WELL Tip: Your Guide to WELL Portfolio Documentation Review

The WELL Portfolio program is designed to help companies implement, scale and assess proven wellness strategies and performance across multiple properties. An important step in the WELL Portfolio journey is preparing and submitting documentation demonstrating compliance with WELL’s research-backed health and well-being strategies. Your organization’s WELL Portfolio Score is the result of successful review of those documents and they contribute toward individual property achievements.

Depending on your goals, you can pursue any of the following milestones for properties in a WELL Portfolio review cycle. Each has specific documentation requirements:

• WELL Precertification: Awarded to properties demonstrating how their planned design, construction, and operational strategies align with the requirements for WELL Certification. It’s a way to communicate leadership and intention before the strategies have been implemented in a project.
• WELL Certification: The premier human health standard for buildings and interior spaces, emphasizing strategies in ten concept areas: Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Movement, Thermal Comfort, Sound, Materials, Mind and Community.
• WELL Health-Safety Rating for Facility Operations and Management: A designation to recognize excellence in buildings and organizations that prioritize health and safety issues through facilities operation and management. Its strategies are a subset of those required for WELL Certification.
• Individual WELL feature achievement: Portfolio members can target specific individual WELL features to help properties demonstrate leadership on particular strategies or in WELL concept areas.

Discover more about the types of documentation required in WELL Portfolio to achieve these milestones, as well as best practices to help you succeed. Review the WELL Portfolio Guidebook in detail for more information on the WELL Portfolio documentation process.

WELL Portfolio Documentation Overview

The main types of documentation required in WELL Portfolio are:

• Feature-specific verification methods
  • Shareable Portfolio-scale documents
  • Shareable Guidelines
  • Individual scale documents
• General documents

Shareable portfolio-scale documents can be assigned to multiple projects or an entire defined portfolio, as applicable, without any need for project-specific documentation.

For example, feature A02 Smoke-Free Environment, Part 1 - Prohibit Indoor Smoking is verified through a Policy Document and/or Operations Schedule and is considered a Shareable Portfolio-scale document. A Policy Document prohibiting indoor smoking could be submitted once by a Portfolio member and applied to the entire portfolio’s properties—or a subset of the portfolio—provided that the organization can attest that this policy applies to all such locations.

Shareable portfolio-scale documents include:

• Letters of Assurance (LOA): form letters available for download in your scorecard. These must be completed by a designated member of the project team (so be sure to select a team member with relevant expertise) that affirms your project has implemented a given feature as required. The person who signs that LOA is attesting that they have the expertise to verify that those projects meet the outlined requirements
• Operations Schedules
• Policy Documents

Shareable guidelines can also be used for multiple projects or an entire defined portfolio when applicable. But they do require the submission of additional project-specific documentation for some properties to determine compliance with the features in this category. Guidelines describe the WELL feature requirements that individual projects adhere to, rather than the details of how a particular project has met the feature.

For example, a Portfolio member could create Shareable Guidelines for feature M02 Access to Nature, which requires a professional narrative as the verification method. The narrative should describe how the portfolio’s properties generally meet the feature requirements to integrate and encourage occupant access to nature within the building and project site (external to the building). It should include specific nature strategies that exist in the properties generally as detailed in the feature. A subset of the properties assigned to those M02 Guidelines would be audited to provide additional project-specific details in a professional narrative that is specific to that property. More details on the audit process are provided in the Auditing section of the WELL Portfolio Guidebook.

Shareable guidelines can be used for features that are verified through:

• Annotated map
• Architectural drawing
• Commissioning report
• Design specifications
• Educational materials
• Mechanical drawing
• Modeling report
• On-going maintenance report
• Photographs
• Professional narrative
• Remediation report
• Signage and communication materials
• Survey materials

Individual-scale documents are those that apply to only one property. Any feature can be submitted as an individual scale document if you have very different ways that properties meet WELL requirements. Only two categories of features are required to be submitted individually for projects:

• Ongoing data reports ( submitted as a part of annual maintenance for some features)
• Performance tests (required for any projects to achieve WELL Certification)

General documents for WELL Portfolio include:

• Portfolio scorecard indicating what features are being pursued.
• A completed Properties tab in the Portfolio dashboard, which includes accurate names, size and occupancy estimates for each project, as well as any properties that are targeting WELL Certification or Precertification in that review cycle.
• Executed WELL Portfolio agreement.
• Representative floor plans, as applicable, for any projects submitting performance testing results for any WELL features.

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