LEVERAGING WELL STRATEGIES FOR HUMAN CAPITAL METRICS & NARRATIVES

The International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) collaborates with companies and stakeholders who understand that human health has a profound impact on corporate performance indicators - including productivity, engagement and resilience. More than ever before, these elements play a critical role in demonstrating value. The investment community is increasingly incorporating new data and non-financial indicators, like ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) factors, into their analyses to gain a deeper understanding of a company’s source of risk and return. As a result, human health is gaining recognition as material to a business’ bottom line.

DRIVING ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE & IMPROVING ESG PERFORMANCE

The WELL Building Standard (WELL) is the leading global rating system and the first to be focused exclusively on the ways that buildings and organizations can improve our comfort, drive better choices, and enhance our health and well-being.

WELL elevates health and well-being across the entire ESG landscape through strategies designed to protect and promote the physical, mental and social well-being of employees and stakeholders. WELL features aim to reduce healthcare costs and turnover, improve productivity, attraction and retention and enhance company culture.

WELL Portfolio offers a way to efficiently apply WELL across a real estate portfolio – of whole buildings or leased spaces – as well as to benchmark, measure and report to both internal and external stakeholders about health and well-being tactics implemented as part of the organization’s broader ESG strategy.

The recently-launched WELL Health-Safety Rating is an evidence-based, third-party verified rating focusing on a subset of WELL features that include an organization’s operational policies, maintenance protocols, emergency plans and stakeholder education. The Rating is inspired and informed by IWBI’s Task Force on COVID-19 and Other Respiratory Infections, and can be applied to one building or across an entire portfolio to help mitigate viral transmission within indoor environments.

Implementing WELL strategies, including through the achievement of the WELL Health-Safety Rating for Facility Operations and Management, provides third-party assurance that an organization has implemented scientifically-substantiated health and well-being strategies which can improve ESG performance - primarily human and social metrics - that are important to their business and/or material to their bottom line.

UNITED NATIONS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (UN SDGs)

Responsible investors and corporations are increasingly using the UN SDGs to achieve broad social and environmental goals. WELL offers these organizations a balanced, integrated framework of strategies that supports the health of individuals within buildings and enables the wider community and surrounding environment to thrive. WELL features align with all 17 SDGs and each of the 169 targets, making it easy for WELL owners to select features that support their project’s SDG ambitions.

WELL + ESG + SDGs

WELL aligns with 45% of the 2020 GRESB Real Estate Assessment indicators; it also aligns with all 17 SDGs and with each of the 169 corresponding sub-targets.

GRESB

GRESB: GRESB is the leading Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) benchmark for real estate and infrastructure investments across the world and empowers investors to make decisions that are leading to a more sustainable real asset industry. Together, WELL and GRESB demonstrate the importance of health and well-being for organizations seeking to benchmark, report and improve their ESG performance through real estate. WELL aligns with almost half (36 out of 80) of the GRESB 2020 Indicators, and this robust alignment can directly benefit an organization’s sustainability efforts as it demonstrates how to most effectively utilize WELL as a roadmap to guide continual improvement of its ESG score.

GLOBAL REPORTING INITIATIVE (GRI)

GRI helps businesses and other organizations take responsibility for their impacts, by providing them with the global common language to communicate those impacts. IWBI serves on the GRI Task Force created to help map the GRI Standards and Disclosures to the 16 Practices in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health for Business Framework. The purpose of this multi-year task force is to share best practices in an effort to activate the framework and to encourage and deepen companies reporting on health initiatives and metrics. Approximately 63% of Fortune 100 companies report using GRI, according to KPMG Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2017.

INVESTING FOR HEALTH: A new platform to elevate health across the investment landscape

IWBI’s Investing for Health initiative is bringing together a powerful network of investors, companies and capital markets influencers to highlight investing for health as a key competitive advantage for organizations around the world.

In early 2020, IWBI launched its Investing for Health platform to offer a virtual space for education, dialogue and collaboration among leading investors, asset managers, pension funds, businesses, foundations, non-profit organizations and academic who agree that human and social capital metrics have been insufficiently and inconsistently reported, thereby limiting the ability of the capital markets to thoroughly assess investment risk and opportunity.

"Major employers are investing in their workers and communities because they know it is the only way to be successful over the long term. "

– Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Chairman of the Business Roundtable

Leading experts from around the world have joined us to help drive better investment decisions and realize the economic and social benefits of maximizing human and social capital. Below are a few articles and webcasts highlighting the themes being discussed among these thought leaders:

• A shifting paradigm: How health is powering better investment decision 
• Health is the heart of resilience: Paving the way to better risk management 
• Elevating human health and well-being across the investment and operating landscape 
• Redefining materiality in the new normal
• Benchmarking for health in real estate
• Investing for Health: Reshaping the notion of the materiality of health and ESG investing
• Elevating human health and well-being across the investment and operation landscape
• Why building design matters in response to coronavirus: our office building as a risk management solution

ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL WELL BUILDING INSTITUTE

The International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) is leading the global movement to transform our buildings, communities and organizations in ways that help people thrive. WELL v2 is the latest version of its popular WELL Building Standard (WELL), and the WELL Community Standard pilot is a district scale rating system that sets a new global benchmark for healthy communities. WELL is focused exclusively on the ways that buildings and communities, and everything in them, can improve our comfort, drive better choices, and generally enhance, not compromise, our health and wellness. The WELL Health-Safety Rating, administered by IWBI and informed by recommendations from nearly 600 multidisciplinary experts, provides an evidence-based, third- party verified rating focused on operational policies, maintenance protocols, emergency plans and stakeholder education to address a post-COVID-19 environment. IWBI mobilizes the wellness community through management of the WELL AP credential, the pursuit of applicable research, the development of educational resources, and advocacy for policies that promote health and wellness for everyone, everywhere. For more information about IWBI and WELL, visit us here. To see our global presence, visit us here.

Contact: investingf[email protected]