Six steps to sustainable commercial buildings for occupiers

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Summary

Six steps to sustainability is a 'how to' guide for owning, developing, designing, constructing, occupying and managing sustainable commercial buildings. For each industry group, it is a compilation of input and ideas from Australian industry leaders as to what, in their experience, are the most important issues and how they can be addressed. For occupiers, the six steps to sustainable commercial buildings article provides the key steps to integrating sustainability into the development and occupation of their workplaces.

The six steps for occupiers are:

Step 1 - Demonstrate the business case for sustainability

Active leadership

Active leadership is important for increasing the understanding and cultural adoption of sustainability principles, as well as for promoting related initiatives and managing related change (Lantos, 2001; Andersson & Bateman, 2000; Starik & Rands, 1995). Therefore, the success of sustainability initiatives undertaken by your organisation depends upon strong leadership, starting with the CEO. With the CEO on board, it is possible to get the commitment of senior management, to gain access to financial and human resources, and to ensure that sustainability initiatives are recognised as relevant to business, organisational, and personal objectives and values (aspirational, strategic and operational). One key to capturing the CEO's attention is to demonstrate that sustainability can support the business case for your organisation's new office space.

Demonstrate the business case

The objective of the business case is to provide a basis for clear understanding of what is to be achieved, at what cost, and why. This is done by answering the following questions:

• How can sustainability add to our profit?
• How can sustainability reduce our risk?
• How can sustainability impact on the continuity of our business?
• How does sustainability fit with our beliefs and values?

The business case aims to provide decision makers with greater understanding of the benefits to be reaped from sustainability by encouraging them to think through the project in a systematic, step by step manner - this process also assists in developing 'buy-in' from decision makers. In addition to testing the economic value of the project, the business case describes the expected value and benefits, including elements such as brand value, the ability to demonstrate leadership in corporate responsibility, and nurturing of corporate culture. The business case will also help senior management to embed triple bottom line accounting and reporting into their decision making, and to establish protocols for life cycle costing, payback evaluation, and trade-off criteria to be used in evaluating the present and future value of sustainability inclusions. (See The business case for occupiers of sustainable commercial buildings for more information)

Step 2 - Get involved in the design

To achieve a sustainable design for your fit-out that effectively aligns with your organisational goals and values, it is necessary to clearly explain these to the building owner, developer, designers and the building manager (if appointed). You should request that the designers explain their proposals to you in your language (i.e. how the proposals meet your strategic goals), rather than in theirs. To meet your requirements, it is likely that the designers will use an integrated design process, which will involve a more participatory style of engagement with all the project stakeholders, including your own people.

As the occupier of the building, you may also be able to facilitate an integrated fit-out (one that is built at the same time as the base building), thus avoiding design, materials and cost duplications. Your involvement in the design and building processes will also help you to understand how to live in the sustainable building most effectively.

Involve your employees in the design process

Behavioural change experts always discuss the importance of getting 'buy-in'. Engaging your people in preparing the design brief and in the design process itself enables your organisation to provide an excellent working environment that responds to their needs and enhances your reputation. Doing this should also save and make you money over time through higher employee satisfaction and worker productivity.

User control has consistently been linked to well-being and productivity in the workplace. Accordingly, it is important to give people the ability to contribute to the design and, later, the operation of the workplace through induction, training and use of feedback processes, which are essential for understanding performance. These processes need to be backed by responsive facilities management.

Specify the performance standards

You should discuss with your consultants, the developer, and/or the owner of the building the things that are important to you with respect to building performance. For example, you may want to reduce energy and water consumption, avoid as much waste as possible and recycle what you cannot avoid, or have particular indoor environment conditions. Branded benchmark and rating tools exist in Australia and can provide guidance to occupiers looking to create a sustainable fit-out. Options are available to rate your energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, waste production and transport.

Your consultants may advise you to seek a particular performance rating under one of the available schemes. These things can usually be specified to form part of the contract conditions with the developer, designer, fit-out contractor and building owner.

Ongoing management of the building will ensure that building performance is optimised and that design intents are translated into performance outcomes. This in turn requires monitoring and measurement systems. As the tenants are the ones to reap the benefits of cost savings from energy and water efficiency and greenhouse abatement, the installation of such metering and sub-metering systems should also be included in this stage.

Step 3 - Sign a green lease

One way to promote positive fit-out design and occupant behaviours – and to give some assurance that the building owner will maintain the performance of the base building – is through the use of contractual agreements such as green leases and building performance guarantees. Through defining the roles and responsibilities of all the parties in achieving particular sustainability outcomes, these contractual agreements help to engage all parties and to influence their behaviours. They also offer further opportunities to secure a competitive advantage by enhancing your organisation's reputation, providing an excellent working environment for your employees, and by meeting economic targets (Investa, 2006).

The Commonwealth Government has developed a green lease schedule, which is a leasing arrangement for government authorities, containing mutual obligations for tenants and owners to achieve efficiency targets.

Some of the key benefits of occupying a sustainable building include:

• strengthening your organisation's reputation for corporate social responsibility
• attracting and retaining talented employees, particularly younger people, who have been shown to care about their employers' social and environmental performance
• enhancing employee well-being and productivity (see Indoor environment, productivity and sustainable commercial buildings for more information)
• contributing to the generation and sharing of organisational knowledge through well-designed workplaces that are open and flexible
• reducing risk by providing a healthy workplace environment
• increasing your profitability through lower operating costs.
  
  

Step 4 - Reinforce the organisation's sustainability culture

Even if your fit-out is delivered to a specific design rating, this will not guarantee that it will perform to design expectations once occupied. A green building may still have 'grey' occupants, due to lack of systems integration, poor building commissioning, and a lack of training. Building management, tenancy fit-outs, and occupant behaviours all have an impact on overall building performance. The fit-out you provide, and the behaviours of the people in your organisation, are therefore critical to maintaining building performance and identifying areas for reducing environmental impacts.

Behaviours that counter sustainability initiatives (e.g. not separating wastes, or over-riding automated light switching) will impact on overall fit-out performance, and indeed may prejudice the performance of the whole building. To overcome this potential problem, occupiers need to interact with their people to raise their understanding of the fit-out design and office management practices that will aid in reducing negative impacts. Involvement in the design process is a good start, but this needs to be extended further. The 'Culture change for sustainable commercial buildings' article outlines some ideas for reinforcing or changing organisational culture to improve sustainability.

Office management and day-to-day operations are also critical to maintaining sustainability performance. Purchase of furniture, fittings, office equipment, consumables, and appliances with reduced life cycle impacts can reduce not only operating expenses, but also the amount of waste generated in the workplace. An organisational sustainability plan is useful for setting internal targets, such as reducing water use and office waste to landfill, and for outlining the mechanisms required to be put in place to encourage staff accountability, awareness and participation (Investa, 2006).

Performance will also benefit from engagement with the building manager, so that occupiers, the performance of their fit-out, and the building itself, are considered together, not individually. Monitoring and measurement systems also provide feedback to occupants and allow them to interact with the building and its performance.

Step 5 - Keep monitoring the performance

Good intentions need to be backed up by actual performance. Monitoring building performance and sustainability engagement over time allows the asset's performance to be measured against the projected value outlined in the business case (see The business case for occupiers of sustainable commercial buildings for more information). The more post-occupancy information that is available about a building, the better you will be able to understand the real return you are getting from your investment.

To study the impact of building and fit-out design and productivity, it is essential to draw links with operational performance and occupant comfort. Typical post-occupancy metrics include staff productivity, sickness, and absenteeism. It is useful to conduct pre- and post-occupancy evaluations to draw or highlight the links made to sustainable design features and strategies (where appropriate); the cost of these should be allowed for in the initial project budgets. Online surveys are useful for these evaluations.

As with Step 2 and Step 4, employees should be engaged in the monitoring of building or fit-out performance from an early stage. You can get them involved in post-occupancy evaluation by encouraging them to keep a diary or to participate in surveys or interviews about the building's performance.

A commitment also needs to be made to reporting the positive outcomes of the building performance, as well as those outcomes that did not meet anticipated targets in post-occupancy studies. It is also worth considering creating a program of incentives and rewards for building occupants to maintain and improve their performance.

Step 6 - Close the feedback loop

This last step is about sharing experiences and assisting in raising the bar for health, safety and comfort in the workplace. This is critical - it has been estimated that an increase of only 2%-5% in staff productivity can cover the total cost of providing their accommodation. There are a number of factors that influence employees in the workplace. While the physical environment is important, it is not the only factor. Well-being is linked to management structures, work loads, interactions with colleagues, work-life balance, pay/incentives, technology, advancement opportunities and other such factors. It is difficult to separate the impact of any one change on employee well-being.

For obvious reasons, most organisations report only the good news stories. However, transparency of the total process is critical so that the industry as a whole benefits from the lessons learnt. As sustainability of buildings is a relatively new science, there is a lot to learn from each other's experiences.

References

Andersson, L.M. & Bateman, T.S. (2000), 'Individual environmental initiative: championing natural environmental issues in US business organizations', Academy of Management Journal, 43(4), 548-570.

Investa (2006), Green lease guide for commercial office tenants, Investa Property Group, Accessed 2 August, 2007, from http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/Environment/documents/GreenLeaseGuide_000.pdf.

Lantos, G.P. (2001), 'The boundaries of corporate social responsibility', Journal of Consumer Marketing_,_18(7), 595-630.

Starik, M. & Rands, G.P. (1995), 'Weaving an integrated web: multilevel and multisystem perspectives of ecologically sustainable organizations', The Academy of Management Review, 20(4), 908-935.