The builder/developer partnered with Bupa, an international healthcare group, to gather relevant baseline data about Lendlease’s workforce from more than 114 work sites worldwide.Lendlease conducted a comparative workplace survey to inform its wellness strategy, which now includes Bupa providing preventive services such as skin and health checks, flu vaccinations, and health coaching for the company’s Australian and European operations.
Health and wellness have a direct impact on productivity through improved employee engagement and morale, better teamwork, enhanced social networks, and reduced absenteeismLendlease has identified several other buildings and tenancies in Europe, Australia, and the U.S. that it plans to submit for WELL certification. The firm is in the vanguard of a wellness movement that is striving to become the next big thing—following high performance and sustainability—for developers, building owners, employers, and their AEC partners to pursue. The three-year-old IWBI is attempting to position its performance-based standard and certification process to play a defining role in shaping that movement, just as USGBC’s LEED system did for the green building market.
It’s no coincidence that WELL and LEED are often mentioned in the same sentence. Rick Fedrizzi, the former President and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council, is now IWBI’s CEO. And the Green Building Certification Institute is the third-party certifier for both LEED and WELL. GBCI entered into a formal collaboration with IWBI in April to help streamline how the two standards work together.
Scialla believes the association with GBCI has been extremely important in taking the WELL Building standard global. Third-party certification could also be a market differentiator, as competing wellness standards and measurement tools are coming out.
An obstacle for any wellness standard or measurement is overcoming skepticism from ROI-obsessed developers and building owners. It’s a lot more complicated to quantify the cost benefits of wellness than, say, reducing energy consumption, especially when some of the supporting evidence connecting health, wellness, and productivity is based as much on impressions as it is on science. 
Last year, Lake Nona entered into an agreement with Delos to bring multiple health and wellness programs to its community. The first project was Intelligent Home, a model home with wellness amenities such as advanced air and water filtration, that Lake Nona views as its living lab,says Caulfield. Lake Nona incorporated Delos’s WELL Signature program into Landon House, its 280-unit luxury apartment building. And Delos provided hospitality designs for 34 StayWell rooms with more than 20 health and wellness amenities in a Marriott hotel on Lake Nona’s campus.
For instance, there’s been lots of research done showing how natural indoor light that maintains circadian rhythms can positively impact a person’s metabolism, but virtually no research proving that artificially induced daylighting works the same way.
The wellness movement is also spurring new ways to measure and execute wellness-centric building practices. In July, HDR unveiled its wellness dashboard tool that measures wellness design cost benefits.
Source: bdcnetwork.com
