Good question, here is a short list of business areas allergies effect.
- Job Satisfaction
- Employee Retention
- Productivity
- Profitability
- Customer Retention
Statistics that as a building owner/operator you should concern you.
- On average, American adults spend 90% of their time indoors. Nearly a third of that is spent in an office.
- Heating and air conditioning equipment is designed to pull dirty, humid, allergy ridden air from outside your building and condition it before pushing it into the occupied spaces.
- Hay fever alone accounts for an estimated 4 million lost days of work.
- Upwards of 25% of your employees have allergies. The younger your employees are the more likely it will be that this is a low estimate.
I wanted to cover them before we jump to the focus of this article. They will have a bearing on how you view the importance of a solid approach to taking care of your environmental systems.
As a building owner/operator you have a responsibility to provide the occupants with a safe environment. If we are to define safe in broad terms, it becomes much more than most people would imagine.
Of course we all understand basic security in terms of protection from physical attackers. Bright lights in the parking areas, locks on entries and exits are standard fair. But what about attacks from microscopic invaders? Allergen come in many forms and have many levels of severity in how that attack people. The effects of allergens can range from unnoticeable to deadly.
Everyone understands how to calculate the costs of running a business. Labor, materials, marketing along with many other cost ares depending on your business type. All these costs get added to the mix before you can determine how profitable your company will become.
The one potentially huge cost area, that few people have a good handle on, is the indirect costs hiding in some of these very unpredictable places; like the cost of turnover due to poor indoor air quality (IAQ).
If fact, some companies never make the connection between poor IAQ and labor costs. They start to experience high turnover and assume things like the pay is too low. To combat the turnover they increase the pay level, which makes the costs go even higher.
Indirect costs associated with an allergens can be very difficult to nail down in terms of effects as well as costs. The level of diminished productivity resulting from an allergen illness varies greatly from one person to the next as started above.
The largest and easiest cost to calculate is the lost workdays due to allergen illness’. One study suggests upwards of 4 million work days are lost in the US just from Hay Fever and it is relatively mild when compared to some allergens.
If the estimated 39 million people in the US suffer from some type of allergy, it becomes clear the cost of poor IAQ is huge, and much larger than expected.
If your facility is not dealing with indoor air pollution, then you are likely spending 20-30% more on labor than needed.
Even if the employees that suffer with allergens arrive at work on time, and finish they assigned tasks, they day is coming when their cognitive function has decreased to the point where a transposed set of numbers cost your thousands of dollars.
CMC Corporate Solutions can provide you with solutions to several comfort issues, like humidity, temperature, smells and lighting; all of which can improve your IAQ. Give us a call to explore your options.
