The WELL Building Standard is the first building certificate that focus explicitly on the health and well-being of the occupiers of a building. Companies increasingly realize that a healthy work environment can contribute to e.g. employee health, productivity, satisfaction and company image. Therefore, many companies show interest in WELL. However, the amount of WELL-certified buildings is severely limited.
Of course, this is partially due to the time it takes to WELL-certify a building (WELL only exists for four years). However, if we want to implement this healthy office concept on a large scale, we should lower the threshold and diminish the largest obstacles. Therefore, I have interviewed and surveyed different stakeholders (i.e. corporate real estate managers, asset managers, institutional investors, developers and consultants), which resulted in a list of twenty-five different obstacles. Furthermore, I used a pairwise comparison method to rank the obstacles and the following three obstacles are the most obstructive:
– High costs for registration and certification
– High costs for implementation
– Difficult to implement the features in existing buildings.
As shown, the largest two obstacles are related to costs, meaning that if the government wants to stimulate the amount of healthy buildings, it would be the most effective to focus on the financial side of WELL. Furthermore, the three largest obstacles are all related to WELL, and not the healthy concepts in general. This indicates that, if another healthy office concept would arise, it could be possible that potential customers will choose for the alternative.