A Bridge for Advancing Performance Frameworks
Organizations see WELL Portfolio as an opportunity to streamline efforts across ESG
When organizations implement health and wellness strategies, they don’t do so building by building, they do so across the enterprise. We learned this alongside the earliest adopters of WELL as they pursued certification. Although they may have been pursuing WELL for a single building, that single building often served as a testing ground for strategies that, if effective, would one day be applied across the organization. In this way, from the very outset, WELL has supported customers in advancing incremental improvements particularly for existing assets where operational budgets are often stretched thin. Our customers wanted and deserved to be recognized for their leadership at scale and their commitment to continuous improvements, but at the time, our certification pathway was designed for building by building achievements where certification was the only end goal.
These learnings drove IWBI to stand up the WELL Portfolio pilot, a one-year endeavor to co-create – along with more than 30 pioneering customers – a comprehensive program that enables organizations to implement, assess and scale proven wellness strategies and be recognized and rewarded for their progress along the way. When we put out the call for pilot participants, we expected that a handful of developers and property managers would raise their hands and they did, along with colleges and universities, manufacturers, healthcare systems, financial institutions and others, with assets collectively spanning 26 countries.
What we found after a year of listening and learning was a revelation to us. Organizations did not just see WELL Portfolio as an opportunity to streamline their efforts and costs, but were enrolling in the program to improve their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance, advance their CSR objectives and make good on their commitments to the UN SDGs.
While many organizations receiving ESG scores have developed a clear roadmap to improving performance for the ‘E’ and the ‘G’, many of our Portfolio customers and prospective customers are turning to WELL to provide that roadmap to improved performance under the ‘S’. Barclays, for example, is already making enormous strides in sustainability, with a 38% reduction in carbon emissions from 2015-2018, and joined WELL Portfolio in part to make advances in human capital management and social impact. Other participants are leveraging WELL Portfolio as a framework for improving mental health, safety standards and social equity within their organizations and beyond.
Many of our Portfolio participants participate in the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB), the leading assessment for ESG performance of real estate assets. Following a 71% increase in participation since its initial release in 2016, GRESB’s health and well-being module is fully incorporated into their reporting for the first time this year, affirming IWBI’s long-standing belief that human health is material to a business’s bottom line. WELL Portfolio participant, the Lendlease managed Australian Prime Property Fund Commercial, led the pack in 2019, ranking number one out of 964 property companies, REITS, funds and developers in this year’s GRESB results. For clients like Lendlease, IWBI is working with the GRESB team to build bridges between our respective platforms and align on the most impactful measurements and metrics.
This year, IWBI signed the UN Global Compact (UNGC), and commenced a joint effort to support implementation and reporting on SDG commitments for other signatories by way of participation in WELL Portfolio. As part of this effort, we mapped WELL to the SDGs and its subtargets; this was another revelation. While we expected WELL to align strongly to certain SDG goals, such as Goal #3 Health and Well-being and Goal #6 Clean Water and Sanitation, we never imagined that WELL features would touch upon every single one of the SDGs. This affirms WELL Portfolio as a framework for sustainability and suggests that for organizations with a footprint in developing markets and low income communities, WELL Portfolio can provide a pathway for advancing each of the SDG goals. Within the digital standard for WELL v2, each WELL feature is now visibly tagged to the relevant SDG.
It’s exhilarating to think that WELL Portfolio can be in service to these larger institutional goals; there is a dawning realization of organizations worldwide that healthy people, healthy planet and healthy businesses are inextricably linked. This makes WELL Portfolio a vehicle for transformation that exceeds our earliest ambitions. Our team is inspired and motivated to deepen WELL’s alignment with these global platforms and enhance the value proposition for WELL Portfolio. In 2020 and beyond, expect us to expand our collaborative efforts with all of these partners and with our customers to accelerate this movement towards healthy places and spaces for all, because every person is entitled to fresh air to breathe, clean water to drink, and a safe and healthy place to call home.
Interested in learning more? View the recording of our Benchmarking for health in real estate webcast featuring the CFO of Measurable, Nicole Carr and the Director of Health Research at the U.S. Green Building Council, Kelly Worden to learn how ESG benchmarking can directly impact your company’s bottom line.
