Top 3 Reasons Your Building’s Intelligence is Key to Your Safe Back-to-Work Strategy
How would you feel if your building could assess sanitation and safety levels before you even walked in? Or if by augmenting a few controls, a building could reduce carbon emissions, and cut down on utility usage across your entire portfolio? This isn’t just the future of smart buildings - this is now. Living in an increasingly health, safety, and sustainability conscious world means that while you are focused on KPIs and NOI, your building has to be intelligent enough to provide solutions for many emergent issues that need to be addressed. Whether this is providing a safe solution for workers hoping to return to the office, or by having autonomous building functions that work in harmony to provide the most optimal experience, smarter, healthy buildings are the answer.
Enabling building systems such as lighting, air filtration, and HVAC to communicate with one another for optimized efficiency is a new capability enabled by ThoughtWire, and can remedy issues when it comes to sustainability, health and safety, and maximizing your environmental and social governance (ESG) investment capabilities. These key areas are essential to understanding how smart and healthy your building is, and what this can mean not only for your ROI and tenant experience - but also on a global scale.
1. Environmental Impact of Your Building
Socially conscious, healthy buildings that work towards environmental sustainability are useful in many aspects. Smart buildings can help to reduce carbon emissions by 10%, which is especially impressive when understanding that 40% of global CO2 emissions come from buildings. A building’s operating systems are often used inefficiently - with over 30% of energy being wasted on a regular basis. With half of a building’s energy production consumed by HVAC, finding a way to regulate and lower this usage would be critical from an environmental, and from a financial perspective. Ultimately, a building without the ability to contribute to your sustainable and financial goals is already a building of yesterday.
Healthier buildings that emphasize ESG frameworks and practices can attract investors, as well as tenants. With an environmental focus on reducing harmful emissions, a social focus on optimizing work for operations staff, and a governance focus of contributing to the healthiness of a building’s city, ESG frameworks can be employed; attracting investors and tenants that are keen to live in socially conscious surroundings. Savings made from transitioning your building to be more sustainable could be reinvested into technologies that will help to further improve ROI and positive tenant experiences as well. Through understanding the environmental impacts of your building, this can help to optimize energy usage, reduce pollutants, cut unnecessary spending, and contribute to a brighter future.
2. Health & Safety
Being safe and feeling healthy is surely in everyone’s focus right now, which makes having a building that can assess health and safety levels for you all the more appealing. Smart, healthy buildings enable contactless entry, space occupancy and density monitoring, air filtration, and more, making tenants feel more comfortable and confident in their environment - and helping you with legislated compliance.
With a dire need for return-to-work solutions, smart building technology is an invaluable asset to the current and post-COVID world. Gaining employees’ confidence to return to work in a building that is healthy and safe enhances satisfaction and productivity, improves work quality, and can put many minds at ease - while still being conscious and aware of restrictions and proper building practices. Being able to have your building think for you, when it comes to the health and safety of your physical space, is yet another reason why investing in smart building technology solutions can solve some of the most pressing challenges we are facing today.
3. Autonomy
Autonomy is a foundational pillar to your building’s intelligence. There must be communication between building systems, devices, IT and operating technical systems and the people using the space to make a significant impact on sustainability, health and safety. When autonomy rates are higher, the overall speed and success of building functioning is improved. Implementing this autonomous technology into a building can result in 80% less breakdowns when it comes to maintenance, with more than 70% of a building’s operations able to be performed remotely - according to a recent case study.
Having occupants connected to their building via mobile application also provides access to building information and allows for more streamlined communication with building management. What does this all mean? While autonomous building capabilities support all of these themes, autonomy is ultimately what provides intelligent buildings with the data to deliver on the most desirable functions for tenants. Whether this be acclimatizing room temperature, regulating light use, or using an intelligent digital assistant, all occupants’ individual needs are best taken care of through autonomous building features.
ThoughtWire’s Solution
Knowing the relationship between sustainability, ESG strategies, health and safety, and autonomy, as well as how this can benefit building owners, occupants, and cities as a whole, is vital when it comes to understanding the importance of smart, healthy buildings. ThoughtWire’s mission - to create smarter spaces by using powerful smart building technology to bring built environments to life, is rooted in driving better outcomes and providing solutions to many of the pressing challenges we face today.
Through ThoughtWire’s Smart Building Suite of Applications, building intelligence and support is provided from the outside in. From managers monitoring their building’s end-to-end operations, to occupants experiencing safe, tailored, and enjoyable living conditions, our Smart Building Suite combines a sustainable, healthy, safe, and connected focus, to allow for a building to operate at its highest function and efficacy rate, catering to many needs, and above all - keeping occupants safe. Smart, healthy buildings assisting in sustainability, health, safety, and autonomy is ultimately an embodiment of all of the progress building intelligence has made over the years, and will continue to make in the future of smart spaces and smart cities.
