NEW YORK—Wellness in the workplace is growing in importance as companies increasingly focus on attracting and retaining talent, gaining a competitive edge and providing the optimum office environment for their employees. Developers and building owners alike are concentrating on accommodating wellness features into building design in addition to making them as energy efficient and environmentally sound as possible. To find out more about how the commercial real estate community is working with building designers and developers to provide wellness solutions for tenants, we spoke exclusively with experts at GlobeSt.com Thought Leader Colliers International to find out what they are noticing about workplace well-being, and how Colliers is helping to provide solutions for top companies across the US.

Wellness can give a company a tangible competitive edge in the global marketplace, executive managing director of workplace strategy and innovation for the Colliers corporate solutions team Keith Perske points out. “Being innovative is a key competitive goal in most companies, and we are finding that many of the actions that promote wellness also contribute to creativity and innovation.”

So what are companies doing to promote wellness in the workplace, and how does the real estate market fit into the picture? “Colliers is in the workplace business,” says Perske. “We partner with clients to build workplaces that help people and create competitive advantages for companies. We think about workplaces as holistic systems, not just panel heights and office sizes. By thinking this way, we don't just focus on cost savings and space reduction, but on creating spaces that actually serve their purpose as tools for productivity and touchstones for culture. For this reason, we include a wellness component in all our workplace engagements.”

Perske says that wellness is not just about providing a fitness center. Adding wellness to a workplace includes providing healthy food choices, encouraging movement and access to natural light, providing restorative and inspiring spaces, incorporating natural sounds and colors, creating view corridors and encouraging authentic interactions. Research has shown that people are more innovative when they are relaxed, when they move and when they have access to natural elements.

“It's a given that having a healthy workforce reduces absenteeism, healthcare costs and accidents while contributing a positive work culture that creates a virtuous cycle of increased productivity and loyalty,” Perske tells GlobeSt.com. According to Dee Edington, author of “Zero Trends: Health as a Serious Economic Strategy,” the cost of waiting for people to get sick far exceeds the cost of helping people to stay healthy, by 19 to 1. In addition, presenteeism (the act of attending work while sick) and on-the-job productivity losses are as high as three times the total cost of worker illness, and the annual cost of presenteeism to an average company with 600 employees is $2 million, according to HR Zone. According to the Principal Financial Well-Being Index survey, 40% of employees say they want to work harder and perform better and 26% miss fewer days of work by participating in wellness programs.

Colliers has worked with clients all over the country to create successful solutions, but the concept of wellness has grown inconsistently in different parts of the country, says Colliers president of office services Cynthia Foster. It has been a well-established phenomenon in California, where it is now undergoing its second or third iteration. “One of our lead tenant-rep brokers in California just did a headquarters for one of the top social-media companies, and one of the important criteria for selection of the San Francisco-based building was dog-friendly space—and that was a deal-breaker.” Workplace wellness is emerging slower in the New York and Chicago markets, says Foster. “In New York it has taken longer to catch on, possibly because of the constraints of the physical spaces or the profile of the financial service tenants. But a few New York landlords have begun to embrace the concept.”

For example, Foster says Tony Malkin, chairman and CEO of Empire State Realty Trust, a REIT whose holdings include the Empire State Building, recently gave a tour of the building to highlight the property's features that accommodate and incorporate wellness. Features such as a gym that's only open to tenants, energy efficiency, including better lighting, temperature control and air quality within the building and healthy restaurant choices on site are just a few of the wellness elements. “The building has gone beyond typical standards to accommodate health and wellness,” says Foster. And it's working. “They have attracted Coty, LinkedIn and Shutterstock to their building.”

Colliers chairman of occupier advisors practice group, Bob Chodos, has completed at least three headquarters assignments where wellness was one of the key drivers.

“With the generational shifts occurring with today's workforce, particularly as it relates to the millennials becoming the dominant population for recruiting; creating compelling workplaces that people “love to come to” is the key objective,” says Chodos.  Hillshire Brands, whose headquarters building at 400 S. Jefferson in Chicago was chosen because it could accommodate the firm's wellness priorities, including an outdoor roof deck. “Hillshire has a very progressive approach to wellness, and that's one of the reasons why they recently moved their headquarters,” says Foster.  

Nuveen Investments is another example of a Colliers client that is putting wellness at the forefront of the formation of its real estate strategy. They have the option to construct an outside deck space on one of their highest floors in their headquarters location in Chicago and already created a café/cafeteria facility that is connected to their conference center that would be adjacent to this outside space if constructed. The redeveloped of their remaining floors included the use of glass office fronts and sections of floors fully open to the exterior window wall to bring natural light into the interior zones on all their floors. The company has created a place where their employees truly enjoy coming to work and as a result they have experienced very low rates of turnover.  

“From deploying stand up desks inside ergonomically designed work stations to reconfiguring space layouts to bring more natural light to all employees, creating great places for their employees to generate higher profits for their companies has become the drumbeat for successful design,” says Chodos. 

Colliers is in the process of working with several large tenants in New York with similar concepts, says Foster. “Wellness is one of the most exciting new workplace trends we've seen in the last two decades and Colliers is leveraging our national experience with large scale tenants on the West Coast and increasingly the Midwest, to create sophisticated, healthy business environments for our clients and their employees,” she adds.