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A Breath Of Fresh Air - Turning Data Into Improved Indoor Air Quality

By Stephen McNulty, Ambisense.

As employees make their return to offices following a two year on-off period of primarily working from home, never before have the public been so conscious of one’s health. With this, the air quality in workplaces, such as meeting rooms, has been scrutinised.

The same processes that can be used to monitor and mitigate wider environmental risks and issues can also be applied to individual’s health, investigating the quality of air in rooms and how this can avoid the risk of illnesses such as COVID-19 and other airborne diseases. IoT, AI, and machine learning - these technologies are all capable of providing great value to the facilities management industry too.

With employees demanding hybrid working, the days of a business requiring a desk for every employee may well be over. The number of workers returning to the workplace has plateaued, and last month the Financial Times reported that UK offices are currently running between 25 – 33% of their capacity depending on the day of the week.

To compound this, the leases on some office spaces are coming to an end, and critically, they are not being renewed, or at least not to the same square footage.

What can commercial property managers do to attract companies in this volatile buyers market?

The same thing every business in every industry does – give people what they want: A healthy, safe, energy-efficient place for their employees.

After over two years of analysis across a variety of different industries and companies, we have found that the greatest threat to staff safety and comfort is those self-same small meeting rooms that companies are trying to get their staff to use. Simply put, the return to office is not successful until people feel comfortable using these spaces.

The ventilation challenge

Poor ventilation levels in these meeting rooms makes sense of course - these small spaces often have a lot of people using them and in many cases, building HVAC systems were designed and commissioned before the rooms were constructed so airflows can be much lower than the rest of the building. The higher the carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the air, the worse the air quality is.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SUNY Upstate Medical University stuck subjects in a room for 2.5 hours, exposed them to 600, 1,000 and 2,500 ppm levels of carbon dioxide, and made them take tests of decision making performance.

Results have shown that depending on the CO2 levels in a room (at around 1,000 ppm), decision-making performance can decline from 11-23%. And at 2,500 ppm, the declines in decision-making were a staggering 44-94%.

While staff may be comfortable and safe in a larger, main office or in communal spaces, which is of course important, those areas where they often end up making critical decisions, were those that had issues that could affect cognitive and decision-making performance.

In over one third of the small meeting rooms that were assessed in a recent survey carried out by Ambisense in over 200 buildings across the UK, there was poor air quality. And to be reasonable, one cannot leave the door open for every meeting.

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What can a facilities manager do?

It’s about having a flexible approach.

• First, these small rooms are the hardest locations to solve. It is generally either expensive or technically non-viable to deliver more fresh air to many of these locations and there are often too many of them to manage to implement localised filtration/purification solutions.

'Hard' engineering solutions are for the most part, ruled out. Leveraging any assets they have, even as simple as leaving a door open, to improve air flow is one of the few tools available to improve the outcome of the space.

• Second, the ventilation performance of these locations is hugely variable based on the number of people in these spaces, how heavily used they are, and often the external weather plays a role too. Some spaces have a two-person meeting for an hour, followed by a three-hour, ten person sales meeting, followed by a two-hour, six-person training session. In some meetings, people talk a lot (i.e. sales meetings) and in others, only one person does the majority of the talking (i.e. training session).

This means their back to office strategy is failing if a company is not addressing the risks in these locations. This is where working smarter really comes into play. Facility managers can do so by letting data help them to understand the capacity and profile of that space.

Another crucial figure is needed, which is how long it takes for the air quality to return to healthy and safe levels after the room has been used. Once facility managers have these figures, they can plan and act accordingly. However, it often requires many layers of data to understand the performance of the space and for many businesses they are managing many of these spaces at once. For FM companies that might be thousands.

Is actively targeting these critical, failing pockets of air quality revolutionary?

Not quite. Using the right tools to drive better outcomes will however revolutionise the comfort and health of the building occupants, critical for facilities managers in a volatile market where there has been a huge change in demand for commercial spaces and what is expected from them.

Property and facility managers need to start getting and using the data to know where they stand so they have a benchmark and can create plans in advance of higher occupancy. They have to use the data to discover and manage the balance between good ventilation that keeps building occupants healthy and building efficiency.