Deep dive: Explore the WELL Health-Safety Rating Features

Some of the WELL Health-Safety Rating features might be familiar health-supporting best practices—like adequate hand washing or prohibiting smoking. Others might be less obvious, like assessing ventilation to assure fresh air is brought in from outside. Of the many features offered, projects have the freedom and flexibility to choose the ones that will best support health and safety in their spaces. You can explore the full range of available features by visiting the WELL Health-Safety Rating Overview.

Although you’re only required to successfully implement 15 of the offered features, we encourage you to adopt even more—the more features you implement, the greater the benefit for all who enter your space.

How were the WELL Health-Safety Rating’s features developed?

The WELL Health-Safety Rating criteria were created with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health; insights from the IWBI Task Force on COVID-19; WELL advisories covering a wide breadth of industries and fields of expertise; and finally, from the WELL Building Standard. The criteria are designed to be applicable to facility types across all sectors, while staying flexible enough to help you maximize the benefit of the rating for your project.

There are five feature focus areas associated with the WELL Health-Safety Rating:

• Cleaning and sanitization procedures help address the spread of COVID-19 and many other infectious diseases through cleaning protocols and hand washing promotion, with a focus on low-hazard cleaning products that reduce negative impacts on indoor air quality and the health of those performing cleaning duties.
• Emergency preparedness programs are essential to ensuring that organizations are equipped to immediately confront and recover from crises like the current COVID-19 pandemic, which spread to almost every continent within five months. Having these measures in place can slow the spread of infectious disease and minimize secondary mortality. Additionally, creating plans to support business continuity, remote work readiness and project re-entry after extended remote periods helps maintain business resilience and individual well-being during and after longer-lasting emergencies.
• Health service resources help organizations encourage individual actions that support the health and safety of all in a given space, including vaccinations, education on good health habits, paid sick leave, improving access to healthcare and supporting smoking cessation. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated how the behaviors of one person can impact others in severe ways - and interventions in the workplace can help address that. Studies estimate that 20 million Americans and 37% of UK employees go to work sick because they lack sick leave or have only one-day sick leave, respectively, infecting colleagues as a result.95,96
• Air and water quality management interventions focus on reducing exposure to pathogens and infectious diseases including COVID-19 by mitigating indoor air pollution, avoiding air stagnation, implementing proper maintenance and air filtration and monitoring water quality.
• Stakeholder engagement and communication is critical to instilling confidence, improving coordination and supporting actions that can help protect safety during and after emergencies. Based on the effects of previous SARS outbreaks, COVID-19 is predicted to have lasting physical and mental health impacts. Providing individuals with access to health-promotion strategies, education and resources can help them to cultivate healthy habits and resilience in response to physical and mental health stressors.

Support

You can find helpful, timely, supplemental resources supporting the robust implementation of each feature can be found in your WELL Health-Safety Checklist. To access these resources:

1. Visit your WELL Health-Safety Checklist.
2. Click on the feature you’d like to explore in list.
3. Click Resources > select a resource to explore in greater depth.

For example, if you were to select Support Handwashing you would find resources from the CDC, WHO, and Europe CDC:

From the Resource tab, you can select any of the available supporting documents to learn more.