Is Indoor Air Quality Hurting Your Business?

Is your indoor air quality hurting business productivity?

There might be more to indoor air pollution than just experiencing uncomfortable, flu like symptoms. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety writes that common symptoms of poor indoor air quality (IAQ) are as follows:

It is common for people to report one or more of the following symptoms:

Dryness and irritation of the eyes, nose, throat, and skin
Headache
Fatigue
Shortness of breath
Hypersensitivity and allergies
Sinus congestion
Coughing and sneezing
Dizziness
Nausea
People generally notice their symptoms after several hours at work and feel better after they have left the building or when they have been away from the building for a weekend or a vacation.

Many of these symptoms may also be caused by other health conditions including common colds or the flu, and are not necessarily due to poor IAQ. This fact can make identifying and resolving IAQ problems more difficult…...read more here

Aside from the obvious health concerns, Lydia O’Connor noted that a recent study performed by Harvard University showed how reducing indoor air pollutants can impact decision making in the workplace. Lydia writes:

Running into mental blocks at your desk job? A new Harvard study says you may be able to blame it on the air quality in your office.

In a paper published Monday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, a team of researchers found that people working in well-ventilated “green” buildings with below-average indoor air pollution and carbon dioxide, or CO2, showed better cognitive functioning than workers in “non-green” offices with typical pollutant and CO2 levels.

“These results suggest that even modest improvements to indoor environmental quality may have a profound impact on the decision-making performance of workers,” lead study author Joseph Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment, wrote.

The findings, Think Progress notes, provide “an entirely new public health impetus for keeping global CO2 levels as low as possible.”

The study of 24 people exposed to different indoor environmental quality conditions over six full work days showed that participants’ cognitive scores were an average 61 percent higher on days working in buildings with low pollution levels than on days working in a conventional building. The results held true across all cognitive abilities that were tested: basic activity, applied activity, focused activity, task orientation, crisis response, information seeking, information usage, breadth of approach and strategy.

When lowered CO2 levels were coupled with lower pollutants in buildings, cognitive scores were a whopping 101 percent higher than in conventional buildings. That finding was significant, the study noted, as CO2 is not typically thought of as a direct indoor pollutant.

The largest improvements were seen in participants’ cognitive abilities relating to strategy, information usage and crisis response….read the full article.

In knowing how improving your air quality can potentially improve both the health and performance of your employees, what can you do to help? MAB Air Solutions offers a complimentary air cleaning to show you exactly how simple the process can be.

Jonathan Choquel provides a quite obvious but often overlooked tip:

Before starting this list of « not so obvious » tips to improve indoor air quality, let’s talk a little bit more about the most obvious tip: opening the windows. Having this habit is good. It’s a good start as it helps lower concentrations of toxic chemicals as well as carbon dioxide (CO2).
Indeed, indoors, the quality of the air is typically several times poorer than the air outdoors.
Certain everyday situations can suddenly degrade indoor air quality. In theses cases, you shouldn’t wait until the next morning to open the windows.
Pollution peaks might happen when you bring home a new piece of pressed-wood furniture or add a coat of paint on the walls. The air your breath indoors can also be degraded by the lack of cleaning.
• Open the windows 5 to 10 minutes. Do it on an everyday basis, even if you don’t know exactly how polluted the air is inside your home. You should also do it when you or someone else engages in an activity prone to deteriorate indoor air quality. Learn 6 more tips here

If interested in learning more about indoor plants that can improve air quality check out this related post!

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