How does your organization measure health and human performance? The answer might vary depending on who you ask. If you direct this question to someone within facilities or real estate, they will point to how their buildings are LEED certified. Several credits for LEED include strategies that improve indoor air quality and access to natural light and views. Facilities might also be pursuing new health-related certifications like the WELL Building Standard or Fitwel. These certifications identify specific ways the built environment can better support health through building location, outdoor spaces, staircases, the design of the indoor environment, and food provisioning.
If you ask someone engaged in health promotion or occupational health, they might tell you about the organizationās participation in the C. Everett Koop Award or the Corporate Health Achievement Award. These awards measure the robustness of an organizationās health programs (i.e., how they are led and how the health outcomes are achieved).
Then there are the metrics that human resources cares about when it comes to organizational health, like the engagement and happiness of employees that are addressed in surveys from the Society for Human Resources Management.
Ā
THE āHAPIā TOOL
All of these measurement tools are excellent, but they tend to measure health and well-being in silos, and the data is not connected. Sometimes it can sometimes be difficult to prioritize which metric is most important to focus on across the organization.
Interestingly, there are many new tools and methods that are beginning to look more comprehensively to evaluate organizational well-being. One of these is the Health and Human Performance Index (HaPI), developed by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Universityās School of Public Health. This tool combines elements of engagement, health, performance, culture, and the physical work environment.
This index was developed in 2012 by Harvard, in partnership with Johnson & Johnson. It is being championed by Dr. Eileen McNeely, Co-Director of Harvardās Sustainability and Health Initiative for a Net Positive Enterprise (SHINE) at the School of Public Health. EYP is working with Harvard to integrate elements of the built environment into the HaPI tool. Specifically, the tool evaluates:
ā¢ Well-being: Provides both affective and evaluative aspects of well-being. Subjective well-being has been associated with overall health and performance.
ā¢ Productivity: Measures the number of employee healthy days and a subjective report of work performance.
ā¢ Engagement: Captures feelings at work (vigor, dedication, absorption) that have been previously associated with job resources, health, and work performance.
ā¢ Culture: Captures the availability of work resources (i.e., supervisor and coworker support, participatory decision making, and challenges) that have been previously associated with health and performance.
ā¢ Built environment: Captures the quality of space and access to healthy amenities (adjustable desks, fitness centers, shower facilities, healthy food options).
The intent of this tool is to provide the business community with a universal benchmark, transferable across industrial sectors and global businesses, for communicating how the business impacts employee development and well-being.
Ā
What weāve learned
EYP piloted HaPI with staff across all offices, and it is helping us better understand our work and our well-being. Here are five high-level findings, and the actions we are taking as a result:
1. Exercise is connected to office location. Our employee data shows a correlation between the amount of exercise employees are getting and office location. Employees assigned to an office with a shorter commute, in an urban location, with access to public transportation and parks, and views to the outdoors were more likely to exercise.
2. Lack of sleep is connected to commute and workload. Lack of sleep was attributed to heavy workloads, increased stress, and longer commute time. The demographic of employees who sleep the least (and reported being the most stressed) are women, particularly those under 45. This falls in line with nationally reported data.
3. Stress impacts performance more than physical health issues. Overall, employees claimed mental health issues (stress, anxiety, or both) were more impactful to presenteeism and absenteeism than physical health issues. This number went up for women and younger staff. There are many reasons employees might feel anxious: lack of sleep, lack of exercise, heavy workload, overall feeling of a lack of control.
4. Culture greatly impacts performance at work. When Harvard tested questions about culture, the work environment, amenities provided, and workplace flexibility and then compared them to job performance and life satisfaction, their analysis confirmed what we suspected: Culture has a stronger impact on our health outcomes than the other factors by a long shot. Organizational factors like trust, respect, fairness, vibrant atmosphere, and authenticity were correlated with job productivity and life satisfaction more than anything else. Though not as highly rated as culture, there are some physical workplace elements that more strongly correlate with job and life satisfaction than others. These include: a place to lie down at the office, a place to meditate, bike storage, and showers.
5. āJob controlā is the most influential factor when it comes to job engagement. Factors like autonomy in decision making, learning new things, using creativity, and āhaving a say in what happens with your jobā impact engagement more than other factors.
Ā
Taking action
EYP is sharing these results with each of our offices and engaging in a conversation about our culture, operations, and the physical environment in our offices. We also see this research as important to helping us shape our thinking when it comes to workplace strategy and how we support our clients.
We are using this information to:
ā¢ Develop location criteria and prioritize amenities and features that encourage movement for building occupants.
ā¢ Dig deeper into how space can help reduce stress and positively impact mental health for different population groups in our buildings.
ā¢ Integrate cultural factors more robustly into the workplace development process, and determine ways the workplace can facilitate a desired culture.
ā¢ Further develop workplace flexibility strategies and policies to enable more job control and sleep for workers, particularly younger women who are typically juggling life and work responsibilities.
Related Stories
Office Buildings | Feb 11, 2019
Real-world wellness pays off
3form, a materials manufacturer, did a top-to-bottom remodel of its Salt Lake City headquarters campus that included adding a 14,500-sf gym.
Office Buildings | Feb 5, 2019
Duluth Trading Company moves to new HQ building
Plunkett Raysich Architects designed the project.
Interior Architecture | Jan 14, 2019
To get more involved earlier in projects, a leading furniture dealer launches a firm for commercial interiors construction
Vantis is positioned to integrate design with offsite customized fabrication.
Office Buildings | Jan 11, 2019
Open offices are bad!
The HarvardĀ studiesĀ on theĀ unintended effectsĀ of open office defines it as space where 'one entire floor was open, transparent and boundarylessā¦ [with] assigned seats,'Ā and the other had 'similarly assigned seats in an open office design, with large rooms of desks and monitors and no dividers between people's desks.'
Office Buildings | Dec 18, 2018
Google announces new $1B Hudson Square campus project
The 1.7 million-sf campus will expand the companyās New York City presence.
Office Buildings | Dec 13, 2018
Apple selects Austin for $1 billion campus
The company will also build smaller expansions in six other U.S. cities over the next three years.
Office Buildings | Dec 4, 2018
Brookfield launches contest for startups to receive two years of free office space
This is part of a larger campaign to burnish the image of L.A.ās Wells Fargo Center.Ā
Office Buildings | Nov 28, 2018
Amazon HQ2 and the new geography of work
The big HQ2 takeaway is how geography and mobility are becoming major workplace drivers.
Mixed-Use | Oct 25, 2018
Philadelphiaās uCity Square kicks off major expansion drive
This innovation center has several office, lab, and residential buildings in the works.