CSRwire Talkback

By Ashley M. Halligan

With an ever-increasing emphasis on sustainability in building, a project’s design team should always be on the lookout for ways to meet and exceed environmental performance goals. But only part of a building's sustainability can be directly linked to its design team.

The other part relies heavily on a building's tenants. Surprisingly, even with state-of-the-art Building Automation Systems (BAS) and eco-savvy designs, tenants make up for as much as fifty percent of energy usage.

The Lucid Design Group gathered empirical data that demonstrated average tenants use measurements of 30 to 50 percent of a building's total consumption. The question then: How to engage tenants so that they share the same environmental performance goals as the design team?

Through a handful of interviews with both software gurus and Leadership in Environmental Design (LEED) professionals, I've come up with five strategies to boost tenant compliance, and subsequent improvement of alignment with performance goals. 

1. The Eco-Charrette

The first idea is an eco-charrette, a strategy to boost engagement before tenants move in.

An eco-charrette is a pre-occupancy meeting between the design team, building managers and soon-to-be occupants. With this initial meeting serving as a forum for suggestions on how to best achieve these goals, this becomes an opportunity for the design team to express the importance of their goals so that tenants are more aware from the beginning.

2. Encouraging Healthy Lifestyles

Josh Radoff, Principal at YR&G Sustainability suggests taking a holistic approach to sustainability, including encouraging healthy lifestyles through eating habits, being active, recycling and composting. A holistic approach increases the likelihood of tenant participation in sustainability plans, he says. “There’s a mistake of focusing solely on energy and water. While they’re important for a lot of people, they’re abstract ideas. It’s hard to get too far only focusing on energy,” says Radoff.

3. Technological Feedback

Another approach is factoring in a technology system that provides live data on usage patterns, comparisons between tenants and can incorporate social media elements to create a public platform for these measurements. One such system is Lucid's Building Dashboard, which has set the bar for tenant-use monitoring, but has also created tenant interest. 

4. Keeping Up With The Neighbors

Another suggestion from Lucid is to create competition between tenants. This can be a powerful extension of a facilities management systems when rallying tenant interest.

According to Lucid's objectives:

"Consider the Prius Effect: when you can see how your car is performing in real time, you tend to fine-tune usage in order to improve, sustain and eventually surpass your current level of performance. This phenomenon is especially true when friends, family and spouses get involved, each competing to outperform the recent mile-per-gallon ‘winner.’ By analogy, the outcome of using Building Dashboard is like the social and psychological effect produced by using the energy monitor in a hybrid vehicle."

5. Educating Tenants About Building Goals

And lastly, Radoff suggests creating transparency.

Because performance goals and energy use measurements can seem abstract, creating a means to simplify these things is necessary for tenants to remain committed to an idea. It's important that tenants understand performance goals and the true impact of their habits and behaviors; otherwise, they'll quickly lose interest. 

All these things said, however, green projects are still a new area that requires continuous research. New ideas are forming as quicklt as projects unfold. And beginning with the aforementioned tactics can be a great start to boosting efficiency from Day 1.

About Ashley Halligan

Ashley Halligan writes about building trends and property management as an analyst for a web-based software comparison company in Austin, Texas. She also serves as the Managing Editor for Austin Lifestyle Magazine. Get in contact with Ashley or follow her ventures on Twitter.