| | MAY 20188Employee Productivity and the Smart BuildingBy Gaurav Burman, VP & Country President, India, 75FGaurav Burman spent 20 years of his life in Sales and worked with companies like PCL, IBM, L&T, APC, and Schneider Electric and then move to marketing. A Civil Engineering graduate from The Thapar Institute, Patiala, Gaurav holds MBA in Marketing from XLRI, Jamshedpur and he was recognized as one of the 50 Most Talented CMOs in India in 2013, and one of the 100 Most Talented CMOs in the World by the US-based CMO Council.IN MY OPINIONEvery day I talk with facility heads and facility man-agers from different companies. We talk about their plans and aspirations for their facilities. We talk about bottlenecks in achieving these goals and the possible resolutions. We talk about making the shift from investment-lad-en facility management to contributing to the company's bottom line. One topic that comes up over and over again with most of these facility managers is `building a work environment that makes employees productive and healthy.'As Mr. Mahesh Ramanujam, President and Chief Executive Officer at U.S. Green Building Council, aptly summarized at the Green Building Conference in Beijing, "There is no deep mystery about how to create healthier spaces. But it does require diligence and attention to detail: the key components of healthy space have everything to do with creating space not for itself, but for people." I couldn't agree more! Employees have to be at the heart of how a building operates, and a healthy, produc-tive workplace is one that is consistently monitored, managed and controlled.A healthy office environment has many dimensions; from the ever-changing environment-based attributes such as good indoor air quality, thermal comfort, lighting and sound to static attributes such as high-quality views, location and amenities. Studies show that each of these aspects significantly impacts employee health, cognitive abilities, problem-solving capabili-ties, concentration, and ability to innovate. For e.g. as US Green Building Council points out, "Studies show that small chang-es such as improved ventilation will boost the productivity of workers by 11% while better lighting will spark a whopping 23% jump in efficiency."But how does today's already-stretched, short-on-resources facility manager keep track of so many resources? How does he/she ensure that each aspect of the facility is continuously moni-tored, managed, and controlled?
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