Managing the air

As the two sections in this chapter make clear, air quality shouldn’t be an afterthought - it has a significant effect on our mental and physical health, wellbeing, and performance. Research documents the important contributions that effectively ventilated spaces can make to organisational (and individual) success. For example, and as an appetiser to the more detailed material to come, MacNaughton and team found that ventilating an office space at double, the ASHRAE minimum rate was likely to add $40 a year per person to building expenses (data were collected in seven different cities in different climate zones in the USA) and to improve occupant performance by 8%, which, for this group of test employees, was equivalent to a $6,500 increase in productivity per employee per year. The researchers also noted lower levels of absenteeism and improved user health in buildings with augmented ventilation levels (compared to ASHRAE minimum). Similarly, Allen et al. learned via data collected over six full days that cognitive performance scores were 61% higher in US office buildings with low volatile organic compounds concentrations (as opposed to high ones) and were particularly enhanced with high outdoor ventilation rates (101% higher than the high VOC condition). The researchers determined that when users experienced the sorts of carbon dioxide levels regularly found in indoor spaces, their cognitive performance was worse than it was at lower concentrations of carbon dioxide.