WELL

Certification represents the highest pinnacle of health achievement across all 10 concepts. Projects must achieve all preconditions, as well as a certain number of points towards different levels of WELL Certification:

There are ten concepts in WELL v2: Each concept consists of features with distinct health intents. Features are either preconditions or optimizations.

1. Air: The WELL Air concept aims to ensure high levels of indoor air quality across a building’s lifetime through diverse strategies that include source elimination or reduction, active and passive building design and operation strategies, and human behavior interventions.

It is evident that the impact of improving indoor air quality is substantial. In a recent global burden of disease study, household air pollution was rated as the tenth most important cause of ill health for the world’s population. Furthermore, The World Health Organization estimated that, globally, air pollution contributed to approximately seven million premature deaths in 2012. Around 600,000 of those were children under years old. The WELL Air Concept seeks to implement holistic design strategies to promote clean air and minimize human exposure to harmful contaminants, in order to maximize benefits to productivity, well-being, and health.

2. Water: The WELL Water concept aims to increase the rate of adequate hydration in building users, reduce health risks due to contaminated water and excessive moisture within buildings, and provide adequate sanitation through better infrastructure design and operations coupled with awareness and maintenance of water quality.

Universal access to good water, sanitation, and hygiene are often grouped in public health approaches yet are interdependent on each other. The provision of well-designed and equipped bathrooms for all, supporting appropriate hand washing, should reduce risks of acquiring enteric and respiratory diseases associated with poor hygiene practices.

3. Nourishment: The WELL Nourishment concept supports healthy and sustainable eating patterns by increasing access to fruits and vegetables, limiting the availability of highly processed foods, and designing environments that nudge individuals toward healthier choices.

Our dietary patterns are influenced by a complex mixture of personal, cultural and environmental factors, including the buildings and communities where we spend the majority of our time and consume the majority of our meals. The way our food environments are designed and operated, as well as the availability and access to foods and beverages in these environments, has the potential to support healthy diets and improve human health with the health of the planet in mind. In fact, research shows that individual change is more likely to occur when environmental conditions and influences are aligned to support individual behaviors.Therefore, improving diet quality and eating behaviors requires a holistic approach, which includes both supportive policies and environmental change.

4. Light: The WELL Light concept aims to provide a lighting environment that reduces circadian phase disruption, improves sleep quality and positively impacts mood and productivity.

Integrating daylight and electric light to create lighting strategies focused on human health, along with traditional requirements for visual acuity and comfort, can lead to healthier and more productive environments. Understanding the specific needs and preferences of users in a space is integral to creating effective lighting environments. For example, patients in a hospital ward have different lighting requirements than individuals in an office environment. Understanding user needs in a space is key to creating a healthier space. Environments that take into account these lighting strategies and user needs can contribute to the improvement of the overall mood and increase the productivity of employees.

5. Movement: The WELL Movement concept aims to promote movement, foster physical activity, and active living, and discourage sedentary behavior, by creating and enhancing opportunities through the spaces where we spend our lives. The impact of changing the global physical activity narrative is substantial. Worldwide, if physical inactivity were reduced by 10%, more than half a million deaths could be averted, while over one million deaths could be averted, if physical inactivity was reduced by 25%. Furthermore, the elimination of physical inactivity has been predicted to increase the global lifespan by an average of 0.68 years.

Movement is intricately connected to all aspects of daily life. Physical activity encompasses a diverse range of activity domains, including occupational, transportation, household, and leisure-time activities. Our understanding of the relationship between physical activity and health continues to evolve. We now know that all movement matters for health and that physical activity can be accumulated throughout the day in a variety of ways. Therefore, it is critical that our buildings, communities, and sociocultural environments consider movement as a vital part of the human condition – and as a key health promotion tool.

6. Thermal Comfort: The WELL Thermal Comfort concept takes a holistic approach to thermal comfort and provides a combination of research-based interventions to help design buildings that address individual thermal discomfort and support human health, well-being, and productivity.

Thermal comfort is subjective, which means that not everyone will be equally comfortable under the same conditions. This highlights that a one-size-fits-all approach to thermal comfort in buildings invariably fails for large numbers of people. A comfortable thermal environment that satisfies all occupants is challenging to achieve, due to individual preferences and possible spatial and temporal variations in the thermal environment. There is a need for a holistic approach to thermal comfort that can satisfy the individual preferences of all (or nearly all) building users. When possible, personal thermal comfort devices should be used. These have been shown to improve self-reported productivity rates, decrease symptoms associated with sick building syndrome and increase thermal comfort. However, due to the difficulties of setting temperature levels that suit all individual preferences, thermal comfort conditions should create baseline satisfaction for the largest number of people. Overall, systems should always be designed with human-centric thermal zoning in mind, helping to optimize the system’s thermal performance.

7. Sound: The WELL Sound concept aims to provide a comprehensive and holistic approach to addressing the concerns of acoustical comfort through research-based design considerations that buildings can accommodate for the purposes of improving occupant health and well-being.

With the rise in hearing impairments and various other health concerns as a result of over-exposure to noise, designing a single space to meet the acoustical comfort needs of every individual is challenging. However, existing research into the effects of best-practice acoustical design within a space suggests that a holistic approach to addressing the issue of acoustical comfort in the built environment is achievable. The planning and commissioning of an isolated and balanced HVAC system provide a firm baseline for the anticipated background noise level in a given enclosure. With the fortification of façade elements, exterior noise intrusion can be subdued, much to the benefit of occupant comfort, health, and productivity. Adding mass and glazing to partition elements, sealing gaps at connections and doors, and providing an airspace between enclosed spaces bolsters sound privacy and increases occupant comfort. Replacing areas of hard surfaces in a space with absorptive materials can reduce reflected sound energy and better facilitate acoustical privacy or, conversely, improve speech projection. Consistent background sound levels can be introduced into a space using a sound masking system, thus improving the signal-to-noise ratio in favor of acoustical privacy between occupants.

8. Materials: The WELL Materials concept advances two strategies for selecting building materials and products. One is to increase literacy on materials by promoting ingredient disclosure, whereas the second is to promote the assessment and optimization of product composition in order to minimize impacts to human and environmental health. Both strategies aim to bridge data gaps in the supply chain, supporting innovation in green chemistry and advancing market transformation towards healthier and more sustainable products.

9. Mind: The WELL Mind concept promotes the implementation of design, policy, and programmatic strategies that support cognitive and emotional health through a variety of prevention and treatment efforts. In combination, these interventions have the potential to positively impact the short- and long-term mental health and well-being of individuals of diverse backgrounds throughout a community.

The built environment serves as a powerful tool to help mitigate these adverse mental health outcomes through policies, programs, and design. Given the high prevalence of mental health conditions among the working population, the workplace is increasingly being seen as an important target for mental health promotion, prevention, and interventions. There are many strategies organizations can take to promote mental health, including improvements to mental health literacy and efforts to reduce stigma; provision of healthy living and working conditions for all, including organizational improvements to promote positive work environments and provision of stress management programs; and strategies that address gaps in access to and use of care by supporting access to mental health, substance use and addiction services and treatment. Improving opportunities for restoration through mindfulness programming, restorative spaces and support of optimal sleep can also have a marked impact on physical and mental well-being, including relief from negative symptoms associated with anxiety, depression, pain, and stress, as well as enhancements in overall perceived health. Lastly, design strategies, such as increasing nature contact within built spaces, have been linked with numerous health-promoting benefits, including decreased levels of depression and anxiety, increased attentional capacity, better recovery from job stress and illness, increased pain tolerance, and increased psychological well-being.

10. Community: The WELL Community concept promotes the implementation of design, policy, and operations strategies that focus on addressing health disparities and promoting social diversity and inclusion. Providing access to health services, inclusive and health-promoting policies, and design that enables all individuals to access, participate and thrive within a space can build a foundation for truly equitable, diverse, and healthy communities.

Promoting community well-being must begin with supporting the fundamental factors that influence individual and collective health. Providing equal and affordable access to comprehensive health services supports better individual and community health outcomes, reducing health disparities and overall healthcare costs. Health promotion programs, from immunization programs and on-demand services to paid sick leave policies and incentive-based initiatives, can improve employee job satisfaction, self-esteem and overall health, while reducing health risks.