Health and wellbeing at the workplace – From office to an inspiring smart office

Businesses today are exploring new ways to enhance employee productivity and well-being, while maintaining a focus on energy savings, improved operational efficiency, and space optimization.

Research demonstrates the profound impact of physical workspaces on employee health, mental states, and emotions. Forward-thinking companies takes into consideration an active design, natural features, and wellness metrics that improve employee productivity. Nowadays, office buildings have the power to attract and retain staff. The successful workspaces of the future will be the ones that make people feel good and offer a memorable, positive experience. Employee discomfort, ill health and reduced performance can be linked to a poor-quality office environment. Good quality lighting can already help to increase employee productivity up to 23%. Apart from lighting, there are other environmental elements that impact employee health and wellbeing.

People spend 80-90% of their time indoors from which around 50% is spent at work so the indoor environment determines the comfort and wellbeing of the office employee, influencing their performance. It is important that smart lighting and IoT has become part of the regulatory standards, allowing architects and building designers to advise for the best solutions.

Keeping employees comfortable and healthy in an office is critical. For example, higher indoor temperatures and relative humidity can correlate with sneezing, skin redness, itchy eyes, headaches and sore eyes. Poor thermal comfort control leads to a 6% drop in staff performance when offices are too hot, and 4% when too cold. In addition, employee performance can decrease by as much as 66% when there is distracting noise, and it can take an average of 25 minutes to return to a task after an interruption.



Even when working from home, the way you light your space has a direct correlation to how productive you will be. Good lighting can keep you focused, alert and at your creative best, while bad lighting can lead to headaches, eye-strain and a lack of motivation.

Turn offices into smart offices

Signify the world leader in lighting, is introducing new Philips IoT sensor bundles that collect and deliver data via the Interact Office connected lighting system and Environmental monitoring API’s. The new sensor bundles can monitor occupancy, the number of people, temperature (at room and at desk level), noise levels, daylight levels, relative humidity and are Bluetooth enabled, to provide indoor positioning and navigation capabilities.



These new sensors are smaller than a match box and are easily upgraded on premise with a simple click and swap via an upgradable sensor slot, a unique feature across a range of Philips professional office luminaires. This future-ready solution means that luminaires can now be upgraded with different sensors at any time. This gives organizations the flexibility to benefit from increased functionality coming along in the future or for example, when a new tenant wants increased functionality.

The most relevant example is The Edge Office Building. EDGE embraces wellbeing, sustainability, design and technology in all the buildings it develops.

Signify International B.V. Ogranak Beograd

Signify

Philips IoT sensors

Interact Office connected lighting system

API environmental monitoring

EDGE

Edge office building

smart lighting

lighting

quality lighting

office lighting