The office monitor workers will find more common in the Covid era

On Nov 28, 2021

An employee works on a laptop computer at the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, which opened in 2018. It is among companies that have focused on office air quality as part of building design standards.

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Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, employees, managers and senior executives have been taking a closer look at what makes a workspace healthy. The pandemic brought an influx of sanitizing wipes, hand sanitizer dispensers and social distancing signage into office spaces.

Harvard professor Joseph Allen says there’s one safety measure offices can’t overlook. Healthy workspaces rely primarily on the air employees breathe, and research going back years before the pandemic shows that improvements in air ventilation and air quality lead to increased cognitive function and work productivity.

One study conducted by Allen’s Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found there is no threshold for how greater air ventilation positively impacts cognitive function for workers.

“Across the globe, we had over 350 workers and we followed them for an entire year. We had air quality sensors at their desk,” said Allen, associate professor and director of the program.

In the study, the workers would be periodically pinged through an app to take these cognitive function tests while at their desk, in order to look at the real-time impact of air quality on the performance of office workers around the world.

What Allen and the other researchers found in the COGfx study should transform the way companies across the world think about productivity investments.

Salesforce, Boston Properties and Armstrong World Industries are among the companies in the U.S. that have worked with Allen, either as part of the COGfx study or with Allen’s healthy building consultancy team at 9 Foundations to improve air quality in their buildings, “the things that we know science tells us are important for human health, wellbeing and productivity,” Allen says.

“The big challenge of our time is how do we ventilate,” said Amazon Chief Medical Officer Vin Gupta, speaking at the recent CNBC @Work Summit and referencing the Harvard researchers’ findings.

Salesforce focus on air in employee education

For many companies, the ability to attract and retain talent will depend on safety precautions and comfort level with a particular work environment.

The Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, which opened in 2018, has received high environmental scores, but the company thinks it’s important to make sure employees understand that design and approach goes beyond energy considerations and directly to health.

Salesforce participated in the COGfx study, where air quality sensors were installed at desks and cognitive function of employees was monitored.

Regular testing of indoor air quality is part of the LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environment Design, certification given to green buildings from the U.S. Green Buildings Council.

“We think it’s…