Harvard public health expert Dr. Joseph G. Allen joins host Edward Wagoner to discuss why indoor air quality is becoming a defining responsibility for today’s facility managers. He breaks down the science, the technology and the practical steps leaders can take to create healthier, higher-performing buildings.
How much do you really know about the air circulating in your building right now?
In this episode, host Edward Wagoner sits down with Dr. Joseph Allen, associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and and co-author of Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick—or Keep You Well, to explore why indoor air quality is becoming a critical focus for today’s facility managers. Dr. Allen breaks down the science behind ventilation, filtration and cognitive function, and shares practical steps leaders can take to create healthier, higher-performing spaces.
Resources Mentioned:
Dr. Joseph Allen: [00:00:00] Facilities managers, your work is getting checked now. Someone can walk in with a sensor and give you a grade on your building. They couldn't do that in the past. This is a landmark shift for facilities management, building operators, employers, building owners, investors. Your work is being graded now.
Host: Welcome to Connected fm, a podcast connecting you to the latest insights, tools, and resources to help you succeed in facility management. This podcast is brought to you by ima, the leading professional association for facility managers. If you, you're ready to grow your network and advance in your career, go to ifma.org to get started.
In today's discussion, we're starting off with one simple yet critical question. How much do you really know about the air circulating in your building right now? In this episode, host Edward Wagner sits down with Dr. Joseph Allen, an [00:01:00] associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, director of Harvard's Healthy Buildings Program and co-author of "Healthy Buildings: how indoor spaces can make you sick or Keep you well". Together, they explore why indoor air quality is becoming a critical focus for today's facility managers. And Dr. Allen breaks down the science behind ventilation, filtration, and cognitive function.
He also shares practical steps FMs can take to create healthier, more high performing spaces. Now let's get into it.
Edward Wagoner: Thank you for joining us on the Connected FM podcast, and congratulations on being named if a's global influencer, Dr. Allen.
Dr. Joseph Allen: Well, thanks for having me. It's quite an honor. I've really admired the work of if a ifma and all their members for a long time, so, I appreciate the recognition.
Edward Wagoner: Let's jump right into it. We've got literally the world's facility management profession listening to us. [00:02:00] And so with that audience there, and as a global influencer, let me open it up and just ask you influences. What's top of your mind right now that you think the profession should be focused on?
Dr. Joseph Allen: Well, let me first start by saying thank you to all the professionals who do the work every day in buildings to keep people. Healthy, safe, happy, productive. I think it's a field that I've long recognized is absolutely critical to our overall health, the public's health success of businesses.
I think it can, buildings can be overlooked sometimes in terms of their power to keep people healthy and happy in terms of their power to be a business tool. We'll talk all about this. So I just wanted to start with saying thank you because I think the. The way to influence or the, what I, the message I wanna get across is that buildings are the single greatest health and business opportunity of this century.
Sounds like a wild exaggeration, but it's not. We can talk about why I feel that way. So that [00:03:00] means the people who manage the building. Playing a key role in our collective health and the health of the businesses that we support and run ourselves. So, I really think buildings are the key, and we can talk about why and how, but really it starts with the people who manage the building.
I've said often that the person who manages your building has a greater impact on your health than your doctor. That's the role of the people who are involved with ifma, right? They're the doctors of the buildings, making sure they're running correctly, not just for energy efficiency, very important, but also for the efficiency and health of people inside the building.
So my first message is, thank you.
Edward Wagoner: I, so I love that. You know, I have, become a yoga instructor since we first met and they focus so much on, on breathing and every time they would talk about that in the classes, I would actually think about you in the clean buildings.
I would actually look around the yoga studio wondering if my air is being properly ventilated and recycled and they'll often say, you can go for days without food or water. [00:04:00] But only a few minutes without air. And so talk a little bit about why you think buildings are so critical and so important, and why the facility managers have such an important role to play in our health.
Dr. Joseph Allen: Yeah, I mean, I like what you're talking about there. First, congrats to you for noticing and recognizing that the indoor matters, even when you're doing things like yoga, very few are probably paying attention to that. And you mentioned of course we can't go along without air. I'll also add to that, that the air we breathe can have an immediate impact on our health.
So it's not just that you can die if you don't get air clearly, but the air you're breathing, the quality of that air will determine things like how well your brain is functioning. So we've done many of these studies looking at the impacts of indoor air quality on brain health as one example. So we're breathing all this air inside.
Everyone's familiar with the 90% stat. We spend 90% of our time indoors. Why does that matter? Well, the air you're breathing can influence things like your brain health. We've done studies showing a link between indoor air [00:05:00] quality and better cognitive function performance, including on things like math tests, strategic decision making, creativity tests.
So the air you're breathing right now, wherever you are, is influencing your ability to even process the information that you're listening to in this podcast. Amongst many other things that influence brain health, but indoor air has been this kind of missing or ignored factor for a long time. We could go through everybody system and talk about how indoor air quality is associated with lung health.
Think about particles of outdoor air pollution that come indoors and influence our lung health or heart health. Certainly indoor air quality influence. The transmission of respiratory diseases like COVID and influenza. So if you put it all together, you're breathing the vast majority of the air you breathe happens indoors.
And the quality of that air is gonna influence cognitive function, lung health, heart health, immune system health, even reproductive health. So it's influencing our body in all these ways. And I think a key problem is that [00:06:00] it's not only been ignored, but also we haven't been designing our buildings correctly to promote.
Good heart health, good brain health, good immune system health.
Edward Wagoner: I was actually doing a little research. Before our call, and by the way, not to fanboy out, but I actually have a copy of your book stood in line to get it autographed several years ago, and this is the first edition. But one thing that struck me is in the reviews one person wrote poor indoor air quality dulls, your brain dampening creativity and cognitive function.
And I believe that was the New York Times very reputable paper.
So I think about that quote. Then I compare that to the massive amounts of time, energy, and money that a lot of organization CEOs are putting into return to office. But I don't think they're putting the same focus on the air quality. If we want people to come back to collaborate and be creative, but we're not creating the environments that enable that, as you said, you know, the air dulls the [00:07:00] brain.
What are some steps that every CEO should take? In their office environment, some immediate steps that they and their facility managers could take to, to make the indoor air quality better for the people that use those facilities.
Dr. Joseph Allen: Yeah, I like that you started with that and I can give some tips for some absolute basics. But you're right. If you think about what this is doing, if you think about return to office, for example, or. You know, what are we doing when we get back to the office? Well, there people can be productive in different places, but they can't be productive together.
I think good CEOs are realizing the point of coming back to buildings is so we're collaborative. More innovation happens, there's better creativity, there's a better spark, better connection is better for culture, right? We are, we're social creatures by nature, so, and they pay attention to things that would foster that.
So you wanna have good amenities, you wanna have good meeting rooms, good conference rooms, good av it, right? You wanna be sure that's all easy. But a missing link again, is the air quality is [00:08:00] influencing things like creativity. So you're trying to spur innovation at your company. You're bringing, spending all this money to bring your high performers back in.
You give this a beautiful amenitized space, and then you have bad indoor air quality. So they're sleepy at their desk. That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. And the good CEOs are realizing this, right? How do we give workers an environment where they can feel safe, comfortable, happy and productive?
And the tips, I think, are really straightforward. So if you think about, you know, indoor air, I think it's two things will drive a lot of that success. One is you want to improve ventilation. So most buildings have choked off a lot of the outdoor air supply. Coming into their building. That's why you're sleepy in these conference rooms.
People feel this immediately. We've all experienced that. So you wanna maximize how much fresh outdoor air is coming in. 'cause our buildings are designed for minimum standards, which are not based at on health at all, and they haven't been for decades. Second thing, you're bringing in all that outdoor air.
You wanna make sure [00:09:00] you've improved filtration, that's easy. Low cost options. Not all filters are the same, but if you get a high grade filter. Paired with good ventilation. Now you're controlling pollutants that are both coming in from outdoors and those that are recirculating from indoor sources like us, and you're maximizing outdoor air pollution.
This is not hand wavy. This is based on decades of science study after study. If you look at kids in elementary school, kids in high school, kids in college, adults and offices, people on airplanes, pilots in the cockpit, in every study, when you improve ventilation and filtration, they perform better.
Whether it's a test of kids and their reading comprehension, a test of college kids on math scores, a test of creativity and office workers around the world, a test of airplane pilot performance. So these are all studies that have been a part of and done and time after time. Myself and others around the world doing this kind of research show the benefits of better ventilation and better filtration.
It tells you that the floor we're at is too low, these [00:10:00] minimum standards. If we're seeing all these improvements, every time we increase ventilation, increase filtration, it's telling us that the current targets are just too low, right? We see these benefits because buildings generally are not designed for our health, so every time we raise that standard, we see an immediate benefit.
Edward Wagoner: And as you were talking, it struck me too. A lot of people are thinking, you know, office buildings, facility managers, but there's so many examples as you were talking through your, the answer to that question. Every building we're in that our office buildings, schools. I'm thinking about I thought about fast food restaurants where they've got the caloric intake on the wall, but what about the indoor air quality there that, you know, air's such an important part of our health. So with that as a background, what about the user of the facility, the people that are coming in, the employees the customers? How can they find out? If they're building that they're in, that they patronize has the right air standards, and how can they [00:11:00] influence the owners and the managers to give it a little more focus, kind of maybe the way that we have focused on obesity and given, you know, the quality of our food a big focus.
How do we bring that to, to our air quality?
Dr. Joseph Allen: Well, so it's a really good question. I think one, it's things like this and what your organization does, which is raising awareness that indoor air quality matters to people's health. People have to be aware of it so that they then get curious about it and then can ask those questions when they're at the office or school or at the restaurant.
I think what people can do is a couple things. First, I think simply asking the question, and that will tell you a lot. About the building owner, the management team, the facilities team. What are we doing around ventilation and clean indoor air quality? What kind of filters do we have? Are we commissioning these systems?
Are we monitoring indoor air quality? Can we see those reports? You'll see if you ask those simple questions. The good companies, the good facilities managers will have answers to all of [00:12:00] that. Yes. We're fully aware of the science showing the minimum standards aren't up. We're maximizing outdoor air. We've upgraded our filters from ERV 13 or higher.
We do annual indoor air quality testing. We commission our systems regularly. We give our building a tuneup. We're really paying attention to your health and our buildings team is on it. Compare that answer against the other facilities manager. What are you doing? What do you mean? I don't know. We're meeting code.
I dunno. It's the filter we've always used. It's been fine, right? The person who looks at you blankly and doesn't have an answer, they're telling you everything you need to know about that building. To be honest, that's for companies looking for their next space. That's for an employee. Trying to figure out if their employer or building owner is on top of this.
Do they have an answer to these basic questions? Beyond that there's been a real shift in technology available to the average consumer that didn't exist just even five years ago. Really, the proliferation of these lower cost indoor air quality sensors means it's not just the building owner as information about the building.
You can use these air quality sensors, [00:13:00] go into a space and get a sense very quickly within a minute or two. Better if it's longer, a couple hours worth for the day you're in there and look at the CO2 levels that'll give you an indication of ventilation and occupancy and look at the particle levels that'll tell you how well the filtration's working.
That's never been available to people before. So that is a power shift because it's putting the knowledge and information in the hands of the consumer, the employee. A customer at your restaurant that never existed before. It also speaks to a dangerous moment for some poorly run buildings and an opportunity for good buildings.
Your work is getting checked. Facilities managers, your work is getting checked. Now, someone can walk in with a sensor and give you a grade on your building. They couldn't do that in the past. They would come in and say, doesn't feel right in here. Feels stale, feels stuffy. My eyes itch. I have a headache when I'm in here.
Very often [00:14:00] those kind of comments could be easily dismissed. You're just a complainer. That's not real. Now, that person can say, well, I've also brought in a monitor. I'm measuring it, and I know what the standards are for CO2, and I know what the standards are for PM 2.5 and building is not meeting those health-based standards.
This is a landmark shift for facilities management. Building operators, employers, building owners, investors. Your work is being graded now.
Edward Wagoner: So I love that. So for our facility managers, you better have an answer ready , because Joe just told people to come and ask. But I also think too, I was struck, you know, many people are in the job market. We always get those weird questions from the interviewer. Here's a question you can throw back at them.
What's the indoor air quality rating? How do you approach it? For the office that I will be in and see the focus they have on their health, Joe you know, I can use my mobile [00:15:00] phone to monitor my health and my activity to check my caloric intake. Do you see a day where we can actually use our mobile phones when we walk into a place and where it will give us warnings about the indoor air quality or help us better manage it?
Dr. Joseph Allen: Absolutely. That's coming soon. We already have that on our phones for outdoor air pollution. You can go and look at the purple air map. You can look at EPAs, a QI and get outdoor air pollution. So is it that far off to think we'll have the same thing for indoor air? Absolutely not. Whether the sensor's on the phone or not, or it's crowdsourced from other people who are measuring in the building, sensors will get cheaper.
They'll be able to measure more things. This is the current reality. I love it because it's a classic business maxim. What gets measured gets managed. So I love this. We get more data out there, we see what's happening in buildings, but for sure it's coming to your phone. And new sensors. We already know what's being developed.
It's not just CO2 and particles, but you'll be able to eventually measure for things like formaldehyde, reliably, you'll be able to [00:16:00] measure specific viruses, specific bacteria, so it's time for companies. I wrote an article in Harvard Business Review talking about this shift that's coming and what we can measure now.
How you can use these low cost sensors, but also a little bit of a wake up call to businesses. The title of the article is something like, it's time for Every Business to Measure Indoor Air Quality because this is what's coming. And if you're not getting a handle on that right now in your facility, sure enough, someone's coming in and is gonna tell you what the data are, and sure enough, you're gonna be caught off guard a year or two years as new sensors become available and everybody starts asking for this.
So it's a great time to start getting familiar with these sensors, what they can and can't do. How it might change your operations. Do you have the expertise on staff or out, or you've hired a consultant to help advise of what the heck these numbers mean. So I think it's a really important moment and that future is definitely coming.
In my book I talk, you mentioned interviewing your building. In the book, we talk about people interviewing their building. Exactly. This, you ask those set of questions, then you can have data behind [00:17:00] it and you can actually understand something about your building and it just not being fed information.
You can actually. Understand what's happening on your own, but this is the future. It's a good one. Indoor quality sensors are just exploding. And the companies that are doing it are really gaining an edge.
Host: IFMA's Knowledge Library is the largest digital collection of quality content specific to the built environment, featuring hundreds of articles, case studies, research reports, videos, and templates. It has helped thousands of facility management professionals learn and leverage FM best practices. It's also 100% free to IFMA members.
Visit Knowledge library.ifma.org to learn more.
Edward Wagoner: listening to you talk, I'm thinking about building owners. If they don't take action now, they're actually going to damage the future value of their building. For companies who are taking up space in those buildings, if they don't focus now, they're gonna [00:18:00] have a problem attracting and retaining their talent.
So, I think especially if the technology is coming, like you say, it's a wake up call for our industry to start doing work now. Versus having to catch up later. I wanna pivot a
minute because I'm suspecting no little boy or girl ever came home from elementary school and said, when I grow up, I wanna focus on indoor air quality. What would you say to people listening or maybe teenagers or people in college right now to think about considering your field of expertise and if they wanted to have an impact, some things that they could do to make an impact in the future?
Dr. Joseph Allen: Yeah, so great question. I'd say to everybody, think about the field of public health. Right. My former dean used to say, whatever your skill, whatever your passion, there's a place for you in public health. So my passion is healthy buildings, indoor air quality exposure and risk assessment, worker health and safety.
I have engineers who have no training in that, [00:19:00] who join the healthy buildings team at Harvard, get that health training, and now they're superpowered. They have this engineering training, plus I understand the drivers of health. I can transform our built environment to improve the human condition. Like it's really quite powerful if you're a policy person.
There's room for you in public health. There's great work being done on the policy side around buildings and standards and codes, and how do you advance this? There's work to be done if you're like a pure bench scientist. So what, how do you figure out measurement techniques and what happens in the lab if you're a technologist?
What about air quality sensors and the whole AI revolution with all this data coming into buildings and digital twins and how do you make sense of that? But I think the power is not so much about these silos, but the umbrella of health, right? Everyone at a facilities manager, you're on the healthcare space.
May not think of it that way, be really in the healthcare space, these building doctors. Right. So I would encourage people who maybe don't think about this, to think about public health either for continuing education credits, getting [00:20:00] more savvy on the health side. Maybe a young person out there thinking about adding a master of public health degree to their engineering or facilities training that becomes really quite powerful.
And I think also helps you talk to the C-Suite and other leaders about not just the, what we do in our buildings. We make sure it's running. We keep it clean, we keep them functional and open, and we focus on service. But the why we do that, why do we do that? Well, we wanna keep people safe first and foremost.
We wanna keep them healthy, we wanna keep them happy. So the focus on the why I think comes from that health lens. That's ultimately what we're trying to do. And then the mechanics are what we do each day. Furtherance of that ultimate goal. All right, so that's a long way to say. I think public health's a great place to be.
I'm inspired by it. I'm inspired by all the students young and older, who come through our doors and kind of put a health lens on their work.
Edward Wagoner: Love that and love the passion. I wanna pivot a little bit back to global Influencer and people who maybe are just meeting you for the first time, may not know that during [00:21:00] the Global Pandemic you went from being a Harvard professor to literally a primetime superstar. I can remember seeing you on CNN talking about air quality, and again, I'm, you know, I know Harvard has a tremendous media department, but probably nothing prepares you to be thrust into the global spotlight like that, and yet you did bring your passion and you did educate us. For facility managers that have an expertise and maybe aren't comfortable doing what you're doing right now. What would you advise people about letting their voice be heard and sharing their passion?
Dr. Joseph Allen: First thing I'd say is do it for sure. Because the, you're the people who have the experience that the rest of us need to learn from. I need to learn from you. It's a million other people who need to learn from whatever it is your specialty is. So I think I don't think you have to do anything special.
I don't think you need special prep. I think people nowadays just want to hear from real people. With real experience. With real [00:22:00] skill where you might learn a thing or two, you know? So I love walking buildings with the mechanical engineers and just talking to 'em about all the systems and just learning from them.
So I would find anything like that. Fascinating. And actually in the entire field of fm everyone's got this experience and they're all trying to learn from each other. So I don't think there's any special prep needed, especially now. People like it just real, like off the cuff conversations, just chatting about what you know, what you don't know.
Maybe trying to, you know, absorb a thing or two, or a lesson or a tip. You can extract out of it. And there's a million people in your organization who's affiliated with your organization, who have that expertise that they can bring to bear on this big question that at least I'm trying to chase and you all is like, how do we improve our buildings for all of these different goals we have.
Edward Wagoner: I love that. So if you're listening, when I reach out to you and invite you to the podcast, remember Dr. Allen's advice, you talked about real people talking, which is what we're doing, and I've got some real questions. Our audience loves to get to know the person [00:23:00] behind the influencer. So if you don't mind, I'm gonna ask a few of these.
Rapid fire. Quick, short answers. Being a global influencer means you're constantly learning. What's something you're learning right now, either professionally or personally?
Dr. Joseph Allen: Wow. I, it's nonstop learning. I'll say. I'm learning a lot about filters, so that's all I'll say for now. But like, I think we know a lot about
Edward Wagoner: Leave it. Leave it hanging. Let's see what we get back in. Some of the comments on the
Dr. Joseph Allen: there's more coming but Sure.
Edward Wagoner: It's the first answer like that, that I've gotten for that question. I love it. This one's a little more fun. We're gonna go to a concert, but you get to pick who we see and it can be past or present group or artist. What concert are you taking me to?
Dr. Joseph Allen: I think that's easy. I'm taking to see Green Day, big energy taking
Edward Wagoner: Have a yoga.
Dr. Joseph Allen: see Green Day.
Edward Wagoner: I have a yoga teacher that's gonna love that answer. That's her
Dr. Joseph Allen: Quite probably the opposite of.
Edward Wagoner: Yeah. Well, you know, my next question [00:24:00] is, you're gonna plan my next vacation. What city in the world are you sending me to your favorite city?
Dr. Joseph Allen: Ooh. Well, you know, I'm a New Yorker, so it's hard to beat New York. I live in Boston for a long time, another great city. But I think if we're going somewhere in like outside of the usual you know, I've really, I've been going to Madrid a lot lately. I've really enjoyed it. I work with Lord Norman Foster, the architect.
That's where his Institute for Sustainable Cities is. And I've found Madrid another place with great healthy food, great people, great culture great vibe. So I really liked Madrid. I,
Edward Wagoner: Excellent. Madrid is an incredible city and also incredible cuisine.
Dr. Joseph Allen: Yes.
Edward Wagoner: So we know you've already written a book again for the audience.
It's called Healthy Buildings, how Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity. I think I've got the first edition. There's an updated edition out. I will tell you the New York Times says the book is a call to action to start demanding healthy buildings with cleaner indoor air. And there's a [00:25:00] lot of very favorable comments that basically says, if you're in our industry. You need to have this book as part of your arsenal. Is there another book in the works?
Dr. Joseph Allen: There is, there's actually two. So, my co-author and I at Harvard Business School, John Mac Homer, we're working on another book really around business. Public health decision making. So a little bit around healthy buildings, but it has a broader lens, includes buildings, but also cities. And a larger lens on that.
We've taught this at Harvard Business School. And the other one is something I've been working on for a while. It's really around what I, a passion I have around exposure and risk. So I'm doing a lot of work around the LA fires. Same thing after Maui, but it's really how do you communicate and understand what risk is and what is a threat.
So for example, we do this all the time. You're gonna measure something in a building. How do you interpret that? I teach this a lot. I see a lot of problems in the news when it's reported. So it's a little bit of a guide on how we think about exposure and then ultimately risk for good [00:26:00] decision making.
So anyway, that's two things, maybe not that many people know that I'm working on.
Edward Wagoner: So we will look for that book and we will hopefully invite you back for another. Episode to discuss the finding in those books. In the meantime, I know there are classes that that you're teaching a lot of work. We so appreciate your time, Dr. Allen, and again, congratulations on being named an IFMA Global influencer.
Dr. Joseph Allen: Yeah, thanks so much. It's such a nice recognition. Enjoyed time with you and I love the work that ifma and all the members are doing, so keep it up. Thanks.
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