The International WELL Building Institute’s (IWBI) new chairman and CEO Rick Fedrizzi capped the first 100 days in his new role by laying out the cornerstones of his 2017 plan for the rapidly growing WELL Building Standard (WELL). These pillars will come as no surprise to those who have followed Fedrizzi’s leadership as the founding chairman and former CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council: Identify, simplify, solidify, amplify. Fedrizzi is the recipient of the 2016 Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainability.
“When people are put at the center of design, construction and operations decisions for our buildings and communities, we can have an immediate and measureable impact on the health and well-being of the employees and colleagues, tenants and customers, faculty and students, and families who occupy them,” says Fedrizzi. “The WELL Building Standard is a powerful tool that can help building owners and operators rapidly incorporate the features that deliver these results.”
WELL is the world’s first building standard focused exclusively on the health and well-being of building occupants. WELL is grounded in evidence-based medical research that demonstrates the connection between the buildings where we spend more than 90 percent of our time and health and wellness impacts on us as occupants.
Fedrizzi noted that he’s spent the last 100 days talking to customers, the IWBI team, and companies and organizations with strong financial and human capital interest in the potential of WELL’s success. “When companies recognize that they can implement WELL for less than what their employees spend on coffee in a year, with the possibility of greater productivity, fewer absences due to illness, and lower insurance usage, they become very interested,” said Fedrizzi.
“Our core users who have helped us pioneer the first market versions of WELL have been tremendous partners in helping us identify opportunities to scale adoption through simplification of both the WELL Building Standard and the processes,” says Fedrizzi. “Some things we are able to do immediately through our alternative adherence path (AAP) process, and we encourage our community to look at the list of new AAPs released just last week. Others will be the result of streamlining internal certification processes to ease the flow of communications between project teams, IWBI and our third-party certification partner, Green Business Certification Inc. Our teams are already reaching out to make users aware of these changes and to introduce the enhancements to organizations who have been interested in WELL as a tool.”
Fedrizzi continued, “We know that human health and planetary health are the same things; what we do in our buildings and communities impacts our back yards. For this reason, we are making it easier for project teams to link their green building rating systems of choice with WELL through credit ‘crosswalks’ that remove the need for duplicative reporting. These are available today to users of Green Star and BREEAM, soon for LEED and Living Building Challenge, and others are underway.” said Fedrizzi. “It’s not either/or. We want to make it seamless for project teams to pursue both.”
Fedrizzi noted that IWBI is also increasing its market-based support in China, Australia and the United Kingdom, and aggressively expanding opportunities for IWBI teams to be with customers in-person and online.
