Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons
The Parsons Healthy Materials Lab is all about placing health at the center of real estate architecture and design. They aim to raise awareness about toxics in building products and create educational online resources for designers and architects that further that cause.
This week we’re in New York talking to Jonsara Ruth, Co-Founder & Design Director of the Healthy Materials Lab and Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design.
Jonsara received a Masters of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design, she also has her own healthy materials design collective called Salty Labs.
The Healthy Materials Lab is all about placing health at the center of real estate architecture and design. They aim to raise awareness about toxics in building products and create educational online resources for designers and architects that further that cause.
I recently completed their 4-part Online Certification Program to become a Healthy Materials Advocate and cannot recommend the course enough, whether you work in this industry or are simply curious to understand more about buildings and the materials that go into them, both good and bad.
It’s far easier not to look under the hood, right? To trust that developers, architects and contractors have our best interests at heart… I hate to burst your bubble but that just ain’t so, nowhere is this more acute than in our homes, offices and Jonsara explains, the worst offender of all, the affordable housing sector.
Jonsara speaks with the precision of a Professor and the conviction of someone with a very clear mission in life, so listen up people, this is a good one.
If you enjoy this episode, hit like or subscribe for next week’s release.
See our 9-point guide to healthy buildings here.
CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS
Our central objective really is to remove harmful chemicals from the built environment that are prohibiting people from living healthy lives.
Just a few thousand years back People were building shelter exclusively out of what was around them - natural materials like wood from trees, clay, stone or water.
It turns out the building products that we primarily build with now contain chemicals that are often very toxic to human bodies. They can now be found in almost every building product in a conventionally built building.
I know this all sounds like a horror movie but of course a lot of this is invisible and that's why it's really important for us to know more, especially as designers and architects - to know enough to not include these materials that contain chemicals in the buildings that we're designing.
Climate change, environmental health and people's health are completely interrelated. There's no way to separate them.
I see more and more people being inspired to make change and taking on the challenge of what that means.
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI (excuse any typos)
MM
Jonsara, many thanks so much for joining us on the show today. Could we start with a quick description of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons and its main objectives are?
JR
Yeah, sure. It's great to be here, Matt. Thanks for inviting us. I'm happy to represent our fantastic team of collaborators at the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons.
You know, our central objective really is to remove harmful chemicals from the built environment that are prohibiting people from living healthy lives. That's the big, big picture.
We believe that if we can, as designers, architects and building professionals, put people in the center of our minds, when we make every design decision, then that changes the way we think about design, and it also puts people's health and environmental health at the forefront.
It changes the way we think about building products and the environment and changes the way we think about the whole process of designing our specific focuses on affordable housing, and people living in affordable housing.
The way that we do that is by providing education to designers, architects and building professionals and even faculty who are teaching the next generation of designers and architects so that they can understand how to design healthier buildings and homes as well.
We do that with courses, short courses, and programs that allow professionals to use these programs as their continuing education credits, so that they can build this right into their practice.
We have two robust online programs. One is specifically about affordable housing. And the other one is more generally, for anyone who is interested in the built environment and making it healthy. We also provide resources and tools and examples for designers and architects to make it simpler to build healthier.
A lot of the work that we're doing is to translate information from examples and from disciplines other than design into actionable knowledge within the building industry. So there's a lot of work being done about the Toxics included in building products. And a lot of that work is happening in science, or in public health, or in material research, or in environmental justice, advocacy.
We are constantly calling upon all of these different perspectives, and interpreting that into useful knowledge for designers and architects, and then putting it into, hopefully, really easily accessible formats through our website, live events and recorded education programs. Our goal is to really make make radical change in the building industry so that everyone can live healthier lives.
MM
It really can be like opening Pandora's Box, once one starts to get into this topic of healthy buildings and healthy materials, there's so much to get one’s head around and so much to research, having trusted sources of expertise becomes fundamental to accessing the right information and for us as designers and real estate professionals to get to the best possible answer as quickly as possible.
If we take a step back, just for perhaps those who are less aware of the risks and dangers of toxic chemicals in our built environment in the buildings around us, what are the main sources of those chemicals? How are they released into the air? What are the risks at stake in these unhealthy buildings and interiors?
JR
Yeah, the sources can be anything in the built environment. We live in a physical world that is made up of materials. I like to think about it historically.
Just a few thousand years back People were building shelter exclusively out of what was around them - natural materials like wood from trees, clay, stone or water. They were mixing these things together to make shelter.
Healthy materials vs unhealthy building products
In the Industrial Revolution there's this huge surge in manmade synthetic products that are primarily based in the fossil fuel industry. There was all this discovery going on about how to take to make synthetic products act a little bit more like natural products, and they were doing it quickly, without much regulation.
Sources of chemicals in indoor environments
Well it turns out the building products that we primarily build with now contain chemicals that are often very toxic to human bodies. They can now be found in almost every building product in a conventionally built building.
That can range from flooring materials, to wall materials, insulation materials, even to the paint on our walls, much of which is synthetic, acrylic, which is plastic. It’s almost like we're living in a plastic bag.
Almost every single material that's used in the built environment is a ‘product’ with a list of ingredients, like you might find in packaged food products.
Negative health impacts of unhealthy building materials
There's been research in the last 25 years to look at the ingredients that are in building products and identify their link to human disease. And it turns out that a lot of these chemicals are linked to human diseases as common as asthma, or diabetes, obesity, or even nerve disorders, autism, attention disorder in children and so on. Then there are the carcinogens and hormone disruptors as well.
So there's a long list of effects that these chemicals in building products can have on human bodies, and the especially vulnerable or children, because their organs are still growing, then their whole bodily system is affected, or older people who are have immune compromised systems are overly affected or pregnant women are, you know, gestating fetuses who could be affected.
Harmful chemicals released into the atmosphere
They can be released through VOCs / volatile organic compounds, or SVOCs, which are gaseous, so they can be emitted, they're invisible gases that release into the indoor environment and then we breathe them in. That's probably one of the most common ways that we can be affected through through inhalation.
Building materials also decompose over time. And as they decompose, they have like microscopic particles that move into the air and and cling on to dust and that dust can also be inhaled. Or it actually can even be ingested.
If we're eating, our mouths are open. We're sitting on a sofa, there's a little bit of dust on the sofa that gets onto our pizza, we put the pizza in our mouth, or some some kinds of chemicals actually can be absorbed through the skin.
So Bisphenol A, for example, has been found on cash register receipts, there's Bisphenol A there so the people working in a grocery store are more vulnerable than all of us, because they touch them every minute, but if we also touch that cash register receipt, we can absorb that Bisphenol A through our skin, which then acts as an endocrine receptor, a hormone disruptor in our body.
I know it all sounds like a horror movie but of course a lot of this is invisible and that's why it's really important for us to know more, especially as designers and architects - to know enough to not include these materials that contain chemicals in the buildings that we're designing.
MM
So this is where we start to build up the argument for how one can can improve the health credentials of our buildings, to do better than has been done in the past. But first we must, I think, define one element you mentioned around people and environmental health or rather how our health as humans, and the health of the environment and the planet around us are interconnected. Can one draw a line between the two? Is there in fact, no clear distinction between them?
Life Cycle Assessments of materials and building products
JR
You know, Matt, I think it's all related, it's impossible to separate the two. The way we think about this is through the full lifecycle of a material.
Take luxury vinyl tile (“LVT”) if we look at the origins of that material, or rather product made up of many different materials, unlike real wood for instance.
If you have LVT, it's made up of many different materials. And there's some great research, which traced all those different materials, so we're looking at vinyl and where all those ingredients come from, and tracing them back to their origins, we find that just in the mining of chloride, and in the manufacturing of vinyl it is extremely harmful to the environment, and to anyone living near those facilities.
So if we think about where plastics or petroleum, fossil fuels are refined, there are communities who unfortunately do not have much choice about where they live, and their housing is located right next to these refineries. And so those people are exposed to the plastics refinery on a daily basis, 24 hours a day.
It’s just one example where there's a link between the environmental pollution affecting the land, our soil and water systems, it's emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, which we know is a major emitter of greenhouse gases, which then go on to cause climate change.
Then there's the people who are living right there, next to that factory, who are affected by that same air pollution. And then if that LVT makes it into their homes, then they're affected by the chemicals that make LVT pliable, soft, so now they're in their homes.
It’s really just following our imagination, asking “how is something made?” “Where is it made?” “What does it affect?” You can see how climate change, environmental health and people's health are completely interrelated. There's no way to separate them.
There's this great report that just came out in October called The New Coal - Plastics & Climate Change, by Beyond Plastics.
The summary of their findings show that plastics production might be even more negative impact on the climate than burning of coal. And the plastics production is a lot about building materials. It's a lot about making the places that we live, which then go on to negatively affect our human health, like we talked about before they can be, they can disrupt our hormone systems, as well as disrupt the climate, the atmosphere.
Biophilia
MM
We're using this People or Planet distinction as if they were somehow two separate concepts. But in fact nature is a bridge between them - it’s a false dichotomy. I often think of biophilia as being the bridge between those two. Once you accept that, once you see the bigger picture of us being at one with the natural world, then there is no distinction to make.
Healthy interior consultants in the design process
If we then look at how the practical realities of integrating some of these concerns into the design process, when we're talking about real estate developers, architects and designers, who are then giving health, both human and environmental health, a seat at the table, so that it becomes part of the design process of building or refurbishing, what does that look like in practical terms? Is it just about having a healthy interiors consultant on the team?
JR
What we're doing at Parsons is to develop a curriculum and courses to help educate the next generation of architects and designers to understand their choices better. So that's beginning, but in terms of professionals who are building buildings, now, there's more education necessary. We're involved in that effort to educate professionals to know better, but we also know that the process of building a building and the day to day demands upon an architect or designer are so extreme that often consultants are needed, yes.
the road to healthier buildings
You know, it takes time and resources to examine our choices more carefully. If we think about using healthier building products, and making healthier buildings, we actually do have to examine our past experience in our past choices, and we need to examine it pretty closely. That is where I think consultants come in.
I think we're also seeing that larger architecture and design firms are beginning to hire in, in house experts in material health, a lot of our students, our graduate students, and our researchers who have worked with us at the Lab, then move on to work in architecture and design firms, and they become the resident expert.
Healthy building standards
There are credentials to achieve, you know, you there are BREEAM in Europe, there's LEED, there's all these different certifying bodies which help people navigate the system. But some of those criteria would maybe not be aggressive enough. And so it's really important for folks to have genuine knowledge, not just to follow guidelines.
MM
I think that's one of the things I took from your four part online certification course - was that you didn't shy away from just showing how complex and thorny, this whole process is, really exposing that and being completely transparent about it, rather than trying to write the textbook and assume that’s the end of the debate.
So with that course, who's your main audience?
JR
Yeah. I mean it's really directed, primarily directed at designers and architects, and, but also at anyone in the building industry. Because we know that contractors, for instance, and developers, and owners of buildings, even maintenance workers, have a huge impact on the way that building is built, and the way that building is maintained.
So anyone involved in making choices for the building products or materials used in buildings, are the potential students of this course. That’s the big objective is, is just like you said, for people to understand that it's not straightforward, that it takes real thought to do it right, we have to weigh our choices, we have to make compromises always and make priorities about buildings. And so what we're trying to do is educate a way of thinking we call it material health thinking.
Architects and design professionals have been taking our course, and we're seeing, at least locally in the US, that we were watching practices actually shift to healthier ways of building, which is phenomenal.
Our next frontier is really to educate, to provide education that's appealing to building contractors. Because at the contractor level, that's where a lot of substitutions happen, you know, the architect and designer can write in a specification for a healthier building product, but then there might not be the money. And then the owner might say, Well, we, you know, we can't spend that much. And then the contractor will say, well, we'll just substitute it for this. And all of a sudden, you've lost your healthier building. Or at least you've lost strides on that. So that's our next frontier is to really to recruit more, more contractors and more maintenance folks in buildings to take these courses and even developers to take the courses.
MM
What is it about affordable housing that makes it such an acute problem in terms of the health or poor health credentials of these buildings?
JR
One of maybe the most obvious reasons is because affordable housing is generally built with cheap materials. And those cheap materials are generally the most unhealthy. Most of the cheap materials that are available today. are synthetics based in plastics, so based on the refinement of fossil fuels, which then are made into materials that are then made into the building products.
If you can find something that's $1 a square foot, well, let's use it for the poor people in affordable housing, and that's the thinking process and we're trying to change that. And to say, actually, we need to use healthier materials for people who don't have a choice about where they live.
Their homes might be located hated near factories or near toxic waste dumps or near highways where there's just a lot of exterior pollution. And then they go inside and their flooring is polluting their house too, they're being polluted in their external life and in their interior spaces.
And then often also people who are living in affordable housing are working in factories, and they're working on construction sites, and they're working in places where they're exposed all day long to harmful chemicals.
And then some of those chemicals are on their, their clothing, and then they bring that clothing home, and then the children in that household are exposed, doubly or triply.
So that that's the reason we've focused because we focus on affordable housing, because people who are living in affordable housing, our have all kinds of more risks and hazards of being exposed to harmful chemicals than than others.
So it's really important that at least we build homes, for low income people that are healthier, you know, let's start there. And, you know, try to give everyone a chance to live a thriving healthy life.
MM
It was a real eye opener for me, I'll be very honest, I think probably been guilty of falling into what is, in retrospect, a fairly white middle class privilege perspective on what I do, which is, trying to help in my own way to create healthier interiors. And it's far easier to have those conversations on premium new build or high end refurbishment projects in central London, with big pension funds behind us and plenty of cash.
There's still topics of discussion and debate around budgets but the numbers are on a completely different scale. And that section of your course really brought it home to me in a lightbulb moment, I just thought, oh, wow, there's this whole other side to this debate, which is, okay, how do we make all this happen when there aren't these big budgets available? How do you how do you crack that?
JR
That's a really great question. And that's where we dig into the details. I mean, that's where we really have to dig into the strategy for the financing of a building. We might redirect funds to materials, you know, adding a little bit of material and adding a little bit of budget to material cost. And what we're finding is that actually, material costs is less of an issue than labor costs anyway.
If this knowledge is brought to the table, then there are other ways to think about those budgets. So it really becomes more of an economic issue with folks in the other white collar folks in the office is like rethinking how they're, they're aligning their budget.
So for instance, if there's a developer who's building housing in five different cities, and there's an architect or designer who's specifying the materials in those cities, if they specify a particular flooring material, for instance, in each of those five buildings over 1000 units, rather than maybe 100 units, then the price differential goes way down. And then you can work it out with the manufacturer, who will often lower the cost. And so then it becomes much more cost competitive.
MM
When you look, say 10 years down the line from where you're at today. And considering where we've got to, what has been done and what has yet to be done. Are you optimistic for the future of healthy buildings and materials?
JR
We're suffering through such hard times right now, our workplace closed again today, like we did in 2020. And there's so much hardship, really, and, you know, we think about the climate crisis and the challenges that we need to overcome in order to slow the temperature rise. And so there's so much to say that we shouldn't be optimistic. But I can't afford not to be optimistic. I'm an optimist. Otherwise, I think I couldn't do this work. I do believe that we can make the shift.
More people who've taken the course or who understand the issues are inspired to make change, they're not discouraged, I see the opposite, I see more and more people being inspired to make change and taking on the challenge of what that means.
I think there's also been more and more economic arguments for the same - political and economic arguments often drive change. And so I think there's more and more legislation also, but we really as designers, and architects can make these changes that can make have mass, mass impact in the in the most positive way.
MM
Thank you for your time, we will link to the course in the show notes. How do you typically recommend people to engage website? Obviously your main? Yeah, weigh in? Do you do LinkedIn, Instagram, what are your channels,
JR
So www.healthymaterialslab.org is our website and on the Learning Hub, you can find the courses and register.
The registration is through the New School, which is where Parsons School of Design and where Healthy Materials Lab is houses. We're also on LinkedIn, and on Instagram and on Facebook. Our handle is at healthy materials lab. S
I hope more folks, join us there, come to our website, you'll find in addition to our courses, you'll find examples of healthier materials that you can specify. You can find tools and resources that will help you get there faster, and ultimately, a four course program which will give you all this knowledge that Matt is mentioning, after having taken the course.
So actually registration is open now through the end of January for the course and then it will close and not open again until the summer. So if you're listening, I encourage you to to Register now for the for the course at healthymaterialslab.org.
Active Travel in Healthy Buildings
Active Travel in Healthy Buildings - a discussion from the Green & Healthy Places podcast that explores active design, active travel and how real estate developers are responding to this new trend with additional facilities in their buildings for cyclists, joggers, e-scooter riders and others.
An interview with James Nash, founder of Active Travel Score
What is active travel?
Active travel is any traditional or any non-motorized transport that isn’t cars, trains, public transport, or buses, for example, so any small, lightweight, possibly motorized way of getting around like an E-scooter, but also running, walking, or cycling to / from a building.
The journey started for me around about 15-16 years ago. When I was at university, I did a business management degree. And going into my final year, when I was into it, I went to Vienna of all places, and I was just struck by how popular cycling was there. And obviously, everyone thinks of Holland being bike friendly. But I was surprised. And it's the first time I'd seen a bicycle rental system on the street. So I just thought “bikes”, yeah, this is going to come to the UK at some point. And it just stuck in my mind.
Then as part of a final year project, I had to come up with a business idea. So myself and six others in our group, if you like at university, and our final year, had to do quite a business idea, and ours was coming up with a bicycle parking product, which we designed. The two of us left university and we decided to set up a business selling bicycle parking products. And we did that for the best part of 10 years. And that grew.
Most obviously, the kind of uptick we saw in cycling across the UK over the past. Sort of, we've seen it for about 15 years now. But then it got to the point about four or five years ago when we saw the opportunity for a certification within active travel. So we launched what was cycling school and is now active school.
My other business is Bike Dock Solutions as a product seller of bike racks and bicycle parking products. And we notice that day in day out, we were giving advice to architects on how to best layout cycle facilities are active travel facilities within commercial and residential buildings, off the large scale, sort of the skyscrapers you see all around London or any other major cities.
So we realized there was an opportunity and and a lack of knowledge of how to do this. So that was really the I suppose the brainwave or the lightbulb moment that there really needs to be an educational tool for the market, the real estate market, and so he started cycling school.
Designing active travel into a building
I think the government planning authorities have really got to grips with this over the past 15 years, in terms of putting the infrastructure into buildings. So storage for bikes, for example, or soon to be storage for E scooters. They genuinely have really started to be demanding for bike racks for new builds. And I'll say that really made developers get their head around it.
Over the past 10 years, planners have been asking for it and developers have been putting it in. There's now a real business case for putting in good active travel facilities in buildings - landlords see that they drive up rents and longer leases for their tenants or their residents. It's simply what people want from a building now.
City planning and active travel
So if it's a residential development, it varies up and down in the UK, and it varies across the world as it should do because cycling. And active travel cultures are different city to city, country to country. So it's important that there are different standards out there, because you don't want to be over subscribing, the number of bike parking spaces within a building, or under subscribing.
So it may be two, it needs to be out of a block of, say, 1000 apartments that get built. And the planning authority will say we will only grant you planning permission if you provide to bike parking spaces per apartment. And it isn't this thing, these aren't kind of like, oh, we'd like you to do this. But we'll give you planning anyway. You have to do it now.
So for example, 22 Bishopsgate, which is a commercial development in London, and it's the largest office building in Europe. It's actually got 1700 bike parking spaces within it. And that is because they had to do it for planning. Hmm. At the moment, are there too many spaces in there for the occupancy levels? There probably is, however, in five years time, or 10 years time, will there be, you know, under-utilization? Absolutely, based on the way active travel is go in, those spaces will get filled. So there needs to be an element of future-proofing to these new developments that are coming along.
Green building standards and active travel
Out of the two is it developers who listen more to green building standards or city planner? I'd say it's the planners. So the idea is have the full control because at the end of the day, if you don't meet their planning commands, requirements, right, that you build your building.
And so they're the most important than site and the fact that particularly in say London, they their demands are very LV demanding. And we are a lot of our clients often will get us involved because they want to send check some of the numbers because they put in an application for planning and then realize how many bike racks I have to provide.
And I think will easy is actually feasible. And so often we'll work with them to get their heads around it. And to explain that yeah, these are you can't think about these V spaces for now, you've got to think of the next 10 years. And then when they realize actually the long term value for putting in these spaces now. And they're a lot more comfortable with Yeah, going into it and stop stopping argument with the local authority or often the planners who asked him for these to go in now.
Healthy building standards
However, I'd say secondary to that. I suppose yourself, you know, how popular now these green certifications are and the health and wellbeing ones like well, lead Breann they're slowly but surely put in more importance on active travel. So they're really beginning to understand its importance in improving buildings overall, whether it's for the standard sustainability side of things or the health and wellbeing side of things.
Active travel facility design
It is important to bear in mind that what makes an active travel facility isn't just the infrastructure. So when I say infrastructure, I mean, the tangible things you can see, and you can touch. So they are extremely important. And so for our certification, they're worth 70%, of what we score. However, on top of that, and I'll go into more detail about what makes good infrastructure in a minute. But on top of that, what is very important is services.
So it's the softer measures within a building. So 20% of what we score, for example, is the active travel services. So is there a bicycle maintenance mechanic that can come to, to the to the building, once every quarter, or once every six months? Is there a laundry service provided for the tenants within a building or residence. So it's the softer measures as well. So that's something else we really want to say.
And the final 10% is future proofing. So what we want to see is that there's a plan in place that the building has to cope with the increase in active travel that we're going to see going forward is so important, especially now, with the post pandemic era where active travel has seen a real big uptick, it's probably sped things up by at least probably five years in a lot of areas, I'd say, in terms of the popularity. So it's not just infrastructure, it's the overall picture of the softer measures as well.
But in terms of blank canvas, infrastructure wise, that's what everyone thinks of when they want to see in is good access. So ideally, we don't want to be having people who are going by active travel, crossing with motor vehicles, we want to have it set completely separated, so their own insurance, so there's no risk of being hit by car, for example. We want security to be good.
So at least two layers of security because, unfortunately, a lot of the methods of active travel such as cycling or a scootering. They obviously bikes and scooters do get stolen very often. So security is extremely important. We like to see two layers of security. So it's a lot harder for someone just to get in, take a bike on a scooter and get out. Once you're inside the facility.
Designing active travel facilities
What we would love to see is a mixture of racking systems. So we'd like to see low level racking systems for and what this enables is for people who may not be able to lift the bike, or maybe have three wheeled bike two tracks, for example, to be able to park their bikes securely. And we like to see a scooter of X starting to appear. Especially as although there are illegal emojis now, building managers need to start thinking about them, because within the next year is pretty much guaranteed that personal e scooters are going to be legalized in the UK.
Active commuters
We also like to see if it's commercial office space, we want to see good high quality showers as well. And that's important so that people will encourage the cycle there's no barrier there to think I'm not going to ride my bike this morning. Because I can't shower when I get to work. We want to see good, good good shower facilities. Lockers are very important because lockers for that so that people can store their items or clothing.
So for example, some people may choose to run into work and then have a shower. So what you want we want to see is enough lockers so that cyclists who want to put their helmets and their bike lights or whatever it might be in a locker, obviously do have a locker but then we need an over provision so that foreigners can actually use have a locker as well.
We'd like to have a really nice look and feel where possible. So by this we want to see the spaces to be not just whitewash blank walls that traditionally is what you get, and are pretty uninspiring we want them to look more like front of house. So if you went into an apartment block or you went into a reception of a commercial building, we'd like to see the active travel spaces, looking more like that soak some color and make them inviting and some of our clients have even chosen to have music playing in their active travel facilities now, so it really is like Front of House As we think it should be. So in terms of infrastructure, that is what we'd like to say.
Active travel and active design
In years gone by it made sense to have spent all this money on reception areas and have all these amazing artworks and think God isn't this great.But then for years, people you could have the other it could be MD of Deutsche Bank who's in your building will actually cycle to work. And they're literally parking their bike in the bins near the bin storage under the under the building. And it doesn't really make any sense. Because if you're a landlord of that building, you want to keep them that bank they're in and you see you need your whole building to be a nice experience. However, there's I can guarantee 90% of buildings in London, probably very much still like that, it despite how much it's been made, and how things are changing. And so it's the whole whole, the whole building needs to be a good experience. And if there is, is less likely tenants or residents are going to leave, and you might be able to charge them more.
Healthy real estate and active travel
And so what's amazing is that a lot of that kind of traditional thinking is, well, an old building, there's not really any point making any effort it because, you know, all these new builds can come along and just put bite racking in and make them look great. But in reality, that's not the case, it's the investment really isn't anywhere near as much as what I think a lot of developers or a lot of existing landlords are building think is, especially when you consider the benefit of it in terms of long term to business case, in terms of how to keeping people tenants happy or attracting tenants because you know, there's there's, there's there's a lot of movement, as always, in real estate are people coming and going. And so it helps to kind of give yourself a bit very best chance if a building or company taking space knows their employees are going to have a great experience when they get into work, parking their bike, having a shower, going for one at lunchtime, whatever it may be.
the future of active travel facilities
If we went up to the pandemic and what I've seen in terms of the increase in active travel in the 12 or so years up until that point, and I'd say Most commercial buildings, certainly, and residential because of what was happening with planning anyway, would look completely different than the the facilities would be so much better. Just because of the way culture and people were naturally shifting across to active channel.
As I said, I think that pandemics may be going to actually take somewhere along this line, as five years out of that, in terms, it's going to make it happen so much quicker, because we're seeing now the the levels of people going into work by bike, even though people just started going back into London, for example, at Bristol, Manchester, and clients are getting inundated with cyclists in particular, people wanting to use the activetrail facilities.
So crystal ball wise, I'd say it's going to be completely different quantity wise how I don't know. But I wouldn't go far to say you've got a building like 22, Bishopsgate, being built in central London, and they're having to put 1700 spaces in their square footage is around about 1.3 million. I believe I might be wrong on that. But it's not far off. I would say that in five years time that there'll be asking for at least two and a half 1000 bike racks. I can't see how they won't be possibly 3000. So it kind of shows where we're going to go. Overall.
Well healthy building standard and active travel
With WELL, it's more of a focus on the cycling side of things, because that's what they tend to look at, at the moment, mainly at. And so I'm an advisor to them on the movement side of the certification. And so they're they certainly over the past five years, taken more, obviously, more than interested interest is the wrong word. But they realize it's more important than it was before. So that that's why they're there.
They're great in that they always any subjects, they've got so many advisors, and they always try and cherry pick people who are seen as an expert in an area and to work with them to help them develop their standard out. So that's what I've done over the past few years. But they're a really good example of a certification and they're all doing the same. Please be doing the same Breann or doing the same lead, which is obviously more popular in the states are doing exactly the same as well.
Active travel experts
Architects are extremely good at what they do. But there's no way they can have the knowledge that say we do an active child facilities because we spend day in day out doing it. So they just know why they can have the same knowledge. So what what kind of worked really well for us is ultimately we, when we started the certification, we realize that the certification was really going to work well because it enabled buildings to get educated guess and work out how good their facilities are, and now allows buildings to who've got good facilities to have a seal of approval and use it as a marketing tool.
But also the certification allows buildings that maybe aren't so good at the moment and aren't scoring particularly well to go on a journey with us over a period of however many years to overtime, improve their facilities and subsequently improve their score. However, we also realize that yes, there is a slight knowledge gap in terms of designing actual facilities.
So that's why we wanted to have a design service alongside that. So if we have a client that's working on a new development, or they want to undertake a refurbishment project, potentially for an existing building, we can work with them to help them and their design team to, to produce the very best facility possible with the space they have, the budget they have, etc, etc, and then certify afterwards as well.
So it's working extremely well. And I'd say, we tend to work most of our clients on the design side, we're working with clients, architects, rather than us doing the job of the architect, which yes, we can do. And we did do that for that building in Bristol. But most of the time, we work alongside a client's existing architect to ensure the very best outcome for the active travel facility.
Active Travel Score Certification fees
Yes, so the certification, we think it's pretty good value. I mean, we see a yearly fee of 1195 pounds for the certification, and we have a two year license period. So a client would have to sign up for a minimum of two years, so works out to be Yeah, just under two and a half 1000 pounds in total, as a commitment. And over that period, we'll work with them to try and improve their facility.
And after the two years, if they wish to renew it, and then that's what will happen, and hopefully, they'll score even better next time around. And it's, the idea is, it's almost like an insurance policy, I guess, for the client. So that while active travel is obviously taking off more so and increasing year on year, they don't get left behind.
So that's the certification. And in terms of the design advice, where we work with architect, we charge 3000 pounds, and that includes the design advice workshops with their architect, and a two year certification period as well.
Active Travel Accredited Professionals
We've literally launched our Accredited Professionals program in the past month, we'll call it a little bit of a soft launch. So far. Because we it's no isn't finished, we're actually not charging for it. Because we want to just make sure the offering is as good as it can be. And ultimately, we do see it being obviously useful for us in terms of being able to scale active score, internationally. But also, we think it will be an extremely useful tool for people who want to get more educated on the subject.
So architects who are going to be working on active trial facilities, project to project for example, I think this would be really, really useful for because we'll take them through the over you know, what makes a good facility and be able to keep them up to date with trends.
So for example, a bike rack a bike charging racks are coming in a scooter charging Max are coming in. They're just two new things that architects currently will know very little about, or where to get them for, so we can help them with that. So yeah, the AP program we do think although it's new, we do expect it to be very good for us.
Employee health wellness with Wellable
Employee health wellness with Wellable CEO Nick Patel discussing healthy indoor environments, workplace wellbeing trends, ESG, mental health and the post-Covid office.
The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast series covers sustainability, wellbeing and community in office, residential and hotel real estate today.
Welcome to episode 030 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we explore the themes of sustainability and wellbeing in real estate, workplaces and hospitality today.
I’m your host, Matt Morley, Founder of Biofilico wellbeing design and Biofit Health & Fitness.
This time in Boston in the US to talk to Nick Patel, CEO of Wellable employee wellness.
We discuss how Wellable are aiming to be the Netflix of wellness content, how existing trends in workplace wellbeing have simply been accelerated by COVID, how mental health at work has become less taboo than ever before, his views on healthy building certifications as a communications tool for brands that care about employee wellbeing and his thoughts on the role technology, culture and physical spaces play in creating a truly healthy workplace experience.
GUEST / NICK PATEL, CEO
HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CONVERSATION
Being healthy to the earth often equates to being healthy to yourself
Companies are starting to invest in community health initiatives, so not just helping their employees who are living in those communities, but helping all local citizens
There's a shift happening from ROI, return on investment, to VOI value on investment
Healthy people are typically still very active and alert in productivity terms at 4pm
No one ever asked us to create content, on the health benefits of gratitude for example, the health benefits of finding purpose in your life, or the science of happiness, but we did it!
Talking workplace wellbeing with Wellable
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI (excuse typos!)
Matt Morley
Nick, thanks so much for being here with us.. I want to start with how you’d pitch a real estate developer landlord or a corporate executive to describe the problem you're solving.
Nick Patel
Yeah, fundamentally, we're in the business of making individuals healthy, happy and more productive, not just professionally but in their personal lives as well. And so our goal in terms of fulfilling that mission is working with employers on a health plan for their properties, really they’re the sponsors, who can support tailored wellness programmes for their constituents, whether that's their employees, or their tenants, whoever that may be.
Now, if we're talking to an employer, I usually always open with the fact that having a wellness programme is the right thing to do for a number of different reasons. There are benefits in terms of business success,. So having a thriving workforce is also associated with having employees who are excited about coming to work every day, excited about giving 100% of themselves into that job, that results in more creativity, more engagement, more retention, all these things will translate into the bottom line for those companies.
When we're talking to a property manager or building owner, it's the same concept, it's just a different channel to that individual. In that case, if you're a property manager, or building owner, your client is the employer. So assisting them in critical things for their business is helpful to attract and retain those tenants, garner higher rents, things like that. So implementing programmes that help their employees lead healthy lives, takes one thing off their plate or supports them in their own personal initiatives or company initiatives, all of which results in just better business success.
Matt Morley
Very cool. I like the way you're presenting it not just as as filling a gap or reducing a negative impact. But in fact, spinning on the upside, which is adding to the business and generating positivity, generating revenue, whatever it might be, rather than just preventing bad things from happening. I think that's a fundamental point on that topic.
We’ve just been through a roller coaster of a past 16 months, how have you at Wellable had to adapt within that employee wellness space? And how have you had to adjust your products and services in line with what's been going on?
Nick Patel
Great question. I think, depending on when you would ask me this question, during the last 18 months, the response would be somewhat or significantly different. I think right now, we're in a place where we're looking backwards, and kind of reflecting on these moments, for us least in America, the vaccine rates are high, we're feeling people coming back to work, things like that. And so as I look back, even coming into March until today, I felt like we're going through three different phases.
I think most businesses went through this in some way, shape, or form, even ones that were thriving in a digital world, and ones that were heavily impacted in the sense that they were on site, or had to be physically present. But they all had this element that no one escaped this. And so there's this recovery phase, right, there's a response phase, and there's reimagined phase.
The recovery phrase for us specifically, we are a comprehensive wellness provider. So what that means is that we are offering a number of different solutions, all independently, that employers or properties can implement in their programme. So that includes software, and that includes services, which were at least pre COVID, delivered primarily on site.
So for us, our recovery phase dealt with helping our clients transition to digital solutions. We had an airline as a customer and as you can imagine, every aspect of their world was turned upside down. I couldn't imagine being in the call centre for that company. And so, they were concerned about health and workplace wellbeing, they're doing it for all the right reasons. But practically, it was something that they could not even think about addressing in the month of March, April, May.
There's a response phase once we realise what was happening, and how we're going to respond. We tried a number of different things. We launched a programme almost initially. So it was very impressive that by mid March, we're launching a new product, we called at the time Wellable LIVE and it was the alternative to our on site services business. It was a streaming service. We were doing effectively Zoom fitness classes, Zoom webinars and things like that, that were throughout the day, five days a week that anyone can watch recordings of.
We were concerned about bandwidth, internet, microphone access, and we're sending out iPads to improve their quality because they were using home computers and things like that. At the end of the day, I think we're proud of that product. But it wasn't something that we saw that was going to be long term.
Now we're entering that reimagined phase of what the world is going to look like, in the short term being 12 months or so also in a very long term. So pretty quickly by May we said, we think the solution if you're going to do digital products, or data content, ‘live’ is nice in many ways, but you are missing out so many the benefits of being able see someone's yoga posture, for example, in a live session, right? So we end up launching what we call Wellable on demand. It is our version of what we think is going to be the future, like most products that are in this early stage, it's still in its infancy, and it's still growing and changing. But really, it's thinking about Netflix for wellness content.
So for us, we initially launched in July, a full library of high quality, you know, multiple camera angles, miked up instructors, things like that of all fitness classes for everything Pilates, yoga, prenatal / postnatal workouts, things like that. And from there, we're exploring additional content, is it healthy cooking, is it just written content in terms of recipes, we already launched a mindfulness and meditation series as part of that. And that's what we're thinking the future of like this digital concept, because what we're seeing is a lot of our clients mainly are still trying to figure out permanently what it looks like. But for the most part, in general, there's going to be more remote work than there was before. And whether that's employees in the office only three days a week, full time remote, every wellness programme is going to need some type of digital element and content delivery. And I think that's what the future for on demand product is going to be.
Matt Morley
So with the shift then to to a largely digital platform in terms of the interface itself, how are your different audience groups interacting with Wellable? Is it via a specific app? Is it essentially online?
Nick Patel
Yes, that's a tough question to answer, because for our perspective, how we deliver health and wellness solutions, is that structurally, we offer a number of different products and offerings, all of which can be purchased independently, and mixed and matched. And so the way we think about is that every employer is unique culturally, you know, where are they based, geographically, the physical space, things like that. And they're comprised of very unique individuals. And in most cases, it's a very diverse subset of people, all of which want different things right.
For some people, having group fitness classes is a great opportunity. Others prefer a digital engagement experience and mobile app, and we try to offer all those independently of each other. So if you look at 100 of our customers, and look what they're doing broadly with Wellable, for the most part, they're doing things that are at the very least, different in small ways, and in some cases, very significantly different. No one's right or wrong. There's not a wellness programme that's perfect for every group or every building. And so that's what we're experiencing.
When you think about how people are interacting with our our solutions, in general, it's not always necessarily a digital interaction. Although that is our primary product, we are known as a software provider, but it could be, you know, pre COVID groups that are just doing things on site, that was everyone, whether it's a warehouse company, or things like that everyone was always on site. And that's the way they felt the best opportunity to deliver was. And so it's just terms of how we communicate our programmes and things like that. It really again, depends on the programme for us, we are an end to end provider so that includes the promotions of the programme , the delivery execution, capturing and responding to feedback.
So to the extent our clients give us that authority to message and communicate directly with the employee, we take advantage of that with tailored messages for people who aren't even participating to people who are very active and we don't want to disrupt their way they're interacting with that programme. For our best clients. Like I said before, they're individuals or their employees are very unique and different. They all want different things. They offer a very diverse mix of our solutions to their clients, or their employees, knowing that someone gravitate to some type of solutions other gravitate to others. And so our communication strategy kind of matches that depending on what it is, depending on who that demographic is or trying to a diverse set of outreach and things like that to capture just a broad audience and then hopefully allow them to self identify what makes the most sense for them.
workplace wellness trends
Matt Morley
I think it connects very neatly with the idea that workplace culture and to some extent the brand itself, as in how the individual company's brand values and mission statement is reflected in terms of how they operate at a corporate or other employee level. So that makes sense.
There's there's just so much happening in this workplace wellness space right now. And there's there's a lot of players emerging, a lot of content being created. You've been in the game since 2012. How have you seen the workplace wellness scene evolve? Obviously, there's sort of there's going to be presumably a pre COVID and a post COVID. Right. But I mean, like just sort of looking at it or bigger scale over the last decade, like what have been the major shifts that you've seen that you're perhaps at a strategic medium term level tapping into?
Nick Patel
Yeah, there’s clearly a pre COVID, post COVID narrative there. The one thing I'll say about COVID, I think everything is still settling a little bit. But I think the long term takeaway from COVID, from our perspective, and I think it kind of makes sense in most industries, is that it didn't necessarily change the world, it really accelerated what was already happening, right. And so remote work, was becoming more and more popular anyway but companies were hesitant, but due to COVID, they were forced to do it. Then they realised there are some growing pains, especially when you're doing it unplanned But they're realising their sales teams can be productive while not travelling, which some groups are already experiencing, and experimenting with.
I think the wellness industry in general, is similar. The trends that we are experiencing, we're just accelerated. It's been eight years since we were founded, so much has changed. You know, the funny little story when we first started, Fitbit had just created their Fitbit zip. So if you remember that, it's like the one that you clip on your belt. And their real selling point was, Oh, it's Bluetooth oriented, and you have an app, it wasn't anything about being wrist worn, or anything of that nature. And at the time, when we first started, you know, the iPhone was one or two years old, we thought the future of health and wellbeing from a digital perspective, that is what's going to be with these consumer apps and technologies. And so rather, you know, we view ourselves, you have to distinguish between the two, there's consumer technology, there's a direct and individual, there's enterprise wellness technologies. And that's when you're going to go to a property and employer health plan and asked them to be the sponsor of a programme.
Back in 2012, we thought the future was going to be connecting all these consumer technologies and the consumer grade solutions, let that market determine who the best products were, aggregate that to a single platform and expose that to employees, or tenants, whoever it may be. And that was a big differentiator. I remember going to employer groups trying to talk to them as a small company, and made the comment, look at this Fitbit, it's going to be great. People are using it. And they're asking the question, are people really going to use a Fitbit or activity tracker? So that was a story in 2012. Now, if you didn't connect to a Fitbit, like at the time, our competitors weren't doing that, that was like the novel. And that was our biggest key differentiator.
Now, if you don't connect to Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin, these technologies, it's a non starter. So in eight years, what became our biggest differentiator is just table stakes.
Mental health in the workplace
Just in general, I think the two biggest trends that were always happening pre COVID, were accelerated due to COVID. And we were experiencing these changes at different rates, certainly early years was a move to holistic wellbeing and considering mental health, certainly pre COVID it was still taboo in the workplace in terms of a conversation. Less so now, we’ve made a lot of progress due to COVID, for sure.
But it was always something that was gaining momentum. Now when we talk to employers, they're asking, How does Wellable address mental health in the workplace? They've asked us about financial wellbeing things of that nature that just weren't nearly as popular even five years ago.
the shift away from biometric screenings
The second big takeaway, at least in the US market, for sure, is that the original wellness programmes first introduced in the 1970s, and became really popular in the 90s and early 2000s. Effectively had I'm oversimplifying here, two big elements - a biometric screening and a health risk assessment. If I draw your blood of all your employees or tenants, I can capture information that data is good for you. And my argument be just because you have data doesn't mean it's good, right? There's gonna be some actionable intelligence from that data that makes it valuable, but data in itself is just attribute. And then the same thing to health risk assessment, it was heavily clinical focus. It was a self assessment. So you're often asking clinical questions to an employee who doesn't necessarily know the answer, and just feels like they want to get to the assessment and answer the questions.
Tonnes of research has always questioned those, even though for decades, but they have this element of stickiness to it. Employers like Safeway is a very famous case study for employee wellness programme here in the United States. And their whole programme is built off biometric screenings. And if you're Safeway, it's hard for you to walk away from a programme that you built the head, a case study on it that's been very widely touted and things like that.
But new programmes aren't adopting the solutions. And we were found find the old programmes, were willing to slowly peel them away. COVID certainly accelerated that in the sense that you couldn't do biometric screens anymore. So a lot of companies suspended that for the first time in a decade or so. And now they're ask themselves, well, we didn't have it before, our wellness programme is still showing positive results. The biometric screening doesn't cover certain holistic elements like mental health and things like that. And I think they're slowly moving away from those. So those are the two big things I find are trends that are happening or celebrate COVID or continue happening. It's a transition to holistic wellbeing, and moving away from things like biometric screenings and health risk assessments.
Healthy building certifications & wellbeing interiors
Matt Morley
So a lot of change, a lot of movement, an industry that's in full evolution. So let’s shift onto healthy building certifications, where you're dealing not just with wellbeing interior design, but also operational and facilities management processes. So these third party standards like WELL and FITWEL. Now, that can either happen at the owner level, or it can happen at the employer level. how does Wellable connect with tall that?
Nick Patel
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would even ask why do we have these certifications, I think it helps people hit certain standards and goals. But I think for really, it's a good way to communicate. If you're in a building, for example, it's a way for you to communicate that we are investing in the health and wellbeing of the tenants. And for most companies who value health and wellbeing that may impact their decision in terms of where they want to set their office and things like that.
It's similar to the ‘healthiest places to work’, companies often strive for that, because the recognition of that healthiest place to work, attracts the right talent, emphasises your values, in terms of caring for the employees and things like that. So it ends up being the end product.
In many ways, I have a number of things that you're engaging with, prior to ever getting that certification. And so as it relates to healthy spaces, especially this new normal, or this kind of post COVID normal that is still kind of unfolding and figure out how it all shakes out. We found or we find I think that promoting health and well being in general, across three buckets is where employers should strive. And we help in many of those areas, but not all of those areas. And by engaging in kind of these three areas or buckets - technology, culture and physical spaces.
Tech, culture and designing physical space for wellbeing
Technology, we always talked about this even prior COVID remote work was increasing, people are looking to be healthy, not just you know, when they're in eight hours a day, in their offices and things like that. And to be able to have a distributed health and wellbeing strategy, there has to be a technology element, there's no real way to do that well outside of that element. And so investing the right technologies, and we're a technology company, as a relates to health and wellbeing is really important. And we offer a number of solutions, depending on the type of wellness programme that you want to offer.
Culture. I always talk to a talk about properties in this way is that people forget that properties have culture to culture, something that companies often associate what's your company culture, but properties have culture too. And it's from you know, is it inclusive? How is it dynamic in the public spaces, all those things are pervasive. And people gravitate to the culture. I mean, that's what culture has is what people are doing when someone doesn't tell them what to do in some ways, right. And so buildings have cultures, employees have culture. And where we've always said is we provide content, we blog a lot, we have thought leadership, we actually have a group within our company that does proprietary research on a number of things, including culture. And that's something that we try to improve, but it's really something outside the scope of what our company does, outside of like guidance and consultation. So we know it's one of the key pillars. And, you know, we're actually personally focusing a lot on diversity, equity inclusion right now in terms of just research and understanding what that means.
We read an article from a professor at Harvard that that summed up pretty well, she said - there's no amount of employee wellness programmes, or company benefits that can offset racism in the workplace. That hit the nail on the head as relates to how important culture is as relates to health and wellbeing.
So then we have physical spaces, whether it's on site gyms, healthy food options, air quality, things of that nature.
As companies or buildings kind of pursue health and wellbeing in the lens of these three areas, I find that they typically can sail through the certification process. And the certification process, in our view, is really getting recognition for all the work you're doing as it relates to health and well being.
Matt Morley
I think that's a crucial insight that to unpack and in a sense demystify some of these healthy building certifications that can seem quite imposing and really a mountain to climb. When you're coming from a standing start. I think the point you're making very clearly, and it's a powerful one, is that if you're active in this space, if you're already engaging with the idea of workplace wellness, and you're looking after your employees, a healthy building certification should be within reach. It's a subtle point, but the certification is really kind of like doing the exam, having done the hard work, right? And Wellable is there to help with some of the hard work. So you can, in a sense, do all of that first, and then the certification just comes later, rather than starting with that and having to roll all of this out, because there's a lot to do.
ESG - Environmental, Social and Governance
So how does Wellable’s work contribute to ESG?
Nick Patel
What's interesting about ESG is that the definition is continuously expanding. So for I think, ESG, when people often associated with this, several years ago, it was around largely a sustainability movement, about going green. And what we found actually, by the requests in demand of our clients, both current perspective is that they often lump that sustainability element into health and wellbeing. And so the general concept being that you know, being healthy to the earth often equates to being healthy to yourself, walking to work or biking to work has both of those benefits. And they're deeply, deeply connected, clean air, good for your body, it's good for the earth, deeply, deeply connected. And so we find that that definition, I would have told you when we first started this company, that we would never be in the concept of sustainability risk broadly. And now we find that they're overlapping very heavily. And so that's where I think our biggest splash happens as a relates to the ESG movement.
But to your point, we often talk to companies, when we think about community health initiatives. And as a public health level, government, especially local governments are doing a really good job about driving Community Health had done an extremely good job of connecting with the private sector, off the concept of Yes, this is the right thing you should do. That is what ESG is about. In many ways, these are the right things you should engage in similar to you should have an employee wellness programme for the right reasons. But by the way, there are all these extra ancillary benefits that come from it.
Community engagement in ESG
In the case of the ESG movement, where we're seeing really big changes and impacts on public health at the local level, it's the private sector, recognising something that was when you would think is fairly obvious is that you recruit and retain employees from the community that you operate in. So if you're in whatever town or city may be, having healthy, happy, healthier citizens of that town or city is going to translate into your company benefits as well. Obviously, your wellness programme can help accelerate those type of things. And we're finding that companies are starting to invest in community health initiatives, so not just helping their employees who are living in those communities, but helping all local citizens is where the wellbeing movement is most deeply tied as relates to ESG.
We started originally, just as employer focus, we've started expanding to properties. And now we have a number of groups, from public health departments and things looking to run community programmes. And largely this is driven by this ESG movement.
Matt Morley
I've seen that very much there's been this kind of kicker in that particular piece of ESG. Around community. Suddenly, the Black Lives Matter moment, I think was a was a turning point in that and it really then suddenly put community up there not just in terms of ethical business practices, or ethical procurement policies for business, in line then with how you look after employee employees, but then there was this piece in between around the community. I think that's, that's a strong point dimension.
Now, but underlying all of this, then is that discussion with the CFO where the saying, okay, but that all sounds great, but you know, show me the data, show me the evidence of how this is having a tangible impact on our staff and on our business. So how does wearable play into that conversation around generating hard data? And if you like, almost analytics around the impact of of working with you?
Nick Patel
Yeah, there's a transition to a couple of questions. Previously, you mentioned about what's changing in the employee wellness space. And I didn't mention this, but this is something that certainly was happening, it's top of the list as well, is that there's a shift from ROI, return on investment, to VOI value on investment.
So the classic model, going back to the, you know, original, old school wellness programmes was that I could invest $1, into an employee wellness programme, and I would extract $2 in savings. You know, if you're in the United States, where you're uncovering your health insurance for all your employees, that would most likely show up in your health care costs. And that's why you did the investment was a strictly financial decision. And what we've transitioned from that, and a couple ways, one, a, that's really hard to measure, right, there are all these external factors that are in play there outside your control COVID. Being a great example, more commonly, you know, a high flu season one year, also has an impact on your claims and things that day to day or year to year, but doesn't necessarily show doesn't always get removed from a wellness programme, per se. Vi, for example, says let's consider those financial benefits, let's consider all these other things to have financial outcomes, but don't show up in a certain hard dollar.
So things like employee retention, depending on the near the number you use, it can be you know, the cost of someone's full salary for a year to just recruit a new employee. So it's always cheaper, like it is in business to retain a customer than find a new one. Same thing with keeping an employee who is familiar with your processes. You don't have to go through the training or the finding that talent, things like that greater productivity, so less sick days, greater productivity in the sense that people have fatigue at the end of the day. And Healthy People are typically still very active and alert in productivity terms at 4pm when they're working and things like that.
So there's a long list of what those value on investment elements could be. So the first place we always start with companies is why are you having this programme? What are those key kind of value on investment metrics that you will measure success? So whenever we have a client join Wellable they fill out a questionnaire and one of the questions is how do you want to measure success and that's really kind of a way to capture these VOI elements, and then from there, you have to capture the data.
So if someone says, Yes, I would like to see less sick days, we need to find out where in there, you know, time attendance records that data sets. If it's about health care costs, how can we have access to those health care claims to begin to measure those things. And so for most companies, especially the ones we're working with, who in many cases are either transitioning from a different wellness vendor to our platform, or just launching a programme for the first time, they conceptually have an idea of things they want to track, but they don't necessarily haven't implemented anything around that in the first step is that data capture based on those specific elements that you want to measure? And from there, depending on what those elements are, the measurement process is a little bit different.
In every scenario, there will be some kind of confounding variables, for example, COVID, right. So looking at healthcare claims of last year, there's no way for you to segment out perfectly, but you should consider that as you think about, you know, the value you're getting from. And at the end of the day, you can measure programme success through these value on investment metrics. But we always talk about why are we doing these programmes, it's for the right reasons, it's for those employees, it's for those tenants.
So I would always encourage employers, and we have it built into our programme capturing the feedback of those participants, right, there's no version of our sick days dropped or healthcare costs drop, and then every employee hits the programme, that's not a successful programme, it really comes down to that. So in every scenario, you're capturing their feedback, you want to make sure what they're doing is fun, because if it's not, it's not sustainable. And you want to make sure you're really building a programme based on the needs and the wants of that audience.
Matt Morley
I like it. So it's a qualitative approach combined with some of the quantitative data to give you some some real, tangible feedback from from the front line, it strikes me a lot of what you're doing then is is in a sense about content creation. What's the strategy behind your content creation?
Nick Patel
Yep, so we work with a diverse population. So everything we're doing is effectively all of the above. And some companies webinars resonate really, really well. Other ones they don't, and just for cultural reasons, based on individual interests and needs, sometimes marketing issues. So our goal is to offer a diverse set of content. So just actual material and topics we cover and deliver that in a diverse way, in terms of different media types, articles, video content, long form material, short form material, things like that.
The one thing I'll say, just as like a business founder is I never thought that we would be as much in the content game as we are now. I just mean, looking back on it, it seemed pretty obvious, but it never occurred to me, we have a very large content team. And they're very busy! And so when we think about content, we think about the combination of two factors, one, responding to demand.
So there's demand for greater mental health resources and things like that we need to respond to those areas. And we're consciously doing that. And we're going to do that in different formats. I think what's tricky is we often are seen as a thought leader, by our clients we're trying to be so I guess it's no surprise there. And so when that perspective is put in, we're being asked to think about the future in a way they have not.
So for us, no one ever asked us to create content, on the health benefits of gratitude for example, the health benefits of finding purpose in your life, or the science of happiness, but we did it. Those are all things that conceptually when you talk to an employer or property and say, hey, these are things are really important. Have you considered to incorporate that your wellness programme and we show all the data around that tie it to, you know, health benefits and well being? They jump on it quickly, but there's something no one ever demanded.
So when you go talk to most employers, they're asking us to do fiscal activity programmes and nutrition programmes. Obviously, we need those some groups now asking for mental health and financial well being, but we cover so many dimensions of health and well being and educating those employers on why those dimension are important, is critical. And then, you know, identifying where those areas to invest in so that's what we spend a lot of time at The back to actually why we formed Wellable is supposed to be this thought engine for us, not just for our content creation, but also for just general topics in the HR and property management space.
The big thing we're working on now is, as I mentioned before, is diversity, equity inclusion. I don't know exactly what that means from a product perspective, or how we're gonna deliver that content. And we're still exploring it. But we know that it's critical to the future health and well being. And make sure we deliver that in a format that kind of impactful to our customers.
Matt Morley
I really encourage listeners to have a little dig around on your site, I found it really interesting and insightful to spend a little time Yeah, moving through the space that you've referred to the empty content that you provide online, as a way to see almost taking the temperature of what both you think is important and relevant, and presumably what what the world of work is asking for, in terms of relevant content. So just seeing the diversity of the articles and the headlines out there was was a real eye opener for me. It's, it's been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time, you've got a really exciting future ahead. So I wish you the very best of luck. How can people reach out Connect, follow along, see what you're up to?
Nick Patel
Yeah, absolutely. If you have any questions, you want to connect me directly my emails just Nick @ wellable.co but a great place to start is of course our website www.wellable.co where you can check out our blog, definitely subscribe to it. I think a couple years ago, we won our award for the best wellness blog, we continue to produce a lot of interesting content there. So if you're just broadly interested in health and wellbeing as your HR person or property person or whoever it may be, it's a great way to get different pieces of content on current issues, emerging issues, and really the future of health and well being at the enterprise level.
Matt Morley
Awesome. Thanks again Nick. It's been great.
workplace wellbeing with wellwise in the UAE
Episode 28 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast with Matt Morley takes us to Dubai talking to Bobbi Hartshorne, Co-Founder and Chief Wellbeing Officer at WellWise, a UK and UAE based business that takes an integrated diagnostics approach to delivering value via office wellbeing programs for corporations large and small.
The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast series takes a deep-dive into the role of sustainability, wellbeing and community in office real estate, residential property, hotels and educational facilities today.
Episode 28 takes us to Dubai talking to Bobbi Hartshorne, Co-Founder and Chief Wellbeing Officer at WellWise, a UK and UAE based business that takes an integrated diagnostics approach to delivering value via office wellbeing programs for corporations large and small.
Our conversation covers:
Bobbi’s experience creating a framework for student wellbeing via an innovative accommodation offer
WellWise’s Research driven diagnostic system approach to workplace wellbeing
their Employee engagement process to build a culture around wellbeing
their network of specialists providing bespoke solutions covering everything from sleep quality, to office design and environmental health
the growing importance of mental health support at work
the subtle but important difference between wellness and wellbeing
the opportunities in the UAE market for workplace wellness
Workplace wellbeing insights from our conversation
Workplace wellbeing improves almost anything that a CEO cares about ,from productivity to engagement, job satisfaction and creativity
organizations with high workplace wellbeing have 2% - 3% better performance on the stock market, better customer loyalty, and better sales performance
when you have a high wellbeing workforce, everything else tends to fall into place
in order to attract people back to these places we call offices, we're having to get very creative about what they look like, how they serve us, what function they fulfill and how they enable success
wellbeing has a broader and deeper meaning than wellness as it incorporates life satisfaction, accomplishment, motivation, purpose, engagement
GUEST / Bobbi Hartshorne of WellWise Workplace Wellbeing UAE Dubai
HOST / Matt Morley - wellbeing champion Espana Spain
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI - EXCUSE TYPOS!
Matt Morley
Okay, let's do this. If I may, I'm going to start by going back in time a little bit, because something came out of your CV as I was doing my research for this conversation. And it's a, it's a sector that seems to be really going through a transformation at the moment. I know it's no longer what you do. But I did want to just pick your brains a little bit on the student accommodation space. And you had a role a set of well being for global student accommodation group. And really the retargeting generation said, as I see it, and it's a dynamic sector. So you're combining wellness with student accommodation? Like what did that give you? And how did that go on to influence where you are today running various workplace wellness businesses?
Bobbi Hartshorne
Yeah. Well, it was a really interesting journey. The thing about that role at GSA was that I created it for myself. And so it was really the first of its kind in the private built student accommodation environment, although there had been similar roles in universities. And so it was a very steep learning curve. And it was really in response to a growing concern about the well being of students and the types of issues that were increasingly coming up in our residences, but also just around universities in general.
Bobbi Hartshorne
what I learned was that, for students, wellbeing was relatively universal. There were nine key areas that we were finding were the constant sources of stress or the opportunities to improve wellbeing. And they were financial, cultural, physical, mental, academic, spiritual, career and environmental. And it was this extreme change and this transition that young people are going through when they go from university, or when they go from school into university, that really creates this instability, where stress and low well being and challenges can fester.
Bobbi Hartshorne
the degree to which an individual has the ability to cope with those to address them, to reduce them varies massively depending on who they are, where they come from, what experiences they've had in the past. And so whilst we were able to build a framework for wellbeing that was fairly consistent across the world, how each individual student engaged with that or benefited from it really did vary. And there was certainly no one size fits all.
Bobbi Hartshorne
it dawned on me that these young people who were really quite different to the types of students that we'd had previously sort of the millennials, and the way they behaved and what they valued, and what got them motivated, and what stressed them was very different. And it dawned on me that those young people were going to enter the workforce, and that they were going to present so interesting and new challenges to employers, in the same way that they had presented new and interesting challenges to the student accommodation sector. And so I got really into looking at that transition, again, that vulnerable period of transition out of university and into the workplace. And I started to look at how existing working practices were maybe not going to align particularly well with this new generation, and maybe some of the challenges that were going to crop up.
Bobbi Hartshorne
And it wasn't long before we started to see burnout in mid 20 year olds, who had been in the workplace less than 10 years. It wasn't long before we started to see employers very concerned about mental health issues for younger employees, and a real change in pattern in terms of what those young employees were seeking from their employers. And it was way beyond cash, it just was so much more than financial gain. And so this is really where my interest in the workplace began. And then COVID cropped around the corner, gave us all a bit of a fright. And that was really an interesting experience because putting a workplace under an exceptionally extreme set of circumstances like COVID. And you tend to bring out either the best or the worst or a mixture of both. And so I really then started to observe what happens in a workplace under extreme circumstances and what happens to employees and leaders and managers under extreme work, workplace environments. And so that really was what gave gave this sort of leeway for me to take the take the jump out of the student accommodation world and into the workplace world because There were a lot of similarities and crossovers that I could draw on. But there was also a whole world of stuff I was interested in that I wanted to explore further.
Matt Morley
So am I right in thinking then with the student accommodation, you were to use the terminology from the hotel world of you're dealing with hardware and software. So you're doing both with training , teaching the mental game, as well as the physical game. So the spaces in which the students were spending their time sleeping at night, but they also meant providing, if you'd like more operational solutions to keeping them sane and healthy and positive and upbeat, right?
Bobbi Hartshorne
Absolutely. And it's quite strange, actually, from the physical perspective because universities for a really long time have been doing a lot to support students across all of those pillars that I mentioned earlier. But the one area that always seem to be neglected, or that was never really optimized was the accommodation, whether that was University owned accommodation, or whether it was privately owned accommodation. And it struck me that the nature of your home is the place where you're going to be engaging with your personal studies where you're going to have your downtime, where you're going to be maybe alone in your room, are the times when the challenges are probably going to rear their ugly heads. And, and it was really important for us to make sure that our teams on in the residences knew how to support students in that environment. But increasingly, that as we were upgrading residences, as we were building new residences, how we laid those structures out how we built community, how we identified whether students were isolated or behaving differently to maybe their normal patterns, that all became part of it. So yeah, absolutely operational and physical,
Matt Morley
There seem to be just so many parallels between the two, if you were to switch out what you've just described in the last couple of minutes, but instead of describing students, we would describe the staff or employees. And in fact, a lot of those same issues can come up or have been coming up, especially over the last few years around stress and anxiety and what have you.
Matt Morley
So you then transition across into the next phase of your career, you moved to launch your own business in October 2020, the end surrender, and there you're focusing more as I understand it on sort of a consultancy role for workplace wellbeing, right?
Bobbi Hartshorne
Absolutely. It just felt like , my natural transition. And my passion had really gone into that space, not that I wasn't still passionate about the student space, but I felt like I'd done a huge amount in the student space and there were great people there who could carry that on and evolve it further
Bobbi Hartshorne
I moved into the workplace and how the parallels as you've already alluded to, could transition across. I could see in the same way as five years previously, I could see that the university sector was struggling with student wellbeing the exact same was happening now with employees, employers struggling with employee well being, I was also observing a lot of snake oil solutions, and a lot of well washing, we call it and they're in your field, you have greenwashing. And this idea that it kind of wasn't very authentic that a lot of the work and practice going on in this space was at a very surface level, plaster over the cracks, put a nice picture on your website and kind of say that you're doing well being but as time went on, it became very apparent to organisations that that really wasn't enough. And it wasn't getting to the heart of the actual challenges and unpacking and really helping them to address the impact that a poor wellbeing workforce creates for an for an organization. And that was really where I wanted to step in with a much more rigorous and, I guess, scientific approach to wellbeing. But I was held back in doing that because what I didn't have that I wanted was a strong research platform. I kind of knew all the ingredients that were required through my own experience and through all the research I had done, but I wasn't able to get those articulated in a meaningful way because I didn't have a research platform. And so really not wanting to be just another snake oil charmer or just another well washer I set about trying to solve that riddle and now It was really when Tim Gatlin and worldwise came into the picture.
Matt Morley
I think it's a crucial point, because as you've suggested, typically, when going in on these projects, when there's there is a problem, by the time you get to the mechanic something's gone wrong with the car, so often by the time consultants brought in, right, if you've got people complaining, or the mood and the, the atmosphere in the office is really turned negative, or whatever it might be, something's going wrong here, I think it's quite rare that it's sort of anticipation, it anticipates, potential need, typically, you're kind of coming a little bit late to the game. So you have to deliver on the data and the numbers. And it's just, it's not enough to pen some nice words and hope everything works out. So you've then took this sort of far more data driven and research driven approach with Well, why so where you're currently clearly spending a lot of your time and energy and it looks to be an interesting new addition. So why don't we dig into that a little bit? So in terms of like, what that brings to the market and the needs that it's addressing? How are you resolving some of the issues that are out there at the moment?
Bobbi Hartshorne
So look, Tim, my business partner, Tim Gatlin, he already had a really, really strong research platform, that funny enough he was using in the student space, which is how Tim and I know each other, but he was also using it in other industries as well. And so I knew that that platform, and the strength of the tech involved in that platform was exactly what we were going to need to unpack the complexity of what we now call the workplace wellbeing network. And so we set about understanding, building on our knowledge, understanding what currently employers were purchasing in this space, what issues were they trying to target? What solutions were already on the market, what research was already out there, what questions were being asked. And we started to spot some key patterns. And these kind of worse split into they were either looking at what was happening with the employees themselves. So why are our employees not engaged? How do we build resilience? Why are our employees eating a terrible diet? Why are they not sleeping properly, or they would then look at organizational factors, although there was a lot less of that going on, but you would say, you know, is our management style appropriate for a modern workforce are our rewards and recognitions keeping up with the latest trends and desires of our employees. And so you have these kind of two sides of workplace wellbeing. But what you didn't really have was anybody who was working out how the two fit together, how they impacted one another, and where they could strengthen each other. And that was really what Tim and I were curious to see if we could create. And it turned out, we could so that was great.
Bobbi Hartshorne
In kind of talking to business leaders, we discovered three really important things. The first was the workplace wellbeing and employee wellbeing was top priority, or at least top five priority for every single business leader we spoke to. The second was that they were all completely overwhelmed by the amount of choice the amount of solutions, you might have conversation, the diversity of the discussion. And they were really struggling to navigate through to something that meant something to their own organization and their own situation. And the third thing was that a lot of them had already started and maybe even four or five years in have been investing in solutions and approaches and building teams and building structures around this stuff. But it wasn't actually really yielding what they kind of hoped. And so there was this kind of disillusionment or this paralysis happening where they were struck with this problem they just could not solve. And so after six months of research and diving into this topic, we've built a diagnostic system that brings those two factors together that organizational side and that employee side. And what we're able to offer organizations now is really comes down to clarity, being able to understand exactly what's happening in your organization, where the pain points are being created, where the challenges are arising from, and what the causation and outcomes of those are, what the cost of those are is to your organization, and then to help them to navigate through a strategic blueprint to a much more successful place to re redesign or redeploy their resources into the areas where it was going to have the most impact the quickest and then build from there. To where they wanted to go.
Matt Morley
Okay, and so you're beginning that process with a data collection phase. So presumably research and surveys, So you're getting both qualitative and quantitative data that gives you a baseline, right? And that forms part of the process or WISE process, as you call it, right? Where do you go on to?
Bobbi Hartshorne
Well, actually, there's a step before the data collection process, which we call the Y, phase for why. And really, this is this is often missing, as well, we discovered when we're doing our research is that quite often companies don't actually understand why it is that they're investing or think that they should be investing in workplace wellbeing. They they've either caught on to a trend, or they've spotted a specific issue such as engagement or resilience, or health, or they have a problem with something like productivity or engagement. And they go, Oh, well, wellbeing must be the answer. So because everybody's telling us that's the answer. But actually, when you start to talk to different employees across an organization, particularly at the senior level, you discover that there's actually quite a big difference in what they understand wellbeing is going to bring to the table, and some of them have got it, unfortunately, quite wrong. And some of them have got it right. But it's not aligned to their colleagues.
Bobbi Hartshorne
The other big Why is why are you doing what you're already doing? So a lot of organizations have already invested in this space they've already bought in consultants, they've already built a framework, they're already doing activities. But why did they choose that approach in the first place? And then why isn't it working? So we have to, we have to understand all of that before we can do the survey because what the survey then allows us to do is to dig into those issues a bit further, as well as just cover off the workplace wellbeing network that I already alluded to, with those those two sides.
Bobbi Hartshorne
Then once we've got those two factors, we can look at them together and say, well, you're saying you want to achieve x, but your current approach isn't doing that. And your employees are still struggling with this factor because of this situation. And so what we're then able to do is move on to the s the strategize element of the WISe process, and help them to use all of that insight, use that quantitative and qualitative insight and really drill down on a strategy that is going to help them achieve their why by unpacking the identified issues that we got at the ice stage, so so that's what we do. And then after we've done that, we've got a lovely strategy on a piece of paper. Well, it's it's next to useless when it's only on a piece of paper, it's now about engaging, it's the E phase of our why's process. You have to start engaging people. And there's two to send you two sets of people you need to engage. The first one, of course, is your employees. So how are you going to build them up, get them on board, get them bought into the process, get them contributing to it, and building a culture around wellbeing. And the second people, you have to engage professionals and specialists and that they could be you know, sleep specialists or office design specialists or manage management and leadership specialists, you know that there'll be a whole mixture of things so that that that phase is really important, as well. And it's really cool actually the way that that plays out, Matt, because those professionals that we bring in, and we've got network of people we can rely on, it's growing, seemingly daily, they don't come into an unknown quantity, they come in at the point that we've already understood the why we've already done all that quantitative data and analysis. So we're able to point them in the direction of the specific challenge that we're trying to target with their solution. So they're not trying to create a solution blind. They've got some real tangible insights themselves that make their impact much greater. And then once you've done all of that, and you've started to embed some different solutions, you're Of course going to want to know whether it's working. And that's where we bring in our reevaluation whether that's we won't rerun the whole system again, or whether we periodically, you know, look at a particular area on a smaller scale. And we can be quite agile with that now with technology and dashboards at our disposal to be able to dig in to a deeper or shallower level, depending on the need of the organization at that time.
Matt Morley
Is that then again, based on let's call it employee satisfaction, because often it's this question from the CEO CFO character. We're going to do all of this so what are the bottom line results we can expect?
Bobbi Hartshorne
the thing that is so awesome about wellbeing is that it improves almost anything that a CEO cares about. So a high wellbeing workforce is more productive, and more engaged, they're more satisfied, they're more innovative, they're more collaborative, they're more creative, they're far more likely to stay. So retention, they are also far more likely to recommend your employer or your workplaces somewhere for others to come in. So it helps with recruitment. And you get better team cohesion, you get better team creativity, and essentially, it just elevate everything. And if there's a specific thing that they're particularly targeting, so let's say they've got really low engagement or really low productivity, then we can certainly engineer this strategy initially, to specifically seek to drive improvements there. But what you find with wellbeing improved wellbeing in general is that as it as it elevates, it just pulls everything up. It's really, it's really quite fascinating in that in that regard. And the other thing that often is overlooked is it as a result of all of this, it drives the bottom line. So we know that organizations with high workplace wellbeing have 2% - 3% better performance on the stock market, better customer loyalty, and better sales performance. So it really does, you know, I'm really not trying to over egg the pudding here. But when you have a high wellbeing workforce, everything else tends to fall into place. And so that's why we really discourage people from focusing on just something like resilience, or just engagement or just productivity, and rather look at well being because your your, your dividends, your return for an investment in well being will be so much greater and so much broader than if you just try and pinpoint one specific problem and neglect the other elements of well being, too. Yeah, lots of claims.
Matt Morley
Okay. And so if we then dig a little bit deeper into the, the wellness practitioners, so in terms of the employee experience, apart from contributing to creating some initial baseline data around how things are performing in the office at the moment, then in terms of the lived experience, what they're engaging with these practitioners who come in, and perhaps you could just a hypothetical example, or a real life case study of perhaps that mix of 234 practitioners that you might bring in that would have an immediate impact on on the employee experience, or whether it's sort of if it's a fitness or wellness classes, or the environment that they're working in, because that at the end of the day is the process and action, isn't it? It's it's the staff, here it is that the changes are coming and whether that works or not, and whether you need to tweak it a little bit. So typically, how do you see that playing out?
Bobbi Hartshorne
Yeah, it's gonna be really interesting. on a case by case basis as to as to which practitioner which approach you choose to invest in and in what order you choose to take them on? Actually, the aside from practitioners, I'll come back to that in a moment. But actually, there's a huge amount that you can just do internally, you don't always need external help with this. Sometimes the results and the strategy is about actually assessing what's happening internally, and, and working out challenges that you've got internally, that you can actually fix yourself. So it's not always about saying right over to a handful of people who are going to rescue your business, because because a lot of the answers exists internally, and you've already got talent who can do that. But where there is gaps in your experience or your knowledge or their specialist areas that your your organization's not familiar with. It could be a real mixture of things that we're seeing a huge rise, for instance, in sleep practitioners, as we increasingly understand the power of good sleep and the cost of bad sleep on everything that is human about us. We're seeing as a result of COVID and this big conversation around hybrid working and trying to attract people back to the office. What even is an office now? This question has just come up in the last six months where what we've always considered to be an office the purpose of an office, what an office should do. has just been blown out of the water. And in order to attract people back to these places that we call offices, and we're having to get very creative about what they look like how they serve us what function they fulfill how they enable success, so you're gonna definitely have a big push in terms of office design, and environmental factors that help to drive those things
Bobbi Hartshorne
I think you're gonna definitely see a rise in the need for mental health support, compensation and benefits design is going to change because cash is no longer King, as I already alluded to, and then probably on the less traditional side, I think you're gonna start to see a rise in wellbeing scientists like myself, who can who can help people to unpack that data, you're going to have people who can assess your strategy as an organization, and how well being can help you to achieve that, I think we're probably going to see a lot more team practitioners as the role of teams, especially with a hybrid slash remote working changes and challenges that are coming in. And also one of the big areas, I suspect what's going to be leadership or management training, we're moving from Hero leadership to servant leadership. And that is a massive shift in how you act, how you think, what you do, the decisions you make the way that you lead. And that's a real big area of development that also and sustainable leadership, which I don't mean sustainable in terms of environmental sustainability, although, of course, that is very important. I mean, sustaining yourself as a leader, as the world of leadership just becomes so increasingly high pressured? How do you maintain your best leadership capabilities by by having high well being yourself? And how do you then invoke that sense of, it's good to have a high wellbeing workforce and sort of that gets moved down the organization? So yeah, so I think there's gonna be some interesting developments in in that space. And then finally, I think it's probably going to be a shift in HR practices, performance management, or rather, it should be performance optimization, and employer branding, recruitment strategies, and the design of the employee experience, they're all going to be things that I think are going to grow in terms of practitioner needs.
Matt Morley
You've been using the term wellbeing throughout this conversation. And I think it's, I've read something on your site recently, where you tried to pick apart the two concepts of wellness and wellbeing, it can seem not irrelevant, but it can seem that the two terms almost just merge into one. But I was interested to hear your thoughts on how you consider wellbeing to be perhaps more of a 360 view of physically and mentally in a good place versus wellness that was perhaps more limited.
Bobbi Hartshorne
Yeah, I think how many, it's really hard now, because as you said, wellbeing and wellness is sometimes used interchangeably, but actually, they do have slightly different definitions. And they definitely have different histories. And for me, wellness generally refers to sort of an individual person's physical and to a degree mental wellbeing. Whereas wellbeing has a broader and deeper meaning than wellness as it incorporates life satisfaction, accomplishment, motivation, purpose, engagement
Bobbi Hartshorne
I think wellbeing is something that's more easily applied to groups, which when we think about the workplace is important in terms of the wellbeing dynamics of teams who are being dynamics of departments of offices of regions, etc. So, you know, there's there's that kind of dual individual versus group application of wellbeing that's harder to express in wellness terms. I mean, the International Labor Organization describes workplace wellbeing as related to all aspects of working life from the quality and safety of the physical environment, to how workers feel about their work, their working environment, the climate at work and working organization. And why does it matter? Well, because the lens with which you understand wellbeing or wellness, it really doesn't matter what you call it, but the lens by which you understand it is going to massively influence your strategic approach to it. The types of practitioners you engage in the types of consultants you gain, you engage the data that you're looking for, if it's if it's understood in the more limited historic realms of wellness, there is a risk that you will miss out on the opportunities to explore Read through that much deeper lens of what we call well being. And typically we see well being referred to in the science and the data as opposed to wellness. So I kind of tend to feel that it's a slightly more rigorous subject. Well being as a more rigorous subject and wellness.
Matt Morley
Yeah, I get it. I like that. And we haven't touched on your location. But you obviously straddling two countries, in a sense between the UK and Dubai, the UAE. Now, how do you see those two locations differing in terms of interpretations of workplace well being? Are you seeing certain things that have much more relevance or importance in the UAE versus in the UK, for example, or vice versa?
Bobbi Hartshorne
You know, what, in many ways, it's not as different as you might expect. And there's some strengths and benefits to both that have sort of come out actually, in the last four or five months that I've observed, the thing we have to understand is that well being is universal. how we approach it, how we solve it, how we understand it, how we address it, the degree to which we're open to do that varies from culture, to culture, but the actual ingredients are factors that contribute to a human's well being are, are the same the world over. And, you know, our cities and any major city anywhere in the world that has a diverse cultural population is going to have issues and challenges and opportunities because of that. variance.
Bobbi Hartshorne
My, my gut feeling is that a lot of the issues are prevailing, the world over, they're not unique to particular cultures. So again, coming back to this shift from Hero leadership to servant leadership, that is happening in the West as much as it's happening here. race and gender inequalities that are still prevailing the world over old habits, dying hard in in kind of very highly bureaucratic, very highly hierarchical issues. These exists here as much as they exist in the West. For me, I think the only major hurdle is that there is probably a slightly delayed discourse here. And that may be the conversation hasn't been as open for as long in the Middle East, in the Gulf region, as it has been in the West. So people's kind of openness or understanding or literacy around the topic is maybe slightly lower here. But in some ways that actually map presents an opportunity for this region, because because the well being conversation and the understanding of well being has matured so quickly, and our data and best practice, evolution has been so fast. Actually, I find that sometimes the West is carrying a bit of old baggage in this space. And a little bit of like, Well, we've been on this journey for five years now. And nothing's changed or little has changed. And so there's a frustration there. Whereas the Gulf region is joining the conversation at a much more advanced stage and a much deeper understanding of the science behind it. And so they don't have to shed their baggage before they can engage at this higher level, which in many ways could present a really, really cool opportunity for them to leapfrog some of the resistance that we may be seeing in the West. And actually, that has definitely played out. I have had more attraction and interest and engagement from organizations in this region, including Saudi and the UAE than I have yet had in the UK, where you would expect the conversation to be much more mature.
Matt Morley
Nice. Sounds like you're you could be in the right place at the right time. So really insightful conversation. So thank you so much for your time, how can people reach out and contact you? Where can they find you online?
Bobbi Hartshorne
Yeah, so the best place to contact us is bewellwise.com we've got some really great free resources for people there, we've got a free to download white paper, which explores the current challenges with wellbeing and how to improve them. We've got a online self assessment tool where people can go in and answer a handful of questions and then get some tailored advice into their emails.
Matt Morley
Alright, listen, thanks so much for your time. It's been fun!