Indoor environmental quality performance - Screening through mandatory workplace assessments: How mandatory physical workplace assessments can be used in developing new danish indoor environmental performance labels for publicly owned buildings in the future

Woxholt, Kristian Løhde ; Wolff, Lasse Gang

4. Term

Building Energy Design

2024

2024-01-10

72 pages

All public buildings in Denmark are required to perform workplace assessments (APV’s) to evaluate the wellbeing of employees. The APV is a tool to evaluate the workplace environment in a systematic way. The questionnaires are distributed at least every third year, and all staff are asked to evaluate their psychological and physical workplace environment. Some of these questionnaires collect valuable information on the indoor environmental performance, while others do not. Since these questionnaires are rarely prepared by experts within indoor environment and qualitative methods, the questions are typically neither specific nor in-depth enough, leading to incomplete results from the analysis. The current physical APV’s are developed individually in every municipality, and there is complete freedom of method in type and number of questions. In addition, there is a lack of a uniform label of results, making it hard to compare the quality of the indoor environment. The National Association of Municipalities in Denmark (KL) has developed a model for assessing indoor environmental quality and wants to use the indoor environmental-related questions in the current APV models to illuminate the occupants’ perception of the indoor environment within municipal buildings. Hence, there is a general interest in being able to use the questions to design strategic key performance indicators that can be included in the basis for bench-learning between municipalities. In this study, physical measurements, and results from a pilot test of the questionnaire have been gathered within a case building, and afterwards treated and analyzed to identify the advantages and disadvantages of these methods of data acquisition. The assessment of the indoor environmental quality has been done, according to the model developed by KL, which follows the requirements and guidelines from the Danish building regulations (BR18). This is done to propose recommendations for how the indoor environmental performance can be evaluated using KL’s model and how it could be improved in the future. The results of the study showed that the measurements worked well in identifying comfort concerns in individual rooms, but it is difficult to assign a cause of the problems from measurements alone. The questionnaire is a valuable source when identifying the origin of indoor environmental concerns in an effective way. When assessing the occupant’s satisfaction, the questionnaire is also a valuable source. The recommendations developed through this study shows the potential of different methods of indoor environmental evaluation. The study showed the potentials of each evaluation method through actual use in a case building.

Indoor environmental quality ; Data gathering ; Publicly owned buildings ; workplace assessments ; Strategic planning

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