WELL Building Standard

The health and wellbeing of building occupants depends on a holistic, integrated understanding of potential impacts that influence health within the built environment. While some of the common known risks to our health today include air-borne pollutants, poor diet, stress and lack of sleep, WELL research has found that buildings also have a profound impact on our bodily functions, ranging from our endocrine (hormone production) system through to our nervous system. Often, employees’ health and resilience are compromised by stressors associated with distractions, poor posture, pollutants and poor internal conditions.

Launched in 2014, the WELL Building Standard ^TM is the world’s first building certification that focuses exclusively on human health and wellness. 

The WELL Building Standard ^TM is an international assessment method that encourages healthy eating choices and active lifestyles, as well as promoting natural light and a high standard of air quality, based on seven years’ of scientific, medical and architectural research.   

Leading organisations are reaping the rewards from investment in comprehensive, holistic health and wellbeing programmes, through increased employee engagement, a more productive workforce and healthier, more resilient staff. WELL is fast emerging as the premier benchmark for health and wellbeing in the workplace.  In an increasingly competitive labour market, employee retention has become a prime focus for businesses and organisations are increasingly making improvements geared at retaining and attracting employees.   

AECOM’s health and wellness experts include a team of WELL APs ^TM lead by Lauren Williams and Emily Loquidis. Our team works with companies to integrate health and wellness measures into design and operations and lead projects through the WELL certification process.

At AECOM, we have a depth of understanding of topics covered in WELL through our specialist in-house expertise which includes – internal air quality, acoustic performance, daylight modelling and lighting design, procurement advice, and water quality. This expertise includes experience in designing internal environments that perform in practice. For example, our acousticians undertake performance testing to ensure that the building performs according to the design intent, providing them with excellent insight into how the design can affect the acoustics of a space. We consider that this experience is essential, as the WELL Standard ^TM requires that all buildings undergo performance verification after completion, and because key parameters (e.g. acoustic performance, water and air quality) are performance tested.

Project experience

We have a wealth of experience with health and wellbeing issues on our commercial office projects.
Below is a sampling of our work.