Indoor Air Quality Is Killing Your Workforce Productivity

The Measure Podcast

Episode Summary: In our second episode of the Measure Podcast by Metrikus, our host Michael Grant is joined by Liam Bates, CEO and co-founder of Kaiterra, who create connected devices to monitor and improve the environment around us.

Theme: Productivity

Episode highlights:

• Why it’s so important to monitor indoor air quality of buildings (03.18)
• The indoor air quality project that Liam is involved in (04.56)
• The challenges with data collection on indoor air quality (5.58)
• Ways you can measure indoor air quality (10.28)
• The adoption Liam has seen from organisations wanting to improve and track their air quality (15.13)
• What indoor air quality data tell us about the workplace (17.12)
• Indoor air quality footprint and how this can help companies plan how many people can fit into a building (19.43)
• The gap between the theory and reality with HVAC systems (24.41)
• How indoor air quality data can inform decision making (30.59)
• Simple policies that can be introduced and have a huge impact on air quality (35.53)

Key Takeaways:

• “There are 3 million premature deaths every year due to indoor air pollution. So just the air pollution inside our buildings. That's not even looking at the impact on productivity, the impact on how we feel.” - Liam
  
• “The challenge is that it's often very hard to understand what the root cause of a problem is when it comes to the indoor environment.” - Liam
  
• “That's personally where I spend a lot of my time on, saying how can we transfer the expertise that exists within people on our team that have been working on this for 10+ years into a piece of software that does the work for you, because otherwise it's going to be hopeless.” - Liam
  
• “The reality is that if you're a building owner, operator, or an employer and you are not measuring your air quality, somebody in your building probably is and you do not wanna be the last person to find out if there's a problem.” - Liam
  
• “If you're trying to add 10 people to a floor, that's going to change the indoor air quality, fundamentally, unless you've got the exact systems in there to cope with that. So you want to know beforehand, are the HVAC systems going to be able to cope with this?” - Liam
  
• “With clear occupancy data you can look at the quality of occupied spaces, because there’s an argument that I really don't care about the air quality of unoccupied spaces.” - Liam
  
• “If you want to take something away, leave the phone booths open, or the small booths that you have in your office open when you leave them so that whoever's coming in next, the CO2 can drop as much as possible. I mean, no joke that can lead to a 20- 30% increase in air quality for users.” - Liam
  
• “The reality is air quality is complex. There are many different parameters that have many complex interactions. But the reality is that if you can find the patterns, sometimes the solutions are dead simple and they're very low cost.” - Liam

Resources:

• Metrikus
• Metrikus Content Hub

Metrikus

Metrikus is a building efficiency platform that helps organizations to make their spaces more efficient, creating positive change for occupants and the environment. Our cloud-based platform achieves this by aggregating data from multiple sources – whether it’s from IoT sensors, the Building Management System (BMS), or elsewhere – into one central place. And once we’ve helped you get your hands on the right data, our platform then transforms it to make it easier to analyze, compare and contextualize.

Michael Grant is the co-founder and COO of Metrikus. Michael is an operations, strategy and management professional with over 20 years in the technology sector. Specializing in technology, software, IoT, ESG and cloud, Michael has over 10 years’ experience working at Senior Management and C-Level and has dealt with large teams to deliver solutions with exceptional service – clients include those from banking, commercial real estate and IT sectors.