger scale over the last decade, like what have been the major shifts that you've seen that you're perhaps at a strategic medium term level tapping into?

Nick Patel

Yeah, there’s clearly a pre COVID, post COVID narrative there. The one thing I'll say about COVID, I think everything is still settling a little bit. But I think the long term takeaway from COVID, from our perspective, and I think it kind of makes sense in most industries, is that it didn't necessarily change the world, it really accelerated what was already happening, right. And so remote work, was becoming more and more popular anyway but companies were hesitant, but due to COVID, they were forced to do it. Then they realised there are some growing pains, especially when you're doing it unplanned But they're realising their sales teams can be productive while not travelling, which some groups are already experiencing, and experimenting with.

I think the wellness industry in general, is similar. The trends that we are experiencing, we're just accelerated. It's been eight years since we were founded, so much has changed. You know, the funny little story when we first started, Fitbit had just created their Fitbit zip. So if you remember that, it's like the one that you clip on your belt. And their real selling point was, Oh, it's Bluetooth oriented, and you have an app, it wasn't anything about being wrist worn, or anything of that nature. And at the time, when we first started, you know, the iPhone was one or two years old, we thought the future of health and wellbeing from a digital perspective, that is what's going to be with these consumer apps and technologies. And so rather, you know, we view ourselves, you have to distinguish between the two, there's consumer technology, there's a direct and individual, there's enterprise wellness technologies. And that's when you're going to go to a property and employer health plan and asked them to be the sponsor of a programme.

Back in 2012, we thought the future was going to be connecting all these consumer technologies and the consumer grade solutions, let that market determine who the best products were, aggregate that to a single platform and expose that to employees, or tenants, whoever it may be. And that was a big differentiator. I remember going to employer groups trying to talk to them as a small company, and made the comment, look at this Fitbit, it's going to be great. People are using it. And they're asking the question, are people really going to use a Fitbit or activity tracker? So that was a story in 2012. Now, if you didn't connect to a Fitbit, like at the time, our competitors weren't doing that, that was like the novel. And that was our biggest key differentiator.

Now, if you don't connect to Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin, these technologies, it's a non starter. So in eight years, what became our biggest differentiator is just table stakes.

Mental health in the workplace

Just in general, I think the two biggest trends that were always happening pre COVID, were accelerated due to COVID. And we were experiencing these changes at different rates, certainly early years was a move to holistic wellbeing and considering mental health, certainly pre COVID it was still taboo in the workplace in terms of a conversation. Less so now, we’ve made a lot of progress due to COVID, for sure.

But it was always something that was gaining momentum. Now when we talk to employers, they're asking, How does Wellable address mental health in the workplace? They've asked us about financial wellbeing things of that nature that just weren't nearly as popular even five years ago.

the shift away from biometric screenings

The second big takeaway, at least in the US market, for sure, is that the original wellness programmes first introduced in the 1970s, and became really popular in the 90s and early 2000s. Effectively had I'm oversimplifying here, two big elements - a biometric screening and a health risk assessment. If I draw your blood of all your employees or tenants, I can capture information that data is good for you. And my argument be just because you have data doesn't mean it's good, right? There's gonna be some actionable intelligence from that data that makes it valuable, but data in itself is just attribute. And then the same thing to health risk assessment, it was heavily clinical focus. It was a self assessment. So you're often asking clinical questions to an employee who doesn't necessarily know the answer, and just feels like they want to get to the assessment and answer the questions.

Tonnes of research has always questioned those, even though for decades, but they have this element of stickiness to it. Employers like Safeway is a very famous case study for employee wellness programme here in the United States. And their whole programme is built off biometric screenings. And if you're Safeway, it's hard for you to walk away from a programme that you built the head, a case study on it that's been very widely touted and things like that.

But new programmes aren't adopting the solutions. And we were found find the old programmes, were willing to slowly peel them away. COVID certainly accelerated that in the sense that you couldn't do biometric screens anymore. So a lot of companies suspended that for the first time in a decade or so. And now they're ask themselves, well, we didn't have it before, our wellness programme is still showing positive results. The biometric screening doesn't cover certain holistic elements like mental health and things like that. And I think they're slowly moving away from those. So those are the two big things I find are trends that are happening or celebrate COVID or continue happening. It's a transition to holistic wellbeing, and moving away from things like biometric screenings and health risk assessments.

Healthy building certifications & wellbeing interiors

Matt Morley

So a lot of change, a lot of movement, an industry that's in full evolution. So let’s shift onto healthy building certifications, where you're dealing not just with wellbeing interior design, but also operational and facilities management processes. So these third party standards like WELL and FITWEL. Now, that can either happen at the owner level, or it can happen at the employer level. how does Wellable connect with tall that?

Nick Patel

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would even ask why do we have these certifications, I think it helps people hit certain standards and goals. But I think for really, it's a good way to communicate. If you're in a building, for example, it's a way for you to communicate that we are investing in the health and wellbeing of the tenants. And for most companies who value health and wellbeing that may impact their decision in terms of where they want to set their office and things like that.

It's similar to the ‘healthiest places to work’, companies often strive for that, because the recognition of that healthiest place to work, attracts the right talent, emphasises your values, in terms of caring for the employees and things like that. So it ends up being the end product.

In many ways, I have a number of things that you're engaging with, prior to ever getting that certification. And so as it relates to healthy spaces, especially this new normal, or this kind of post COVID normal that is still kind of unfolding and figure out how it all shakes out. We found or we find I think that promoting health and well being in general, across three buckets is where employers should strive. And we help in many of those areas, but not all of those areas. And by engaging in kind of these three areas or buckets - technology, culture and physical spaces.

Tech, culture and designing physical space for wellbeing

Technology, we always talked about this even prior COVID remote work was increasing, people are looking to be healthy, not just you know, when they're in eight hours a day, in their offices and things like that. And to be able to have a distributed health and wellbeing strategy, there has to be a technology element, there's no real way to do that well outside of that element. And so investing the right technologies, and we're a technology company, as a relates to health and wellbeing is really important. And we offer a number of solutions, depending on the type of wellness programme that you want to offer.

Culture. I always talk to a talk about properties in this way is that people forget that properties have culture to culture, something that companies often associate what's your company culture, but properties have culture too. And it's from you know, is it inclusive? How is it dynamic in the public spaces, all those things are pervasive. And people gravitate to the culture. I mean, that's what culture has is what people are doing when someone doesn't tell them what to do in some ways, right. And so buildings have cultures, employees have culture. And where we've always said is we provide content, we blog a lot, we have thought leadership, we actually have a group within our company that does proprietary research on a number of things, including culture. And that's something that we try to improve, but it's really something outside the scope of what our company does, outside of like guidance and consultation. So we know it's one of the key pillars. And, you know, we're actually personally focusing a lot on diversity, equity inclusion right now in terms of just research and understanding what that means.

We read an article from a professor at Harvard that that summed up pretty well, she said - there's no amount of employee wellness programmes, or company benefits that can offset racism in the workplace. That hit the nail on the head as relates to how important culture is as relates to health and wellbeing.

So then we have physical spaces, whether it's on site gyms, healthy food options, air quality, things of that nature.

As companies or buildings kind of pursue health and wellbeing in the lens of these three areas, I find that they typically can sail through the certification process. And the certification process, in our view, is really getting recognition for all the work you're doing as it relates to health and well being.

Matt Morley

I think that's a crucial insight that to unpack and in a sense demystify some of these healthy building certifications that can seem quite imposing and really a mountain to climb. When you're coming from a standing start. I think the point you're making very clearly, and it's a powerful one, is that if you're active in this space, if you're already engaging with the idea of workplace wellness, and you're looking after your employees, a healthy building certification should be within reach. It's a subtle point, but the certification is really kind of like doing the exam, having done the hard work, right? And Wellable is there to help with some of the hard work. So you can, in a sense, do all of that first, and then the certification just comes later, rather than starting with that and having to roll all of this out, because there's a lot to do.

ESG - Environmental, Social and Governance

So how does Wellable’s work contribute to ESG?

Nick Patel

What's interesting about ESG is that the definition is continuously expanding. So for I think, ESG, when people often associated with this, several years ago, it was around largely a sustainability movement, about going green. And what we found actually, by the requests in demand of our clients, both current perspective is that they often lump that sustainability element into health and wellbeing. And so the general concept being that you know, being healthy to the earth often equates to being healthy to yourself, walking to work or biking to work has both of those benefits. And they're deeply, deeply connected, clean air, good for your body, it's good for the earth, deeply, deeply connected. And so we find that that definition, I would have told you when we first started this company, that we would never be in the concept of sustainability risk broadly. And now we find that they're overlapping very heavily. And so that's where I think our biggest splash happens as a relates to the ESG movement.

But to your point, we often talk to companies, when we think about community health initiatives. And as a public health level, government, especially local governments are doing a really good job about driving Community Health had done an extremely good job of connecting with the private sector, off the concept of Yes, this is the right thing you should do. That is what ESG is about. In many ways, these are the right things you should engage in similar to you should have an employee wellness programme for the right reasons. But by the way, there are all these extra ancillary benefits that come from it.

Community engagement in ESG

In the case of the ESG movement, where we're seeing really big changes and impacts on public health at the local level, it's the private sector, recognising something that was when you would think is fairly obvious is that you recruit and retain employees from the community that you operate in. So if you're in whatever town or city may be, having healthy, happy, healthier citizens of that town or city is going to translate into your company benefits as well. Obviously, your wellness programme can help accelerate those type of things. And we're finding that companies are starting to invest in community health initiatives, so not just helping their employees who are living in those communities, but helping all local citizens is where the wellbeing movement is most deeply tied as relates to ESG.

We started originally, just as employer focus, we've started expanding to properties. And now we have a number of groups, from public health departments and things looking to run community programmes. And largely this is driven by this ESG movement.

Matt Morley

I've seen that very much there's been this kind of kicker in that particular piece of ESG. Around community. Suddenly, the Black Lives Matter moment, I think was a was a turning point in that and it really then suddenly put community up there not just in terms of ethical business practices, or ethical procurement policies for business, in line then with how you look after employee employees, but then there was this piece in between around the community. I think that's, that's a strong point dimension.

Now, but underlying all of this, then is that discussion with the CFO where the saying, okay, but that all sounds great, but you know, show me the data, show me the evidence of how this is having a tangible impact on our staff and on our business. So how does wearable play into that conversation around generating hard data? And if you like, almost analytics around the impact of of working with you?

Nick Patel

Yeah, there's a transition to a couple of questions. Previously, you mentioned about what's changing in the employee wellness space. And I didn't mention this, but this is something that certainly was happening, it's top of the list as well, is that there's a shift from ROI, return on investment, to VOI value on investment.

So the classic model, going back to the, you know, original, old school wellness programmes was that I could invest $1, into an employee wellness programme, and I would extract $2 in savings. You know, if you're in the United States, where you're uncovering your health insurance for all your employees, that would most likely show up in your health care costs. And that's why you did the investment was a strictly financial decision. And what we've transitioned from that, and a couple ways, one, a, that's really hard to measure, right, there are all these external factors that are in play there outside your control COVID. Being a great example, more commonly, you know, a high flu season one year, also has an impact on your claims and things that day to day or year to year, but doesn't necessarily show doesn't always get removed from a wellness programme, per se. Vi, for example, says let's consider those financial benefits, let's consider all these other things to have financial outcomes, but don't show up in a certain hard dollar.

So things like employee retention, depending on the near the number you use, it can be you know, the cost of someone's full salary for a year to just recruit a new employee. So it's always cheaper, like it is in business to retain a customer than find a new one. Same thing with keeping an employee who is familiar with your processes. You don't have to go through the training or the finding that talent, things like that greater productivity, so less sick days, greater productivity in the sense that people have fatigue at the end of the day. And Healthy People are typically still very active and alert in productivity terms at 4pm when they're working and things like that.

So there's a long list of what those value on investment elements could be. So the first place we always start with companies is why are you having this programme? What are those key kind of value on investment metrics that you will measure success? So whenever we have a client join Wellable they fill out a questionnaire and one of the questions is how do you want to measure success and that's really kind of a way to capture these VOI elements, and then from there, you have to capture the data.

So if someone says, Yes, I would like to see less sick days, we need to find out where in there, you know, time attendance records that data sets. If it's about health care costs, how can we have access to those health care claims to begin to measure those things. And so for most companies, especially the ones we're working with, who in many cases are either transitioning from a different wellness vendor to our platform, or just launching a programme for the first time, they conceptually have an idea of things they want to track, but they don't necessarily haven't implemented anything around that in the first step is that data capture based on those specific elements that you want to measure? And from there, depending on what those elements are, the measurement process is a little bit different.

In every scenario, there will be some kind of confounding variables, for example, COVID, right. So looking at healthcare claims of last year, there's no way for you to segment out perfectly, but you should consider that as you think about, you know, the value you're getting from. And at the end of the day, you can measure programme success through these value on investment metrics. But we always talk about why are we doing these programmes, it's for the right reasons, it's for those employees, it's for those tenants.

So I would always encourage employers, and we have it built into our programme capturing the feedback of those participants, right, there's no version of our sick days dropped or healthcare costs drop, and then every employee hits the programme, that's not a successful programme, it really comes down to that. So in every scenario, you're capturing their feedback, you want to make sure what they're doing is fun, because if it's not, it's not sustainable. And you want to make sure you're really building a programme based on the needs and the wants of that audience.

Matt Morley

I like it. So it's a qualitative approach combined with some of the quantitative data to give you some some real, tangible feedback from from the front line, it strikes me a lot of what you're doing then is is in a sense about content creation. What's the strategy behind your content creation?

Nick Patel

Yep, so we work with a diverse population. So everything we're doing is effectively all of the above. And some companies webinars resonate really, really well. Other ones they don't, and just for cultural reasons, based on individual interests and needs, sometimes marketing issues. So our goal is to offer a diverse set of content. So just actual material and topics we cover and deliver that in a diverse way, in terms of different media types, articles, video content, long form material, short form material, things like that.

The one thing I'll say, just as like a business founder is I never thought that we would be as much in the content game as we are now. I just mean, looking back on it, it seemed pretty obvious, but it never occurred to me, we have a very large content team. And they're very busy! And so when we think about content, we think about the combination of two factors, one, responding to demand.

So there's demand for greater mental health resources and things like that we need to respond to those areas. And we're consciously doing that. And we're going to do that in different formats. I think what's tricky is we often are seen as a thought leader, by our clients we're trying to be so I guess it's no surprise there. And so when that perspective is put in, we're being asked to think about the future in a way they have not.

So for us, no one ever asked us to create content, on the health benefits of gratitude for example, the health benefits of finding purpose in your life, or the science of happiness, but we did it. Those are all things that conceptually when you talk to an employer or property and say, hey, these are things are really important. Have you considered to incorporate that your wellness programme and we show all the data around that tie it to, you know, health benefits and well being? They jump on it quickly, but there's something no one ever demanded.

So when you go talk to most employers, they're asking us to do fiscal activity programmes and nutrition programmes. Obviously, we need those some groups now asking for mental health and financial well being, but we cover so many dimensions of health and well being and educating those employers on why those dimension are important, is critical. And then, you know, identifying where those areas to invest in so that's what we spend a lot of time at The back to actually why we formed Wellable is supposed to be this thought engine for us, not just for our content creation, but also for just general topics in the HR and property management space.

The big thing we're working on now is, as I mentioned before, is diversity, equity inclusion. I don't know exactly what that means from a product perspective, or how we're gonna deliver that content. And we're still exploring it. But we know that it's critical to the future health and well being. And make sure we deliver that in a format that kind of impactful to our customers.

Matt Morley

I really encourage listeners to have a little dig around on your site, I found it really interesting and insightful to spend a little time Yeah, moving through the space that you've referred to the empty content that you provide online, as a way to see almost taking the temperature of what both you think is important and relevant, and presumably what what the world of work is asking for, in terms of relevant content. So just seeing the diversity of the articles and the headlines out there was was a real eye opener for me. It's, it's been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time, you've got a really exciting future ahead. So I wish you the very best of luck. How can people reach out Connect, follow along, see what you're up to?

Nick Patel

Yeah, absolutely. If you have any questions, you want to connect me directly my emails just Nick @ wellable.co but a great place to start is of course our website www.wellable.co where you can check out our blog, definitely subscribe to it. I think a couple years ago, we won our award for the best wellness blog, we continue to produce a lot of interesting content there. So if you're just broadly interested in health and wellbeing as your HR person or property person or whoever it may be, it's a great way to get different pieces of content on current issues, emerging issues, and really the future of health and well being at the enterprise level.

Matt Morley

Awesome. Thanks again Nick. It's been great.

workplace wellbeing with wellwise in the UAE

The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast series takes a deep-dive into the role of sustainability, wellbeing and community in office real estate, residential property, hotels and educational facilities today.

Episode 28 takes us to Dubai talking to Bobbi Hartshorne, Co-Founder and Chief Wellbeing Officer at WellWise, a UK and UAE based business that takes an integrated diagnostics approach to delivering value via office wellbeing programs for corporations large and small.

Our conversation covers: 

• Bobbi’s experience creating a framework for student wellbeing via an innovative accommodation offer

• WellWise’s Research driven diagnostic system approach to workplace wellbeing

• their Employee engagement process to build a culture around wellbeing

• their network of specialists providing bespoke solutions covering everything from sleep quality, to office design and environmental health

• the growing importance of mental health support at work

• the subtle but important difference between wellness and wellbeing

• the opportunities in the UAE market for workplace wellness

Workplace wellbeing insights from our conversation

Workplace wellbeing improves almost anything that a CEO cares about ,from productivity to engagement, job satisfaction and creativity

organizations with high workplace wellbeing have 2% - 3% better performance on the stock market, better customer loyalty, and better sales performance

when you have a high wellbeing workforce, everything else tends to fall into place

in order to attract people back to these places we call offices, we're having to get very creative about what they look like, how they serve us, what function they fulfill and how they enable success

wellbeing has a broader and deeper meaning than wellness as it incorporates life satisfaction, accomplishment, motivation, purpose, engagement

GUEST / Bobbi  Hartshorne of WellWise Workplace Wellbeing UAE Dubai

• https://www.bewellwise.com/

• https://www.linkedin.com/company/bewellwise/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbihartshornewellbeing/

HOST / Matt Morley - wellbeing champion Espana Spain

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattmorleylux/

FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI - EXCUSE TYPOS!

Matt Morley

Okay, let's do this. If I may, I'm going to start by going back in time a little bit, because something came out of your CV as I was doing my research for this conversation. And it's a, it's a sector that seems to be really going through a transformation at the moment. I know it's no longer what you do. But I did want to just pick your brains a little bit on the student accommodation space. And you had a role a set of well being for global student accommodation group. And really the retargeting generation said, as I see it, and it's a dynamic sector. So you're combining wellness with student accommodation? Like what did that give you? And how did that go on to influence where you are today running various workplace wellness businesses?

Bobbi Hartshorne

Yeah. Well, it was a really interesting journey. The thing about that role at GSA was that I created it for myself. And so it was really the first of its kind in the private built student accommodation environment, although there had been similar roles in universities. And so it was a very steep learning curve. And it was really in response to a growing concern about the well being of students and the types of issues that were increasingly coming up in our residences, but also just around universities in general.

Bobbi Hartshorne

what I learned was that, for students, wellbeing was relatively universal. There were nine key areas that we were finding were the constant sources of stress or the opportunities to improve wellbeing. And they were financial, cultural, physical, mental, academic, spiritual, career and environmental. And it was this extreme change and this transition that young people are going through when they go from university, or when they go from school into university, that really creates this instability, where stress and low well being and challenges can fester.

Bobbi Hartshorne

the degree to which an individual has the ability to cope with those to address them, to reduce them varies massively depending on who they are, where they come from, what experiences they've had in the past. And so whilst we were able to build a framework for wellbeing that was fairly consistent across the world, how each individual student engaged with that or benefited from it really did vary. And there was certainly no one size fits all.

Bobbi Hartshorne

it dawned on me that these young people who were really quite different to the types of students that we'd had previously sort of the millennials, and the way they behaved and what they valued, and what got them motivated, and what stressed them was very different. And it dawned on me that those young people were going to enter the workforce, and that they were going to present so interesting and new challenges to employers, in the same way that they had presented new and interesting challenges to the student accommodation sector. And so I got really into looking at that transition, again, that vulnerable period of transition out of university and into the workplace. And I started to look at how existing working practices were maybe not going to align particularly well with this new generation, and maybe some of the challenges that were going to crop up.

Bobbi Hartshorne

And it wasn't long before we started to see burnout in mid 20 year olds, who had been in the workplace less than 10 years. It wasn't long before we started to see employers very concerned about mental health issues for younger employees, and a real change in pattern in terms of what those young employees were seeking from their employers. And it was way beyond cash, it just was so much more than financial gain. And so this is really where my interest in the workplace began. And then COVID cropped around the corner, gave us all a bit of a fright. And that was really an interesting experience because putting a workplace under an exceptionally extreme set of circumstances like COVID. And you tend to bring out either the best or the worst or a mixture of both. And so I really then started to observe what happens in a workplace under extreme circumstances and what happens to employees and leaders and managers under extreme work, workplace environments. And so that really was what gave gave this sort of leeway for me to take the take the jump out of the student accommodation world and into the workplace world because There were a lot of similarities and crossovers that I could draw on. But there was also a whole world of stuff I was interested in that I wanted to explore further.

Matt Morley

So am I right in thinking then with the student accommodation, you were to use the terminology from the hotel world of you're dealing with hardware and software. So you're doing both with training , teaching the mental game, as well as the physical game. So the spaces in which the students were spending their time sleeping at night, but they also meant providing, if you'd like more operational solutions to keeping them sane and healthy and positive and upbeat, right?

Bobbi Hartshorne

Absolutely. And it's quite strange, actually, from the physical perspective because universities for a really long time have been doing a lot to support students across all of those pillars that I mentioned earlier. But the one area that always seem to be neglected, or that was never really optimized was the accommodation, whether that was University owned accommodation, or whether it was privately owned accommodation. And it struck me that the nature of your home is the place where you're going to be engaging with your personal studies where you're going to have your downtime, where you're going to be maybe alone in your room, are the times when the challenges are probably going to rear their ugly heads. And, and it was really important for us to make sure that our teams on in the residences knew how to support students in that environment. But increasingly, that as we were upgrading residences, as we were building new residences, how we laid those structures out how we built community, how we identified whether students were isolated or behaving differently to maybe their normal patterns, that all became part of it. So yeah, absolutely operational and physical,

Matt Morley

There seem to be just so many parallels between the two, if you were to switch out what you've just described in the last couple of minutes, but instead of describing students, we would describe the staff or employees. And in fact, a lot of those same issues can come up or have been coming up, especially over the last few years around stress and anxiety and what have you.

Matt Morley

So you then transition across into the next phase of your career, you moved to launch your own business in October 2020, the end surrender, and there you're focusing more as I understand it on sort of a consultancy role for workplace wellbeing, right?

Bobbi Hartshorne

Absolutely. It just felt like , my natural transition. And my passion had really gone into that space, not that I wasn't still passionate about the student space, but I felt like I'd done a huge amount in the student space and there were great people there who could carry that on and evolve it further

Bobbi Hartshorne

I moved into the workplace and how the parallels as you've already alluded to, could transition across. I could see in the same way as five years previously, I could see that the university sector was struggling with student wellbeing the exact same was happening now with employees, employers struggling with employee well being, I was also observing a lot of snake oil solutions, and a lot of well washing, we call it and they're in your field, you have greenwashing. And this idea that it kind of wasn't very authentic that a lot of the work and practice going on in this space was at a very surface level, plaster over the cracks, put a nice picture on your website and kind of say that you're doing well being but as time went on, it became very apparent to organisations that that really wasn't enough. And it wasn't getting to the heart of the actual challenges and unpacking and really helping them to address the impact that a poor wellbeing workforce creates for an for an organization. And that was really where I wanted to step in with a much more rigorous and, I guess, scientific approach to wellbeing. But I was held back in doing that because what I didn't have that I wanted was a strong research platform. I kind of knew all the ingredients that were required through my own experience and through all the research I had done, but I wasn't able to get those articulated in a meaningful way because I didn't have a research platform. And so really not wanting to be just another snake oil charmer or just another well washer I set about trying to solve that riddle and now It was really when Tim Gatlin and worldwise came into the picture.

Matt Morley

I think it's a crucial point, because as you've suggested, typically, when going in on these projects, when there's there is a problem, by the time you get to the mechanic something's gone wrong with the car, so often by the time consultants brought in, right, if you've got people complaining, or the mood and the, the atmosphere in the office is really turned negative, or whatever it might be, something's going wrong here, I think it's quite rare that it's sort of anticipation, it anticipates, potential need, typically, you're kind of coming a little bit late to the game. So you have to deliver on the data and the numbers. And it's just, it's not enough to pen some nice words and hope everything works out. So you've then took this sort of far more data driven and research driven approach with Well, why so where you're currently clearly spending a lot of your time and energy and it looks to be an interesting new addition. So why don't we dig into that a little bit? So in terms of like, what that brings to the market and the needs that it's addressing? How are you resolving some of the issues that are out there at the moment?

Bobbi Hartshorne

So look, Tim, my business partner, Tim Gatlin, he already had a really, really strong research platform, that funny enough he was using in the student space, which is how Tim and I know each other, but he was also using it in other industries as well. And so I knew that that platform, and the strength of the tech involved in that platform was exactly what we were going to need to unpack the complexity of what we now call the workplace wellbeing network. And so we set about understanding, building on our knowledge, understanding what currently employers were purchasing in this space, what issues were they trying to target? What solutions were already on the market, what research was already out there, what questions were being asked. And we started to spot some key patterns. And these kind of worse split into they were either looking at what was happening with the employees themselves. So why are our employees not engaged? How do we build resilience? Why are our employees eating a terrible diet? Why are they not sleeping properly, or they would then look at organizational factors, although there was a lot less of that going on, but you would say, you know, is our management style appropriate for a modern workforce are our rewards and recognitions keeping up with the latest trends and desires of our employees. And so you have these kind of two sides of workplace wellbeing. But what you didn't really have was anybody who was working out how the two fit together, how they impacted one another, and where they could strengthen each other. And that was really what Tim and I were curious to see if we could create. And it turned out, we could so that was great.

Bobbi Hartshorne

In kind of talking to business leaders, we discovered three really important things. The first was the workplace wellbeing and employee wellbeing was top priority, or at least top five priority for every single business leader we spoke to. The second was that they were all completely overwhelmed by the amount of choice the amount of solutions, you might have conversation, the diversity of the discussion. And they were really struggling to navigate through to something that meant something to their own organization and their own situation. And the third thing was that a lot of them had already started and maybe even four or five years in have been investing in solutions and approaches and building teams and building structures around this stuff. But it wasn't actually really yielding what they kind of hoped. And so there was this kind of disillusionment or this paralysis happening where they were struck with this problem they just could not solve. And so after six months of research and diving into this topic, we've built a diagnostic system that brings those two factors together that organizational side and that employee side. And what we're able to offer organizations now is really comes down to clarity, being able to understand exactly what's happening in your organization, where the pain points are being created, where the challenges are arising from, and what the causation and outcomes of those are, what the cost of those are is to your organization, and then to help them to navigate through a strategic blueprint to a much more successful place to re redesign or redeploy their resources into the areas where it was going to have the most impact the quickest and then build from there. To where they wanted to go.

Matt Morley

Okay, and so you're beginning that process with a data collection phase. So presumably research and surveys, So you're getting both qualitative and quantitative data that gives you a baseline, right? And that forms part of the process or WISE process, as you call it, right? Where do you go on to?

Bobbi Hartshorne

Well, actually, there's a step before the data collection process, which we call the Y, phase for why. And really, this is this is often missing, as well, we discovered when we're doing our research is that quite often companies don't actually understand why it is that they're investing or think that they should be investing in workplace wellbeing. They they've either caught on to a trend, or they've spotted a specific issue such as engagement or resilience, or health, or they have a problem with something like productivity or engagement. And they go, Oh, well, wellbeing must be the answer. So because everybody's telling us that's the answer. But actually, when you start to talk to different employees across an organization, particularly at the senior level, you discover that there's actually quite a big difference in what they understand wellbeing is going to bring to the table, and some of them have got it, unfortunately, quite wrong. And some of them have got it right. But it's not aligned to their colleagues.

Bobbi Hartshorne

The other big Why is why are you doing what you're already doing? So a lot of organizations have already invested in this space they've already bought in consultants, they've already built a framework, they're already doing activities. But why did they choose that approach in the first place? And then why isn't it working? So we have to, we have to understand all of that before we can do the survey because what the survey then allows us to do is to dig into those issues a bit further, as well as just cover off the workplace wellbeing network that I already alluded to, with those those two sides.

Bobbi Hartshorne

Then once we've got those two factors, we can look at them together and say, well, you're saying you want to achieve x, but your current approach isn't doing that. And your employees are still struggling with this factor because of this situation. And so what we're then able to do is move on to the s the strategize element of the WISe process, and help them to use all of that insight, use that quantitative and qualitative insight and really drill down on a strategy that is going to help them achieve their why by unpacking the identified issues that we got at the ice stage, so so that's what we do. And then after we've done that, we've got a lovely strategy on a piece of paper. Well, it's it's next to useless when it's only on a piece of paper, it's now about engaging, it's the E phase of our why's process. You have to start engaging people. And there's two to send you two sets of people you need to engage. The first one, of course, is your employees. So how are you going to build them up, get them on board, get them bought into the process, get them contributing to it, and building a culture around wellbeing. And the second people, you have to engage professionals and specialists and that they could be you know, sleep specialists or office design specialists or manage management and leadership specialists, you know that there'll be a whole mixture of things so that that that phase is really important, as well. And it's really cool actually the way that that plays out, Matt, because those professionals that we bring in, and we've got network of people we can rely on, it's growing, seemingly daily, they don't come into an unknown quantity, they come in at the point that we've already understood the why we've already done all that quantitative data and analysis. So we're able to point them in the direction of the specific challenge that we're trying to target with their solution. So they're not trying to create a solution blind. They've got some real tangible insights themselves that make their impact much greater. And then once you've done all of that, and you've started to embed some different solutions, you're Of course going to want to know whether it's working. And that's where we bring in our reevaluation whether that's we won't rerun the whole system again, or whether we periodically, you know, look at a particular area on a smaller scale. And we can be quite agile with that now with technology and dashboards at our disposal to be able to dig in to a deeper or shallower level, depending on the need of the organization at that time.

Matt Morley

Is that then again, based on let's call it employee satisfaction, because often it's this question from the CEO CFO character. We're going to do all of this so what are the bottom line results we can expect?

Bobbi Hartshorne

the thing that is so awesome about wellbeing is that it improves almost anything that a CEO cares about. So a high wellbeing workforce is more productive, and more engaged, they're more satisfied, they're more innovative, they're more collaborative, they're more creative, they're far more likely to stay. So retention, they are also far more likely to recommend your employer or your workplaces somewhere for others to come in. So it helps with recruitment. And you get better team cohesion, you get better team creativity, and essentially, it just elevate everything. And if there's a specific thing that they're particularly targeting, so let's say they've got really low engagement or really low productivity, then we can certainly engineer this strategy initially, to specifically seek to drive improvements there. But what you find with wellbeing improved wellbeing in general is that as it as it elevates, it just pulls everything up. It's really, it's really quite fascinating in that in that regard. And the other thing that often is overlooked is it as a result of all of this, it drives the bottom line. So we know that organizations with high workplace wellbeing have 2% - 3% better performance on the stock market, better customer loyalty, and better sales performance. So it really does, you know, I'm really not trying to over egg the pudding here. But when you have a high wellbeing workforce, everything else tends to fall into place. And so that's why we really discourage people from focusing on just something like resilience, or just engagement or just productivity, and rather look at well being because your your, your dividends, your return for an investment in well being will be so much greater and so much broader than if you just try and pinpoint one specific problem and neglect the other elements of well being, too. Yeah, lots of claims.

Matt Morley

Okay. And so if we then dig a little bit deeper into the, the wellness practitioners, so in terms of the employee experience, apart from contributing to creating some initial baseline data around how things are performing in the office at the moment, then in terms of the lived experience, what they're engaging with these practitioners who come in, and perhaps you could just a hypothetical example, or a real life case study of perhaps that mix of 234 practitioners that you might bring in that would have an immediate impact on on the employee experience, or whether it's sort of if it's a fitness or wellness classes, or the environment that they're working in, because that at the end of the day is the process and action, isn't it? It's it's the staff, here it is that the changes are coming and whether that works or not, and whether you need to tweak it a little bit. So typically, how do you see that playing out?

Bobbi Hartshorne

Yeah, it's gonna be really interesting. on a case by case basis as to as to which practitioner which approach you choose to invest in and in what order you choose to take them on? Actually, the aside from practitioners, I'll come back to that in a moment. But actually, there's a huge amount that you can just do internally, you don't always need external help with this. Sometimes the results and the strategy is about actually assessing what's happening internally, and, and working out challenges that you've got internally, that you can actually fix yourself. So it's not always about saying right over to a handful of people who are going to rescue your business, because because a lot of the answers exists internally, and you've already got talent who can do that. But where there is gaps in your experience or your knowledge or their specialist areas that your your organization's not familiar with. It could be a real mixture of things that we're seeing a huge rise, for instance, in sleep practitioners, as we increasingly understand the power of good sleep and the cost of bad sleep on everything that is human about us. We're seeing as a result of COVID and this big conversation around hybrid working and trying to attract people back to the office. What even is an office now? This question has just come up in the last six months where what we've always considered to be an office the purpose of an office, what an office should do. has just been blown out of the water. And in order to attract people back to these places that we call offices, and we're having to get very creative about what they look like how they serve us what function they fulfill how they enable success, so you're gonna definitely have a big push in terms of office design, and environmental factors that help to drive those things

Bobbi Hartshorne

I think you're gonna definitely see a rise in the need for mental health support, compensation and benefits design is going to change because cash is no longer King, as I already alluded to, and then probably on the less traditional side, I think you're gonna start to see a rise in wellbeing scientists like myself, who can who can help people to unpack that data, you're going to have people who can assess your strategy as an organization, and how well being can help you to achieve that, I think we're probably going to see a lot more team practitioners as the role of teams, especially with a hybrid slash remote working changes and challenges that are coming in. And also one of the big areas, I suspect what's going to be leadership or management training, we're moving from Hero leadership to servant leadership. And that is a massive shift in how you act, how you think, what you do, the decisions you make the way that you lead. And that's a real big area of development that also and sustainable leadership, which I don't mean sustainable in terms of environmental sustainability, although, of course, that is very important. I mean, sustaining yourself as a leader, as the world of leadership just becomes so increasingly high pressured? How do you maintain your best leadership capabilities by by having high well being yourself? And how do you then invoke that sense of, it's good to have a high wellbeing workforce and sort of that gets moved down the organization? So yeah, so I think there's gonna be some interesting developments in in that space. And then finally, I think it's probably going to be a shift in HR practices, performance management, or rather, it should be performance optimization, and employer branding, recruitment strategies, and the design of the employee experience, they're all going to be things that I think are going to grow in terms of practitioner needs.

Matt Morley

You've been using the term wellbeing throughout this conversation. And I think it's, I've read something on your site recently, where you tried to pick apart the two concepts of wellness and wellbeing, it can seem not irrelevant, but it can seem that the two terms almost just merge into one. But I was interested to hear your thoughts on how you consider wellbeing to be perhaps more of a 360 view of physically and mentally in a good place versus wellness that was perhaps more limited.

Bobbi Hartshorne

Yeah, I think how many, it's really hard now, because as you said, wellbeing and wellness is sometimes used interchangeably, but actually, they do have slightly different definitions. And they definitely have different histories. And for me, wellness generally refers to sort of an individual person's physical and to a degree mental wellbeing. Whereas wellbeing has a broader and deeper meaning than wellness as it incorporates life satisfaction, accomplishment, motivation, purpose, engagement

Bobbi Hartshorne

I think wellbeing is something that's more easily applied to groups, which when we think about the workplace is important in terms of the wellbeing dynamics of teams who are being dynamics of departments of offices of regions, etc. So, you know, there's there's that kind of dual individual versus group application of wellbeing that's harder to express in wellness terms. I mean, the International Labor Organization describes workplace wellbeing as related to all aspects of working life from the quality and safety of the physical environment, to how workers feel about their work, their working environment, the climate at work and working organization. And why does it matter? Well, because the lens with which you understand wellbeing or wellness, it really doesn't matter what you call it, but the lens by which you understand it is going to massively influence your strategic approach to it. The types of practitioners you engage in the types of consultants you gain, you engage the data that you're looking for, if it's if it's understood in the more limited historic realms of wellness, there is a risk that you will miss out on the opportunities to explore Read through that much deeper lens of what we call well being. And typically we see well being referred to in the science and the data as opposed to wellness. So I kind of tend to feel that it's a slightly more rigorous subject. Well being as a more rigorous subject and wellness.

Matt Morley

Yeah, I get it. I like that. And we haven't touched on your location. But you obviously straddling two countries, in a sense between the UK and Dubai, the UAE. Now, how do you see those two locations differing in terms of interpretations of workplace well being? Are you seeing certain things that have much more relevance or importance in the UAE versus in the UK, for example, or vice versa?

Bobbi Hartshorne

You know, what, in many ways, it's not as different as you might expect. And there's some strengths and benefits to both that have sort of come out actually, in the last four or five months that I've observed, the thing we have to understand is that well being is universal. how we approach it, how we solve it, how we understand it, how we address it, the degree to which we're open to do that varies from culture, to culture, but the actual ingredients are factors that contribute to a human's well being are, are the same the world over. And, you know, our cities and any major city anywhere in the world that has a diverse cultural population is going to have issues and challenges and opportunities because of that. variance.

Bobbi Hartshorne

My, my gut feeling is that a lot of the issues are prevailing, the world over, they're not unique to particular cultures. So again, coming back to this shift from Hero leadership to servant leadership, that is happening in the West as much as it's happening here. race and gender inequalities that are still prevailing the world over old habits, dying hard in in kind of very highly bureaucratic, very highly hierarchical issues. These exists here as much as they exist in the West. For me, I think the only major hurdle is that there is probably a slightly delayed discourse here. And that may be the conversation hasn't been as open for as long in the Middle East, in the Gulf region, as it has been in the West. So people's kind of openness or understanding or literacy around the topic is maybe slightly lower here. But in some ways that actually map presents an opportunity for this region, because because the well being conversation and the understanding of well being has matured so quickly, and our data and best practice, evolution has been so fast. Actually, I find that sometimes the West is carrying a bit of old baggage in this space. And a little bit of like, Well, we've been on this journey for five years now. And nothing's changed or little has changed. And so there's a frustration there. Whereas the Gulf region is joining the conversation at a much more advanced stage and a much deeper understanding of the science behind it. And so they don't have to shed their baggage before they can engage at this higher level, which in many ways could present a really, really cool opportunity for them to leapfrog some of the resistance that we may be seeing in the West. And actually, that has definitely played out. I have had more attraction and interest and engagement from organizations in this region, including Saudi and the UAE than I have yet had in the UK, where you would expect the conversation to be much more mature.

Matt Morley

Nice. Sounds like you're you could be in the right place at the right time. So really insightful conversation. So thank you so much for your time, how can people reach out and contact you? Where can they find you online?

Bobbi Hartshorne

Yeah, so the best place to contact us is bewellwise.com we've got some really great free resources for people there, we've got a free to download white paper, which explores the current challenges with wellbeing and how to improve them. We've got a online self assessment tool where people can go in and answer a handful of questions and then get some tailored advice into their emails.

Matt Morley

Alright, listen, thanks so much for your time. It's been fun!

An introduction to biophilic design and wellbeing interior concepts

What is a green building vs a healthy building?

The real estate industry has increasingly shifted away from thinking exclusively about 'green buildings' and 'sustainable real estate' in what has been a quiet revolution over the last 10-15 years towards building occupant wellbeing and human health, extending the concept further to give a mix of Planet (green buildings) and People (healthy buildings).

What role do smart buildings play?

Aligned with that, we are increasingly looking at smart buildings too, so 'healthy, green and smart' are becoming the holy trinity of high performance real estate today in other words.

Thinking about a workplace, home, building, or an entire community that is healthy, green and smart means we have three possible levers to play with. Let's leave the smart slightly to the side for now.

Biophilic design in wellbeing interiors

When we're thinking about wellbeing interiors, there's been this massive shift towards appreciation for integrating nature into an indoor environment, a concept now typically referred to as biophilia, which is really just our innate connection to to the natural world and how increasingly urban environments, come with their own risks because we end up disconnected from where we came from.

Biophilic design brings the outside world back in. I started doing gyms and then branched out into coworking spaces, business clubs, offices and now entire buildings. The focus there is combining elements of both eco-friendly and sustainable interiors that are conscious of how an indoor environment’s materials, fabrics, plant count and so on can also affect occupant wellbeing.

What's fascinating is that the natural and organic are inherently healthy, just think about diet for example. So natural positioning for a brand or office interior in a Silicon Valley tech company is a fundamental piece of their workplace wellness and employee engagement strategies. Not not just doing less harm to the environment but actually giving something back to your people, to your employees who are spending their days there.

What are the benefits of biophilic design in the workplace?

Besides making just about any interior space more pleasant and uplifting, biophilic interior designers can make a workspace more productive for workers, helping with concentration with views onto nature, be it direct or indirect, living or a representation of nature in other words. Both work, as it turns out!

Biophilic spaces also foster feelings of vitality and by being connected to nature during the work day the research shows it promotes overall positivity. We also look for data, tangible results that highlight the impact of such biophilic design interventions, it’s not enough to rely o aesthetic improvements alone, we’re after functional health improvements here.

What data or science is there behind biophilic design’s benefits?

That's where the tech piece loops back in, increasingly all of this needs to be data driven and/or scientifically backed, delivering functional health benefits. One area of particular interest is indoor air quality, previously this was wrapped up in the wide-ranging healthy building certifications such as WELL Standard and Fitwel. Now though, we’ve seen dedicated air quality standards coming onto the market such as RESET AIR. This is a real sign of the times and holds the key to more widely available data around indoor air quality.

When you're dealing with a workplace, we don't have a standardized system of rankings for how healthy a space it is. The green building movement did make some progress in that sense, with certifications like LEED and BREEAM and various others all around the world starting the process off.

how do smart building certifications fit into this?

More recently we've had smart certification systems come into the market; I tend to use WIRED Score. They go in and make sure that everything within that building or workplace is future-proofed so that you can effectively integrate tech into your facilities management system, opening the door not just to high connectivity but also energy efficiencies, invaluable building usage data, and so on.

Air quality monitors produce data every hour that can be analyzed online and set-up to send alarm notifications whenever there is a change in air quality in a particular space, for example if something doesn’t look right in a particular meeting room because it has been full of workers for four hours straight and the ventilation system has started to play up. Technology gives us a real time view of the health credentials of a space, no matter its function.

Yes, there is a modest cost to all of this but once you're set up I think you then get into discussions around providing support for your occupants, guests or customers. You’ve made health a priority. Another tangible output is often productivity rates and less low-level anxiety.

Work doesn’t need to be about putting hours in at your desk in a specific corner of the office, it's about how much can you produce and what type of space(s) do you need to do your best work, adding value to the company’s bottom line in the process?

Does biophilic design have its own wellness building standard?

Biophilic design is a part of building standards such as LEED or BREEAM for example, there are components within them that give credits or recognition for integrating elements of biophilic design so rather than being a separate standard it appears as a feature, or a design strategy that we use to not just tick boxes on a standard’s check list but to deliver tangible aesthetic enhancements to an interiors space.

So in a sense, biophilia sits between the two worlds of green and healthy buildings, with wellbeing interior design on one side and sustainable design on the other. In other words, if I create a biophilic office or biophilic gym for example for a project pursuing LEED or WELL, it would secure points for both standards.

what about wellness lighting?

There has been real revolution in lighting systems over the last few years, and so there's a few different ways of looking at it one would be to say, okay, how can we, first of all, reduce energy expenditure with the lighting? That’s the easy part, we've been doing that for a little while now.

Then it becomes, ‘how can we enhance wellbeing through our lighting choices?’ That’s where smart lighting systems, exposure to natural daylight, even color therapy come in. It’s all about the spectrum of light we use, that affects our energy levels basically.

From a biophilic design perspective, I take inspiration from ancestral health practices, with a brighter blue-white light in the mornings and into the middle of the day, then softer, more amber hues or yellow and orange with no blue at all after dark. That means no TV and no bright halogen overhead lights please otherwise it disrupts sleeping patterns, that then results in decreased energy levels the next day, and we all know what feels like.

We see hotels engaging with that concept but workplaces are only really just catching on. How many of us have spent entire days in offices with intense blue-white halogen lights above us from nine o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock at night, then you go home and guess what, it's hard to switch off despite being tired!

If it’s dark at 5pm in winter, consider a task lamp on your desk combined with a softer uplighter on a wall or a standing lamp with a dimmer option. We want energy levels not to drop but we also need to protect the quality of our sleep once the work is done. It’s not that complicated really once you work it out.

how do you apply your knowledge to residential projects now?

I'm often dealing in quite large-scale projects, so it might be an eight-story mixed-use real estate development in London, an entire hotel or various fitness rooms and gyms in a health centre. When I have scale, I'm part of a team working alongside engineers, architects even interior design studios. Over the last year though I've been at home and so my challenge has been to take some of this big picture thinking and apply it to my own little world of a home office environment with wellbeing interiors and biophilic design principles.

I've created a home gym space as well as a home office in fact, applying the knowledge gained from commercial or hospitality projects and converting them into a residential context. What happens when you apply those ideas to your home environment where you now spend a lot more time than you did before?!

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Wellbeing Interiors Q&A with Matt Morley

Matt Morley in a rare seated moment at the MONTOYA creative co-working space in Barcelona, Spain

What was your career path into wellbeing interiors and healthy building consultancy?

I spent almost 10 years working for a real estate developer, so from a head of marketing role I eventually moved over into a Real Estate Creative Director role in-house for a development called Porto Montenegro. We built an entire town on the Adriatic coast, basically. I

I’d be called in to work with an architect, financial analyst and the operations department to design and launch new business concepts such as co-working offices, outdoor gyms, business clubs, retail stores, beach clubs and so on.

‘Give me a space and a budget and I'll create the concept for you!’

How did you end up combining nature, health and real estate interiors?

That was where I learned my trade, in a sense, but in parallel with that I was developing this interest in natural fitness, connecting with the outdoors both during exercise and through interior design.

The difference between how I felt when I was exercising in nature vs an uninspiring indoor gym became ever more clear. The same goes for office environments, so I started bringing in plants, using a standing desk and using various healthy design strategies to improve the spaces I spent most time in

Your way in to biophilic design was a combination of real estate knowledge, interior fit-out experience and a passion for nature, in other words?

Yes, although I wasn’t using the terms ‘biophilic design’, healthy buildings or wellbeing interiors back then, it was far more instinctual. In retrospect, that’s what made it all feel so urgent, my energy levels were so directly affected by the spaces I spent time in. I just didn't feel healthy in certain homes, offices or gyms. What could I do to change it?

I started hacking away at the subject, gradually realising that there was a whole school of thought largely led by the US around how to actually do wellness real estate and wellbeing interiors in a more structured way, as evidenced by the WELL Building Standard for example.

How did that lead to you setting up a health & fitness consultancy for hotel groups?

I set up my first company, Biofit, specializing in creating green and healthy gyms and wellness spaces. I now advise hotel groups and corporates around Europe on creating innovative fitness facilities and wellness activity programs for guests.

That was followed in 2019 with my second company, Biofilico, with a much broader scope, really going back to where I was before, creating a range of interior concepts but with an eco and wellness twist.

We also offer healthy building certifications and expert advisory to project teams on larger development projects or corporate offices.

What about this relatively new term of ‘Wellbeing Champion’, what does that involve?

More recently I’ve started playing the role of a Wellbeing Champion on bigger projects alongside developers, architects and HR teams, representing the voice of occupant health in other words and promoting strategies that can positively impact the wellness benefits of a building or interior.

What career path do you recommend for those who want to work in wellness interiors?

I had my own very particular way in to wellbeing interiors, there are others who have done very well having migrated across from a building engineering background, a sustainability consultant background and of course architects. All of them have a passion for working with nature though,

My particular angle on wellbeing interiors is through environmental design and the lived occupant experience combined with a strong real estate and corporate sustainability strategy perspective, that’s my magic sauce if you like!

What different responses are you seeing in the world of workplace wellbeing now post-COVID?

It’s quite hard to generalize at a country or regional level, possibly even at an industry level. I tend to think more in terms of brand culture and how a particular brand or organization applies their culture or mission and values to their response.

What I am seeing is more creative businesses such as fast moving tech startups and generally more youthful dynamic company cultures, and especially those linked to health and wellness, have all been early adopters of new more flexible approaches to working from home and flexible hours in general, where it’s about results rather than hours clocked up in front of a screen.

Contrast that with more traditional businesses that are pushing for return to the office no matter what.

From my perspective, there have to be some concessions at a building level. A structured approach I recommend goes beyond tactical, knee-jerk reactions such as ‘do we need plexiglass screens in between desks now’ or do we need more cubicles.

What about ESG in real estate? Is that relevant here?

Right, so the savvier companies are adopting an ESG strategy approach: Environmental, Social and Governance. Investors, pension funds and the like are all looking for ESG credentials in the businesses they back, creating pressure from above.

Then from below, HR teams are saying they want a healthier work environment for staff now. Bring those two together post COVID and suddenly we’re talking about indoor air quality in C-suite boardrooms in a way that wasn’t imaginable just two years ago.

Now everybody wants to know about indoor air quality and how an office environment can connect to a corporate ESG or CSR strategy.

It's been a really difficult year on so many levels and yet there does seem to be this amazing opportunity to slingshot off the back of all of this to a healthier built environment in the near future.

ESG reporting has just gone right to the top of the agenda and so if there is a silver lining to all this, for me it's that there are so many opportunities now to if not reinvent but certainly upgrade the the workplace environment in particular but also our homes and gyms, health centres even retirement homes.

How do you help workplaces evaluate or measure wellbeing interior interventions?

It’s typically a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, something like indoor air quality, for example, is very much quantitative, so installing air quality monitors around the workplace.

You can do a deep dive analysis of what's going on today, make a number of changes, effectively applying various biophilic design principles oriented towards improving the purity of the indoor air that we're breathing, things like changing the ventilation fan filters, removing any nasty materials and fabrics or upgrading certain pieces of furniture and replacing them with more natural alternatives.

Is it all about interiors and furniture or do building management policies have a role to play?

It’s definitely worth thinking about things like an eco-cleaning product policy and green procurement strategies so that going forward, anything that's coming in or bought for the workplace has been approved and signed off in terms of being chemical free and not off gassing nasty stuff into the indoor environment.

From there, you set up your indoor monitors and off you go, you've got data being produced on an hourly basis with a monitor on each floor and each key work zone that then gets analyzed in the cloud and you're set up for life.

How can an employee workplace survey help with wellbeing design?

Employee satisfaction within the workplace, done anonymously, can help us in identifying some of the softer stuff such as noise pollution, thermal comfort, bad odours, and so on all of which ca affect concentration levels negatively and therefore they damage the business in terms of productivity.

Open-plan offices are certainly not dead but clearly there are different types of work going on in the workplace that require different environments, such as solo deep work where you need to really zone in and focus, or more collaborative meetings that are all about engaging with others and bouncing ideas around creatively.

What type of a space does that require and how can biophilic design foster or promote the right outcomes?

You have also created a number of office recharge rooms in the past, what is the concept there?

In a sense this also answers the question around performance metrics for wellbeing interiors in the workplace. I did a project in London’s Canary Wharf to create a biophilic workspace or creative meeting room right by the water called The Wardian Case - Vitamin Nature space.

It was full of plants and we did a scientific research questionnaire with the University of Essex, and it was all about productivity, concentration levels, stress levels and a feeling of vitality.

Everybody spent at least an hour in the space, and we found across the board, positive responses on productivity, stress levels and concentration.

Office recharge rooms that use biophilic design are a really interesting way to convert a small space or unused office space into somewhere that can help with mental wellbeing during the work day, especially for creative workers.

Post COVID there's a real need for a focus on mental health in the workplace, making Biophilia a real trump card to play because connecting with nature has this amazing calming influence. It's instinctual!

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Is Biophilic Design about Sustainability or Wellbeing?

Can Ikigai home office by Biofilico wellbeing interiors

What is biophilic design?

The concept biophilic design can be a confusing name but actually it's very simple. In fact I'd argue there's perhaps nothing simpler because it's effectively our innate connection to the natural world.

So 'biophilia' = love of or connection to nature. If nature has been our partner in evolutionary history over the last, wherever you want to start from 200,000 years or a billion years, depending on how you look at it, we should just pause there for a second.

We're now in 2021, industrialization began a couple of hundred years ago, that marked a profound change on our evolutionary path that has meant we're increasingly disconnected from our partner in evolutionary history, Mother Nature. It's hard to underestimate the impact of this diversion in our respective paths.

My argument is that the further we move away from the natural path the more at risk we put both our own physical and mental wellbeing and also it turns out, that of our host planet as well.

What role do green buildings / healthy buildings have in biophilic design?

This is where biophilic design connects with sustainability and environmentally-friendly thinking.

If we accept the premise that we're endangering our relationship with the planet, biophilic design is a way to rectify in some small way, that disconnect between our living environments that previously were just natural spaces, and the reality of living, working and playing in a dense urban environment.

Our home or office may well be in a high-rise, city centre building, yet how can we still maintain that connection to nature, that has been proven to be so fundamental to our mental and physical wellbeing?

Biophilic design in a workplace for example, is not just about sustainability, a green building strategy to give something back to the planet; by bringing the outside world in biophilic interiors are also about wellbeing design for the office. Healthy buildings are all about making our real estate as positive as possible for our own health.

Healthy interior design and nature

Our work and home environments can and should be healthy places to spend 8-12 hours a day, it's that simple, anything less simply isn't good enough any more.

The closer you can get to a natural indoor environment, be it in a workplace or residential context, the healthier that space is going to be for you mentally and physically.

Think of biophilic design as as a hybrid solution that combines elements of healthy building or wellness interior principles, with green building concepts.

Whereas we've had 25 years of green buildings and sustainable real estate development, over the last 10 years there's been a shift towards wellness real estate and workplace wellness design that connects to the environment. It's a subtle but important shift in perspective.

Biophilia is interesting, indeed biophilic design is interesting because as an expert consultant I straddle those two worlds. You often get people who are specialists in green buildings or healthy buildings, my approach combines elements of the two.

Organic design in biophilia

The first key concept then is 'organic design', finding ways to integrate natural elements back into our offices and homes. That can be real life nature but it can also be representations of nature, artworks, sculptures, natural materials or other ways to give you a visual connection that isn't actually a living photosynthesising plant!

Wellbeing interiors in biophilia

Secondly, it's about using nature to create wellbeing interiors for offices and homes, which involves for example, focusing on ways to bring the indoor air quality in line with what one would find in a forest, beach or mountain setting - as pure as it can get in other words. Definitely not what it's like in downtown London, LA or Shanghai on a busy. Monday morning.

A Wellbeing Champion for healthy materials

As a Wellbeing Champion on a project, we also consider the selection of sustainably sourced natural materials as a central part of wellbeing interiors and biophilic design.Healthy materials like these don't off-gas or contain any nasty chemicals, that in turn will damage the air quality and pose a low-level health risk for building occupants. Typically the more natural and organic matter a fabric or material contains, the cleaner and healthier it will be.

Movement and fitness in biophilic design

We were born to move, that's part of our evolutionary history so how can biophilic design prompt small amounts of almost unconscious movement into our workspaces into our daily life?

Whilst we are in the office there's some clever things we can do there that don’t necessarily involve designing a gym, ‘active design’ involves strategies to help prompt people to be just that little bit more active in their workspace. For example standing desks, walking meetings, engaging stairwell design to create a viable alternative to the lift, a mix of work areas that might even include a room for stretching and yoga or meditation, if not a few weights and a barbell!

Nourishment in biophilic design in the office

This can be as simple as using displays of fresh fruit and vegetables as prompts, as a way to encourage people to think, eat, drink, healthy. Consider how to encourage water consumption, low-sugar fresh fruit juices and eve vegetable juices as a way to maintain energy levels throughout the day rather than reaching for a chocolate bar or Diet Coke.

Wellness lighting in a healthy office design

A lighting system it can be a smart system that is in tune with our circadian rhythms which is basically our 24 hour cycle. So, for example things like in winter after dark, it’s best not to use glaring white, blue or gree lights ss you might find in say a hospital emergency room.

Instead we’re trying to find ways to smooth that path to complete rest with softer more amber tones to improve your sleep quality at night, and certainly not disrupt your sleep while still giving you enough light to be energized and deliver on your work i the latter half of the day, or if working late i the office.

So just really taking inspiration from the natural world, and finding ways to integrate that into the workplace experience.

What is the role of a biophilic design in real estate?

Biofilico creates environments that are promote productivity while reducing low levels of stress and anxiety during the work day, primarily that's done through the workplace environment interventions described above but what I'm seeing is, if you take a slightly more health oriented approach it can also be applied to other sectors.

At the moment we’re looking at later life residential concepts for example, so almost like upscale retirement homes where actually it's all about health and living well. Private health clinics, I'm looking at now, as well, and definitely residential, where I'm able to apply the same principles are the same. We all want to live well, feel good and be healthy, right?

So where do we spend most of our time? In our residences, workplaces and for some of us more than others, quite a bit of time in the gym as well! Those are my three sectors of interest.

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FURTHER READING:

World GBC Health & Wellbeing Framework for green & healthy buildings

Biophilia in healthy buildings

The role of biophilic design in healthy interiors

The real estate industry has increasingly shifted away from thinking exclusively about 'green buildings' and 'sustainable real estate', this has been a quiet revolution over the last 10-15 years towards building occupant wellbeing and human health as well, not replacing but rather extending the concept further. This then gives you a mix of Planet (green buildings) and People (healthy buildings).

Healthy, green and smart buildings

Aligned with that, we are increasingly looking at smart buildings too, so 'healthy, green and smart' are becoming the holy trinity of high performance real estate today in other words. Thinking about a workplace or a home or a building, or an entire community that is healthy, green and smart.

Benefits of Biophilia in real estate

For me at least, within that space of sustainability and wellbeing in buildings and interiors, there's been this massive shift towards integrating nature into an indoor environment, typically referred to as biophilia, which is really just our innate connection to to the natural world and how increasingly urban environments, come with their own risks because we end up disconnected from nature, so biophilia or biophilic design brings the outside world back into our urban, indoor environments.

Biofilico started doing gyms and then branched out into co working spaces and business clubs and offices and now entire buildings, but really the focus there is combining elements of the eco friendly and sustainable, a consciousness about the impact we’re having on the planet, from the materials to the types of fabrics that we're bringing in, and how many plants are in there, and so on.

Nature = healthy interiors

What’s fascinating is that the natural is often the healthy too, so if you think about diet for example, the more natural and organic your ingredients the better the nutritional value. The same concept can be applied, in an abstract way, to our office and home environments.

You're seeing all of these Silicon Valley startups going big on biophilic design in their workplace wellness and employee engagement strategies for that same reason.

A lot of it's about giving something back to staff, not just doing less harm to the environment but actually giving something back to the people, to your employees who are spending time in the workplace every day by making it generally more pleasant and by implication a more productive for them to work in.

This approach helps with concentration levels too, it's been shown that if you can reconnect a little with nature during your work day rather than sitting in a white box all day long, then it actually helps to restore energy levels, it gives feelings of vitality.

Biophilic design research - health benefits

There's a lot of research out there around the positivity that a biophilic interior in your home or office can engender and so now we're seeing this happy balance in interiors today.

We’re looking for the science and the data to back all this up. That's where tech comes back into the discussion as we need to deliver functional benefits, so not just form and aesthetics but functional mental and physical health benefits.

Like any good interior design it all needs to look good whilst having minimal impact on the environment, plus we are aiming for tangible improvements in emotional and physical wellbeing for the occupiers of the space in question, be it an office, a home or even a gym.

Well building certifications

In the same way that you have your star ratings for hotels, when you're dealing with a workplace, there hasn't really been any standardized system in terms of ensuring that there is adequate consideration taken for workplace wellbeing, or generally creating a healthy environment for workers.

The green building movement did that to an extent, via certifications like LEED and BREEAM and various others all around the world. Then came the wellness certification rating systems such as WELL, FITWEL and RESET. More recently we've seen the emergence of smart building certifications, the one I use is WIRED SCORE.

They really go in and just make sure that everything within that building or workplaces is set up so that it is future proofed so that can you can effectively integrate tech into your facilities management system, a lot of it then goes into the FM facilities management, and you're then looking for efficiencies in terms of how a building is operated so that you're reducing energy expenditure at lower times of usage, when there's less occupancy in a space, whether it's an office or hotel or, or an entire building and creating a more touchless environment so that most things can be done and delivered via an app or via technology instead of old school manual options.

What is indoor air quality in the context of a healthy building?

Indoor air quality data comes down to your air quality monitors, Biofilico is certified in RESET AIR - a protocol for installing certain types of high-grade monitors in certain locations around a building or interior space, ensuring the data is delivered to the RESET cloud for ongoing analysis, you then have a lot of alarms that go off if anything looks unusual, you can overlay that data with occupancy data and start to see if there's something happening in this meeting room because they've been in there for four hours without a window open and there’s a problem with the ventilation, for example.

Wellness tech is now allowing us a real time view of the healthy credentials of a space. Yes it requires a modest investment upfront on behalf of the building owner or the tenant, but really once you're set up you provide support for your guests, customers, occupants or residents, giving them reassurance that you're taking their health to heart and that it's a priority.

When you look at the costs of staffing and rent, a minor increase in healthy interior enhancements can really make a tangible difference, especially to productivity rates. People are breathing fresher air, they're more likely to be do quality creative work. It's no longer about putting hours in at your desk in a specific, dedicated corner of the office, it's about how much can you produce and what quality work can you produce around the building, , moving between areas as needed to adapt to the type of work you are doing at any one time during the work day.

Biophilic design in building certification standards

Biophilic design is less an alternative than an integral component of the green building and healthy building movements. So if you're looking at LEED or BREEAM, there are components within them both that give credit or recognition for integrating elements of biophilic design, such as landscaping, gardens, views of nature, plant walls, and so on.

Biophilic design is a strategy that we use to not just tick boxes but to deliver value and enhancements to a space and what's interesting about it that is straddles both worlds, the green and the healthy, wellbeing design and sustainable design. So that same strategy can be applied to both of those two different types of certification standards and you gain credits for both.

Lighting strategies in healthy buildings

There's been some real revolution in lighting systems over the last few years. How can we, first of all, reduce energy expenditure with the lighting? That's the easy part, we've been doing that for a little while, then you say okay how can we enhance wellbeing through smart lighting systems and really you get into color therapy, there, playing with the light spectrums on offer at different times of day to connect with our innate circadian rhythm.

So thinking about, say, a brighter blue white light. In the mornings, which is when the sun is high as we're getting up to the middle of the day and then towards the end of the day, a softer, more Amber yellow or orange hue, and removing all the blue white lights later at the end of the day so we're not disrupting sleep patterns.

How many of us have spent days in offices with these intense blue white halogen lights above us from nine o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock at night, then you go home and it's hard to switch off! A different type is more appropriate after dark, especially in winter.

How does Biofilico apply these concepts to a home setting?

A typical project might be an 8-story mixed use real estate development in London or the health and fitness offer for entire hotel. At a larger scale, I'm part of a team and there's mechanical engineer consultants, architect studios and interior design teams involved as well..

Recently though, we’ve applied this thinking to Can Ikigai in Barcelona, Biofilico’s home base, with a home gym set-up, a biophilic home office and a wabi-sabi organic interior concept design. This has meant applying some of the knowledge that we have from healthy buildings and wellness in the workplace to a residential context.

Contact us for help with your office, home, hotel or gym project

Interview for 'Future of Workplace Wellbeing' webinar

Matt Morley on the Future of Workplace Wellbeing

FREE webinar registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/7716129787897/WN_AHVNM-q-SKCVoJzk5mfi6A

Matt, can you describe what you do in regards to workplace wellness in a sentence?

I can try! It took me a long time to get there but basically I’m about creating green and healthy spaces, so I combine design and operational strategies to help make offices geared for wellbeing and sustainability.

What will you be discussing at the upcoming Future of Workplace Wellbeing seminar?

It’s already shaping up to be a really promising line-up and I’m delighted to be contributing my thoughts to the panel. I’ll likely focus on tangible improvements that can be made to the work environment itself, in order to offer practical inspiration to HR teams, Brand Managers and Office Managers concerned about the now imminent return to work.

One thing’s for sure, there has never been a more pertinent time to make office upgrades of this kind, employees are quite frankly looking for signs of understanding from their employers now that we have all grasped the risks associated with spending so much time in close contact with colleagues.

The benefits still far outweigh the risks in my view but every office needs to adapt to the new reality. Debate about how to create a safe and healthy workplace is here to stay.

Which workplace wellbeing trend gets you the most excited at the moment?

I’ve been talking about biophilia and biophilic design for 5-6 years now but it feels like this concept is finally ‘having a moment’ as more and more workplaces are catching on post-pandemic.

Essentially it’s about bringing the outside world into our built environment to harness nature’s mental and physical health benefits; so while I may be known for creating the world’s first biophilic gym back in 2017 those same principles can be applied to any type of indoor space, and ultimately we spend most of our time in our homes and in the office, so it is there that we’er seeing the most innovation at the moment.

How does biophilic design connect with the future of workplace wellbeing in your view?

For me, biophilic design combines elements of sustainability and wellbeing via its nature-first approach to materials, colours, sounds, textures and scent. It’s not just landscaping or putting plants on desks, as some might think, the deeper you go into the principles behind this design philosophy the more it gives back and the greater the impact can be. Recently i’ve been geeking out on innovative bio-materials from fruit skins and algae for example!

So why is this important? We’re looking to boost productivity and concentration while reducing anxiety and stress amongst employees and, just as importantly, respecting the environment in the process. It’s a lot to think about, I recognise that but it is absolutely within reach for most offices.

What are the intended outputs of this particular workplace wellbeing strategy?

Pretty quickly I realised that data illustrating the benefits of biophilic design was going to be key when pitching this concept to a CFO or CPO so in 2018 I carried out a research study with the University of Essex and EcoWorld Ballymore, a real estate developer with a biophilic residential building in Canary Wharf.

We created a ‘Vitamin Nature space’, or recharge room, and invited local professionals in during their lunch hour, or for a team meeting or workshop and the results were so encouraging!

There is this innate connection in all of us to natural spaces, it’s an evolutionary thing, just think of the hundreds of thousands of years of history in which our ancestors’ survival depended entirely on their understanding of edible plants, wild animals, dangerous insects, the seasons, weather cycles and more.

Arguably there is nowhere better to bring some of this biophilia back into our lives than in soulless office interiors in a dense urban environment.

What workplace wellbeing project has had the biggest impact on you recently?

I have an ongoing advisory role with Black Mountain Partners in London, a real estate development fund currently re-launching a Grade A heritage building overlooking London Bridge with a gym, restaurant, rooftop bar and, crucially, eight floors of offices.

For this long-term client I manage their Placemaking & ESG, so i’m working very much at a strategic level with the CEO to align the fund’s activities with ESG, both at corporate and building level.

ESG fundamentally influences not just how the business is run and the team is managed but also impacts the work being done by architects, engineers, interior designers and facilities management.

On smaller scale consultancy projects I’m often alone, doing both the strategy and the creative implementation at office-level, or I’m working in partnership alongside a local interiors team (as was the case for the Hero natural foods office project in Switzerland).

For Black Mountain Partners though, I don’t touch any of that directly but I do get to work with the biggest names in the business; it’s a high stakes game!

What’s your workplace wellbeing practice of choice?

It would have to be Active Design - it’s about being active at work, not so much working out at work (although that certainly does no harm if the opportunity is there!) instead it’s about using the stairs not the lift, adapting to a standing desk rather than a chair, moving between deep work spaces and more collaborative zones in the office according to the task in hand rather than being locked in a private office, using a bike to get to and from the office, walking outside at lunchtime for a bite to eat, and so on.

Contact us here to discuss your workplace wellbeing project

Restorative Mindfulness in the Workplace

The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast explores sustainability, wellbeing and community in real estate and hospitality.

This episode is with Yinshi, a company promoting restorative mindfulness in the workplace.

The Role of Restorative Meditation in Workplace Wellness

Today I’m with Leigh Chapman, Founder of Yinshi, a workplace wellness start-up focused on facilitating meditation at work. 

His business model is both hardware and software, providing physical meditation pods that can provide a safe haven for an office worker to escape to for a little quiet time, as well as a suite of services to facilitate and encourage a greater acceptance and understanding of the value meditation can bring to the workday.

We discuss the pros and cons of open-plan offices on mental health, the benefits of biophilic design, micro-napping at work, the ‘Six Whys of Meditation’, how mindfulness improves productivity and the human-centric office post-Covid. 

yinshi.co.uk

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Today I'm with Leigh Chapman, Founder of Yinshi, a workplace wellness start-up focused on facilitating meditation at work. His business model is both hardware and software, providing physical meditation pods that can provide a safe haven for an office worker to escape to for a little quiet time, as well as a suite of services to facilitate and encourage a greater acceptance and understanding of the value meditation can bring to the workday.

A full transcript follows courtesy of Otter.ai - apologies for any typos lost in translation!

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Welcome to Episode 14 of the green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellness and sustainability in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of BioBlu sustainability, Biofilico wellness interiors, and Biofit nature gyms.

Today, I'm with Leigh Chapman, founder of Yinshe, a workplace wellness startup focused on facilitating meditation. at work. His business model is both hardware and software, providing physical meditation pods that offer a safe haven for an office worker to escape for a little quiet time, as well as a suite of services to facilitate and encourage greater acceptance and understanding of the value meditation can bring.

To the work day, we discussed the pros and cons of open plan offices or mental health, the benefits of biophilic design, one of my favourite topics, micro napping at work, what he calls the six Whys of meditation, and how mindfulness is linked to productivity, and his views on the human centric office post COVID. It's an interesting conversation.

He's a super bright guy, with big plans to make an impact on the workplace in London. If you like this type of content, please consider subscribing…..

So, Leigh thanks for joining us. I'm excited to talk to you today. I'm really keen to hear more about your your new business inchie. So perhaps you could give a quick intro to what you're doing and the products that you currently have on the market.

Leigh Chapman 2:05

Hi, Matt. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for thanks very much for having me. Today, really excited to talk to you. So yeah, just give you a quick, quick overview. He and she is a product service solution, all sorts of different things, which is primarily born out of the need to combat the issues that we've got stress and mental health in society in general today, which cost the UK economy up to 45 billion a year.

And obviously, that's a societal wide problem, but we look specifically workspaces and how we can improve and help contribute to better workspaces. And part of that is about the appropriate spaces or having the appropriate spaces for physical, mental health.

And in particular, we are really passionate advocates, advocates of meditation. And that comes from, from my backstory, I won't go into it too deeply. But I found meditation at a time when I was suffering from stress quite badly at work, difficult points in my life. And helped so profoundly, I can't begin to tell you hopefully, we'll get into that a little bit later.

But the problem that I had was that I couldn't find space to do it every day. And in actual fact, at the time, I was doing a type of meditation, which required you to practice twice a day.

So if you couldn't find a space to do it in the morning, then, you know, there was even harder to find a space later in the day, because offices just for most offices just aren't cut out or designed to have that type of space for mental wellness.

And I had the typical problem where I would find myself in the toilets, once a day, trying to find some kind of peace and someone in the cubicle next to me trying their best to not let me find some peace. And one day I just had a bit of a spark a light bulb, and just thought this gotta be a better way of doing this, really. So that's where the idea was born.

And we our main products are meditation pods that provide a quiet, peaceful, private, secure space for people to meditate in their own time. And we suppose we're kind of retrofitting these spaces into offices, because it would be great if they were designed in that way in the first place. And those kind of aspects of well being well thought about and integrated into the design process, they obviously starting to be which is great.

And some offices do have areas for for meditation, but not many. And actually, those areas that they do have sometimes aren't ideal because a lot of people have a self a sense of self consciousness that they can't get over and end up don't using those spaces at all. So our spaces are a little bit more private than that.

So yeah, we're kind of retrofit retrofit in these spaces in So offices really and and trying to make a meaningful contribution to people's mental health and stress levels while they're at work.

Matt Morley 5:08

Okay, so a couple of things you mentioned that I thought were worth picking up on. Clearly, the subtext to that is that the shift towards more open plan offices, one of the side effects of that has been there is effectively a limit to the number of spaces or options available to someone where they can have a private moment where they can

Yeah, just just pull away from, from the hub. And I think that's the challenge for that has become the challenge more recently around workplace wellness, and particularly around design and layout for a lot of sort of the big corporates is, is how you balance that that sort of free flowing movement, hot hot desks and what have you, but also creating enough areas of privacy. So clearly, in a way you're responding to that because there are fewer people in their own private offices now than there were, say 20 years ago, right. So in a sense, it's a response to that or a solution to that problem.

Leigh Chapman 6:09

Yeah, definitely. I think there's, there's a lot been said about open plan offices isn't the real Marmite kind of area, some people love them. Some people, some people hate them. And you're right, there's so much good about them, you know, I can talk about things like collaboration, creativity, ideas that are sparked through random encounters, that kind of stuff.

But you know, there is the flip side as well, and that they aren't good for everyone's mental health, I don't think they don't suit every type of personality. I don't know, if you listen to Bruce daisley at all. He's SVP of Twitter, in the UK, and he does a lot of stuff around working environments. And that's the company's kind of thing. Now, he's really interesting.

He came out with quite an amusing comment on one of his podcasts recently, which was open plan offices are the best way to get everyone in the company to absolutely hate each other very quickly. Because there's so many things that really wind people up about those spaces. You could be sitting next to someone and you know, you don't get any work done for an hour, because all they want to talk about is you know, what happened in, you know, the Queen's gambit last last night or something like that.

So they don't say absolutely everyone, I think there is an acknowledgment of that. Now, I think people are starting to question that. It can be really interesting to see how the workplace evolves, I think when we go back, post COVID, and all the challenges that that's obviously going to throw up. And it'll be really interesting to see how people start to re examine those a lot more when they're thinking about office design, and what's really sort of best for our productivity and mental health at the same time.

Matt Morley 7:46

So even before COVID, this was a year and a half, two years ago, I was involved in a sort of biophilic design consultancy project for a big corporate in Switzerland, just outside of Zurich. In fact, they do natural foods, and they're all in there were completely into this whole space, but they had a big big issue with the headquarter building around acoustics.

And it was it got right to the top of the tree and that the the global HR director was was really pushing hard to try and address the problems around acoustics, sound levels, background noise. And it got to the point where by you know, we needed to take sort of quite drastic measures we created with sort of acoustic panels all over the place, acoustic paints, acoustic underlays, for the carpets, all kinds of things.

And then in fact, we ended up with a what we call the wellness room, which was effectively a mini space dedicated to, to just kind of chilling out in a sense. So clearly, that's something that's that we're seeing emerging on the market.

But to describe your your pods a bit more in detail, then like, this is a space that you sort of you literally walk into and in a way cut yourself off, right, and you have that quiet moment in a dedicated space by yourself. Whereas a wellness room, you know, might be other people in there in silence or not. But then in one of your pods, it really is a sort of personal moment, right?

Leigh Chapman 9:11

Yeah, exactly. And you know, we're not saying by any means that wellness rooms are not a good idea. And they of course, are totally open for, you know, people to use those and harness them in the way that works for their mental health in the best way.

But you know, a lot of people it doesn't work. And like I said before, there's just too much of a sense of self security for them to go in there and really, properly relax and switch off. So. So our environments on our pods are designed to be a little bit more private.

They're hard to describe verbally, I'd say to anyone, probably best to go to our website. If you just Google the inchie you'll find that quite easily and you'll be able to see them. There's two two parts that we've designed The word pod one is a kind of an open circular spiral design. It's made with birch plywood, which we chose for it's kind of calming natural materials and colours, as well as it kind of feeling quite restorative as well.

And it's a biomimetic design, which is inspired by the golden ratio, which I'm sure you've heard of before, which is a really common sort of spiral pattern found throughout nature, from galaxies down to plants, and the way they kind of pattern out spiral. And enter in the pod is really a bit of a journey, I suppose we were trying to create its likes of what we wanted to do was it really feel like you were stepping out of your current environment into a different one, one that was more instantly more relaxing, and you could straightaway just feel a little bit more ease and breathe more easily.

And we supply noise cancelling headphones as well, really comfortable noise reducing headphones that come with guided meditations, as well as sleep enhancing audio, because we believe in micro napping, as well as lots of studies that, that back that up is a really useful tool as well.

Matt Morley 11:07

Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Because it's, it's, I've seen some interesting stuff coming out around lactation pods or lactation rooms. For young mums who bring their kids to school at camp, their kids don't go to school, so they bring their kid into the with a baby into the office. And then obviously, in parallel with that yet sleeping pods or giving staff within the Office permission to have let's say, a power nap during the day. And then so in a sense, I can see how the your pods would would really fit into that.

So a lot of it then clearly is about having or sensing that there is permission to do this. Right? And so how do you how do you pitch the and obviously around sleep and the sort of the 20 to 30 minute power nap there's there's lots of research around that when you when you talk about meditation in terms of its benefits for restoring concentration levels?

Or what are the the touch points that you tend to fall back on when you're when you're talking about specifically meditation as opposed to going outside for a walk or having a coffee or, or whatever else someone might do to try and relax at some point, say mid afternoon when they have that energy dip.

Leigh Chapman 12:22

Hmm, yeah, good question. It's a bit hard to know where to start the story on this one sometimes, because you can come in at very different points in different angles. But I think everyone has probably heard this sort of anecdote about the amygdala, right, the part of our brain, which is the reptilian brain, which Yeah, kind of responsible for our fight or flight responses. And works by activating cortisol in our system for when we do need that fight or flight response.

And it was kind of designed for us to you know, fend off woolly mammoths, rather than actually deal with having 152 on opened emails in our inbox. And that's kind of what it's doing at the moment, right to us. We're working ridiculously crazy hours, a lot of us under high pressure, stressful jobs. And cortisol is just bad for us in so many different ways. You know, it's been shown to increase anxiety, depression, have physiological issues, digestive problems, headaches, heart disease, sleep problems, lots and lots of different health issues that that's attributed to.

But the good news story in all this is that we can change all that, you know, in terms of how we actually change the neuro plasticity of our brains, to rewire them to react differently to external pressures that we face on a day to day basis.

And meditation is one of the ways that you can do that. And we talk about when I actually go into companies and try and launch the part and embed meditation as a practice, we talk about the six Whys of meditation. And they are reduces stress, improves attention and creativity, the fact that it's foundational wellbeing practice, the fact that successful people are doing it, which I'll come on to a bit more in a second. The factor is great for relationships.

And also the last one, which is a little bit tongue in cheek, but you look younger, which I'll come on to, in a bit with detail in a second. The reduce stress one is kind of linked to what I just said about quarters up.

And there's there's all sorts of studies that have been shown that just one week of 20 minutes a day of meditation leads to a significantly slower response in our amygdala during meditation, which is kind of interesting in its own right, but actually, when you look up studies that went a bit further, they showed that eight weeks lead to the same effect during a baseline states and not just when you are during meditation, but slower amygdala response rate when you actually just ignore Your day to day level of consciousness.

And the second one I mentioned was about improved creativity and attention. And there's studies on that as well that show free 10 minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase attention skills in a control group.

And then other studies around open monitoring meditation, which is kind of like body scan meditation. And that was shown to stimulate divergent thinking, which is a really key driver of creativity, which is the type of income using brainstorms and coming up to Business Solutions. The third was a foundational wellbeing practice.

So meditation didn't just help with, you know, being good in meditation in itself. And the other aspects I've mentioned already, it helps with all aspects of life, you know, you look at the different spheres of wellness, you know, it's not just kind of spiritual, emotional, psychological, but you've got physical, environmental, financial, occupational, social.

And this is one of the biggest things for me about meditation. Because it has a positive feedback, loop effects and all these different areas, you know, once you start meditating, you tend to have better decision making and better intuition. And that creates a bit of a domino effect across these different areas.

So when you're making better decisions, you start to eat more healthfully. When you're eating more healthfully, you do more exercise, you do more exercise, you sleep better, and so on, and so on. And all these areas tend to have like a compound feedback effect, which, which just gets better and better in all the different areas.

And I think this is really critical for businesses, because one of those areas is relationships. And what meditation tends to do is, just puts that slight barrier between the thought and the action sometimes so rather than getting blown around, you know, in the in the winds of your emotions and thoughts, it just gives you that extra seconds sometimes to be aware that actually, this is an emotion that I can be detached from, I can observe it, I can decide how to react to this.

And I've only wish I discovered this early on in my life and avoided some of the compensations that I've unnecessarily had at work, I think. So I think just about building better relationships and a more harmonious kind of work environment, I think it's really, really helpful.

Matt Morley 17:21

I think there's a lot in that I really do. And I've come to think of my modest meditation practice of, you know, 20 minutes a day, as really the the other side of the coin of, of an ongoing, yeah, essentially sort of therapy.

The two really do go together working on understanding your own triggers, and your own the baggage that we're all carrying around with us. I think in a way, you know, there's just so much being put out there right now around the benefits of mindfulness, the benefits of meditation, that I think there's a good, good chance you sort of ride that wave.

You mentioned Silicon Valley, and a lot of those big tech companies are are the innovators, you know, that the first on board, when it comes to biophilic design are the first on board when it comes to workplace wellness, and they're really leading the way. So no doubt, you know, it will be, it will be a very interesting pitch to be in on when you when you get in front of someone Amazon or Facebook, for example, forget your pods in there, but thinking sort of slightly more of a wider market, you know, into sort of London's corporate world of legal offices and insurers and so on, or even banking offices.

How would you How would you imagine if there were, say, a well being champion within that business, who was able to at least get you, you know, introduction in there. And then obviously, the questions start coming up around what, you know, how do we, how do we know?

How do we monitor its use? Or how do we know beyond someone sitting there all day watching to see how many people are going in or coming out? How long people spend? How could you collect some kind of data to corroborate or at least show that it's being out well adopted by by the staff on that particular floor? Or within that building?

Leigh Chapman 19:08

Yeah, it's a really crucial point, Matt, and something that I've thought about a lot from the start of this and how we bake that into into the offerings. I don't think enough companies are tracking this in terms of the wellness space.

And the industry does sort of get let down by that, I think, and some people do have a slightly sceptical view of some of the wellness offerings as a result and I think really important for internal stakeholders, obviously to have that justification and take people on the on the journey with them and have that story and, you know, data to sort of back up that yes, this is working is providing us some some return on investment and some value.

You know, when we instal the pod, we make sure it's got a booking calendar set up with it so we can tell occupancy rates and who's using it. So repeat usage. You know, we need to kind of market it or make the awareness of it more known to who who aren't using it currently. And then, you know, obviously, qualitative measures, like employee feedback are really useful as well, you know, the anecdotal measurements such as, you know, people's performance, who are using it, like self assessment in terms of their well being.

And then also, you know, we do offer to sort of help advise on more, especially larger scale testing to assess the effectiveness of it as well, which isn't always possible for some companies. But there's some amazing studies out there at the moment, you know, there was a famous one in the US by insurance company, Aiden, who showed that the introduction of a mindfulness programme led to an extra $3,000 a year in productive productivity from their, from their teams, you know, so that so there are also large scale testing programmes that you can put in place to measure that. And also be really looking at stuff like healthcare costs, you know, the reduced amount of claims that they see as a result of that this is a preventative medicine, really.

nd then you'd have reduced rates of absenteeism, presenteeism things like staff turnover. Yeah, there's all kinds of sorts of things that you can measure, it really depends how how deep they want to go. Really?

Matt Morley 21:20

Yeah, that makes sense. And to be fair, I'm putting you on the spot there. But the reality is from the, from the owner or developer, or from the corporate side, you know, clearly there is no one answer to these problems. It's a it's a case of creating a nurturing environment that fosters productivity and creativity and positive relationships.

And there is no magic bullet for that. It's about putting a number of strategies in place of which I'm fully convinced that meditation kind of should have a seat at the table, for sure. I'm just wondering, you know, clearly, we're discussing this within the context of a global pandemic, that looks like it's going to have an impact, the lasting impact on the return to work, but not just that, in terms of also, you know, how we how we use offices in future, I'm wondering how you've had to adapt your business strategy over the last year, or how you add a date how you see things over the next year, because it could well be that you get a sort of slingshot effect off the back of all of this right with an increased interest on behalf of on behalf of businesses in, in creating innovative, interesting and engaging workspaces, right, where meditation can be a part of that.

Leigh Chapman 22:36

Yeah, absolutely. And he gets it. Yeah, it's an incredibly interesting time, like you say, you know, I think there's a short term, medium term change, and then a long term change as well. I've read a blog post recently, actually, around this exact topic, actually called human centric offices.

You know, it looks undoubtable, that we're going to be going back to a sort of more hybrid approach. You know, I think the the stats have been coming out overwhelmingly in favour of that, I think there was a yougov survey recently, which showed I think, four in 10. People, you know, want to don't want to sort of carry on in the same way as it was before.

So there's some, there's some really compelling reasons for, for going back to the office, but also some compelling reasons for how we can sort of carry on all the goodness that we've got from this remote work and experience.

Because I think, you know, this, it works for more experienced sort of staff, you know, with this remote working, but we've got to remember that there's, there's a whole swathe of of people coming into work at the moment who are missing out on that sort of face to face collaboration, the relationships, you know, we spoke about, you know, being able to solve complex problems, the ease of conversation, you know, not dropping out halfway through because of bad Wi Fi, all that kind of stuff. So there's lots of good reasons for getting people back to the office.

But I think we need to kind of convince people a little bit, and certainly people who are kind of resistant to that at the moment. So I think there's a short to medium term job to do that. And part of that is making sure mental health is put as a key priority. Obviously, there's all sorts of kind of measures that we can put in place to that.

And I think there was a study done by the Prince's Trust youth index recently that showed it one in four people have been unable to cope during the pandemic. And there's obviously huge mental health issues that are going to have to be addressed.

So mental health really needs to be at the top of the agenda and enticing people back making them feel comfortable about coming back to work or the safety measures that that obviously have to be put in place as part of that are also critical. I think, looking at sort of more medium to long term. Really this idea about and it's something we've been seeing, obviously already, but I think it's only going to accelerate this idea about the office being a destination And somewhere we really kind of want to actually go into and we see some value in it and we see some some positive kind of mental health benefits from it at the same time, this idea about kind of premium eyes in the office. Similarly, I think the to sort of go hand in hand, and all the all the subjects that obviously, you know, close to your heart, like biophilic design are going to be really crucial here.

But you know, other stuff like, you know, almost like ideas, like making the office like more of a Art Gallery, you know, making it interactive, making it more experiential, making it very shareable. You know, I think there's going to be huge talent flight to companies that really get that right. And clearly, you know, we're not going to need quite as much space as we did before, in the medium to long term because of this new balance between working in the office and working at home.

So I think there's a real opportunity, and I think people are starting to really sort of cottoned on to that. And hopefully, yeah, we can, we can be part of the solution for for people that want to be involved in that as well.

Matt Morley 26:03

Another trend that you're you're nicely positioned to, to fit in with, I think is around the shift to environmental, social and governance or ESG, oriented policies at the real estate developer and an owner, landlord level.

There's, there's details in there now with the latest ESG guidelines, particularly around mental health, and the idea of there being a mental health officer, someone who's done a modest piece of training around understanding how to help someone who, if there isn't a full HR department available, at least there's someone there who's kind of the dedicated go to person that you can, you can talk to you and I think, you know, these systems, I know I've mentioned it to you offline previously around the kind of green building and healthy buildings certification systems, for sure, are a way to sense kind of encourage the industry to move in the right direction.

So that then leads me on to the idea of the green buildings and sort of the materials and you mentioned briefly how you're you're producing or the materials that you're using for the pots in terms of like the manufacturing process itself. Talk to us just briefly about how you've, you've gone about that because you're effectively it is a product you manufacturing in the UK, are you manufacturing abroad and importing like what's what's your current setup in that in that sense?

Leigh Chapman 27:34

Yeah, we UK manufacturing at the moment, it was it was tempting to go down the road of Far East or Eastern Europe, because obviously the the value is extraordinary. But we really wanted to keep our carbon footprint to a minimum. So we decided to take a bit of a hit on that and produce in UK and keep it as local as possible. In terms of the materials that we use, the main material in the pod number one is birch ply.

We chose that because it's a really fast growing species of trees, so it's relatively easy to replace. The wood wastage of plywood, during the manufacturing process is also significantly less when compared with traditional lumber practices.

And it also tends to be much more durable as well. So it tends to last longer. We use walling off or near in pod number two. And obviously that has also got some good eco sustainability creds. In fact, that veneer is a very low wastage, you know, option for for word. So yeah, there are there

Leigh Chapman 28:39

are main kind of ways that we're trying to help sustainability in terms of the materials that we that we use, but we also, you know, donate to the world land trust as well for every pot that sold. And I think generally just maybe, slightly less tangibly, but I really do passionately believe that.

Meditation helps to raise people's consciousness generally, you know, it puts more community on things like so puts more emphasis on things like community, and looking out for each other, and the world.

And I think that has to be good for sustainability as a whole, you know, you're talking about sort of creating a greener and happier planet, I think we need to create a greener and happier mind, if that can be such a thing.

And really, we're passionate about exposing more people to how meditation can can really help open their mind and be more aware of sustainability and, and the decisions that we make and how they impact everything else.

Matt Morley 29:43

Yeah, it's it's definitely, you know, very closely aligned with that the idea of the people on planet and community as you mentioned, I think that's increasingly becoming a bit more than just a buzzword.

A lot of the green building certifications are shifting in that direction now and in response to events over the last 12 months just to sort of wrap things up if you could send if there was one message if there's one piece of content that you want to get out to the corporate workplace community or to people are considering how to adapt or adjust their, their workplace environment going back in after, yeah, a year or perhaps more of working from home like what what's the what's the one thought that really is driving everything you're doing that you'd sort of put up on a billboard.

Unknown Speaker 30:32

But I mentioned an article that I recently wrote, it's on our website called human centric design, I'd urge people to go there and have a read, this is a very practical guide or my take on on what the guide is for managing that transition for us back into the workspace.

But I think if something on a billboard would maybe say, just really urge people to consider in making space for meditation in their business as the benefits are transformative. You know, your, your teams could be so much happier, more productive, resilient, creative, collaborative, cooperative, and just all around nicer to each other. And that stuff is viral, you know, it spreads and it creates economic as well as societal and psychological benefits. Okay, best of luck, man.