CBRE Joins Forces with Delos to Promote Office Wellness

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Paul Scialla of Delos

Los Angeles—CBRE Group Inc. and Delos will enter into a strategic alliance that will advance Delos’s mission “to transform indoor environments into spaces that help nurture, sustain and promote human health and well-being,” the two companies announced late last week.

With the opening of its Global Corporate Headquarters in Los Angeles in 2013, CBRE became the first company in the world to achieve WELL Certification for a commercial office space through Delos’s WELL Building Standard pilot program.

Moving forward, CBRE will pursue WELL Certification for at least 100 buildings, sites or offices managed by or associated with CBRE worldwide. Further, the company plans to accredit 50 of its employees through the WELL Accredited Professional program. The WELL AP credential incidates knowledge regarding human health and wellness in the built environment and specialization in the principles, practices and applications of WELL. (For a summary of the WELL principles, read on.)

In addition, CBRE will become a founding member of the Well Living Lab, an effort to study the interaction between human health and well-being and the indoor environment. The lab is a collaboration between Delos and the Mayo Clinic and is located adjacent to Mayo in Rochester, Minn.

“Two years ago, CBRE took a bold step in bringing health and wellness into their Global Corporate Headquarters,” Delos CEO and founder Paul Scialla said in a prepared statement. “Since then, they have become a thought leader for healthy design, advocating its benefits to clients worldwide. This new alliance will allow CBRE and Delos to further advance the WELL Building Standard to CBRE’s clients around the world.”

In 2013, the new CBRE headquarters, at 400 S. Hope St. in downtown Los Angeles, became WELL Certified. A year later, CBRE says, 92 percent of employees there said the space had a positive effect on their health and well-being.

“More and more occupiers are recognizing the role the physical and environmental characteristics of their offices can play on the recruitment, retention, health, and even performance of their employees,” Dave Pogue, CBRE’s global director of corporate responsibility, said in the statement. “Delos, as creator of the WELL Building Standard, developed a comprehensive way to measure and recognize the efforts taken in this area.”

The WELL Building Standard is an evidence- and performance-based system for measuring, certifying and monitoring features that affect human health and well-being in the built environment. To date, the program has enrolled nearly 30 million square feet of building projects in 13 countries.

WELL sets performance requirements in seven Concepts, or categories, relevant to occupant health and well-being in the built environment: Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Fitness, Comfort and Mind. Specific approaches are associated with each Concept, a Delos spokesperson explained to Commercial Property Executive.

As an example, a goal for Air is to optimize indoor air quality, through removal of airborne contaminants. Nourishment aims to encourage healthy eating habits by providing occupants with healthier food choices, behavioral cues and knowledge about nutrient quality. For Light, one intention is to minimize disruption to the body’s circadian rhythm, through requirements for window performance and design, light output and lighting controls, and task-appropriate illumination levels.