A strategic collaboration between the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), the global authority for driving market transformation through healthy buildings, organisations and communities, and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), a leading representative organisation of the built and natural environment sectors in the UK and globally, aims to raise awareness and encourage adoption of strategies that advance health and well-being in buildings and organisations globally.
Moving forward, IWBI and RICS will jointly engage their members and broader networks in opportunities to support occupant health and well-being through IWBI’s WELL Building Standard (WELL) and RICS’ International Building Operating Standard (IBOS).
The two organisations will work collaboratively to promote thought leadership around health and well-being in properties, and will work to advance benchmarking, regulatory frameworks and standards, with an emphasis on the built environment sector in Europe.
WELL, a global leader for creating and certifying spaces that advance health and wellbeing, has been adopted by nearly 44,000 projects encompassing 4.85 billion square feet of real estate across 127 countries. The WELL ecosystem is grounded in the WELL Standard, a library of holistic evidence-based building and organisational strategies – organised into 10 impact categories – that can improve the health and well-being of people.
To achieve WELL Certification, a building must have strategies across all 10 concepts: Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Movement, Thermal Comfort, Sound, Materials, Mind and Community.
Certification is available through the WELL Building Standard and WELL Community Standard pilot, along with ratings that are targeted subsets of strategies from the WELL Standard, and which focus on thematic, goal-focused achievements that demonstrate an organisation’s commitment to health and well-being.
As a globally recognised professional body, RICS promotes and enforces the highest professional standards in the development and management of land, real estate, construction and infrastructure. Representing more than 134,000 professionals working in the built environment industry globally, and with offices in every significant financial market, RICS is ideally placed to influence policy and embed its standards within local marketplaces in order to protect consumers and businesses.
IBOS is a data-based approach that supports the measurement and management of buildings for strategic decision-making. Developed alongside the market, IBOS reaches beyond traditional ways of assessing building performance to add another dimension – user experience – and provides a consistent way to benchmark across a number of properties. IBOS revolves around five key pillars: compliance, economics, functionality, sustainability and performance.
Learn more about healthy workplaces with Priva
We cover the benefits of wellbeing certifications – including the WELL Standard, as well as some of the long-term benefits of healthy buildings strategies for businesses and their staff in our recent white paper: How to Create a Healthy Workforce (which is available for free download on our Priva.com corporate site.)
We also offer a CIBSE Approved CPD titled ‘Wellbeing and Building Technologies’ which explores many of the ways you can use building technologies to enhance health and productivity – and make your building a place people want to be. Drop us a line to check availability and book this CPD at your offices.
