Businesses are in a global competition for talent, spending millions to attract the best and brightest. Once you have invested in recruiting top talent, the goal is now to optimize their performance. Healthy Buildings are the key to unlocking that performance. We spend the vast majority of our time indoors, so much so that the people who design, operate, and maintain our buildings have a greater impact on our health than our doctor. For businesses, the health and well-being of employees is their greatest asset and expense. To date, the green building movement has chased only a small fraction of the full potential of our buildings – energy, waste, and water. Future opportunities lie in focusing on human performance in buildings.

In this course we will explore the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building to define what a healthy building is. We will show you hard evidence that can be used to make the case that an investment in healthy buildings is an investment in people that will produce enterprise-wide benefits. We will weave in a tour of a Harvard Healthy Building to get a sense of what this looks like in practice, and we will have a hands-on demonstration of new sensor technologies and analytics that can be deployed across real estate portfolios. And, knowing the business maxim that what gets measured gets managed, we will show you how to move from measuring KPIs to measuring HPIs – Health Performance Indicators – to track progress toward healthy building strategies. Last, we cannot ignore the realities of a changing world, so we will discuss asset risk, ESG, and building resiliency in the age of a changing climate and rapid urbanization.

• Define what a Healthy Building is and understand the basics of the scientific underpinnings of this movement.
• Evaluate Healthy Building certification systems and consider the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
• Leverage advances in new sensor technologies, analytics, and approaches to optimize indoor environments for human health and performance.
• Explore real estate asset risk and resiliency in the context of climate change and a renewed focus on corporate ESG.
• Discover how Healthy Building strategies are put into practice with a tour of a Healthy Building on the Harvard campus and via hands-on demonstrations of new technologies and analytics.
• Synthesize scientific information, certification system offerings, new technology, real estate trends, market forces, and environmental changes into a cohesive narrative and strategy for your business, real estate portfolio, and/or design strategies.

Real Estate Owners, Developers, and Investors; Executives in Finance, Human Resources, Facilities Management; Global Real Estate Portfolio Managers; Architects and Designers.