Leesman, a specialist in assessing employee experience, and Delos, a wellness real estate and technology company, are collaborating to investigate how real estate strategy can better support wellbeing at work. 

With a wide variety of strategies being promoted as a secret to ‘wellness at work’, this collaboration aims to test and validate the impact of leading real estate strategies on worker wellbeing on an ongoing basis, not only when the office is new.

For the first time, Leesman will include a special ‘Environmental Wellbeing Module’ based on review and synthesis of research on topics related to workplace design, workplace wellbeing, occupational health, happiness, psychological wellbeing, and environmental stress among others. 

The Leesman survey together with the module – the design of which was led by Sally Augustin PhD, a global expert in environmental psychology – meets the precondition survey criteria for the WELL Building Standard version 2 pilot (WELL v2), and also offers some optimisations in feature C04 of WELL v2. Intended to add a minimal amount of questions while testing key constructs, the module can be easily added to the core Leesman survey and is available upon request to all buildings interested in tracking environmental wellbeing. 

The results of the pilot, conducted with one of the ‘Big Five’ accounting firms and its 21 UK-based buildings in late 2018, suggests that even the highest performing workplaces within the Leesman databank have more work to do when it comes to supporting employee wellbeing. This places the onus on real estate teams and business leaders to focus on total human sustainability in addition to business sustainability.

Of the collaboration, Leesman’s Development Director & Head of Insights and Research, Peggie Rothe PhD, said: “Following the pilot with one of the world’s leading management consulting firms, we’re now canvassing interest from Fortune 500 companies who are committed to pursuing wellness at work. This proves health and wellbeing is sliding higher up the business agenda. In time, the results from the wellness module will arm businesses with the data they need to deliver their wellness strategies.” 

Whitney Austin Gray PhD, Senior Vice President of Delos, and Head of Delos Insights, added: “As a global wellness pioneer, our prerogative is to ensure healthy buildings evolve and continue to support human health. Leesman has amassed data from more than half a million respondents and the benchmark has a global scope. We’re excited about working together to validate the impact and investment of healthy buildings to support health and wellbeing on a global scale.”