#12.1 - Francesca Brady: Investing in the Air We Breathe and a Thriving Workplace Environment.

Part 1

Francesca Brady - is CEO and Co-Founder of AirRated an indoor air quality (IAQ) certification company 

She is an advisory member for the Camden Clean Air Initiative, the BREEAM Health and Wellbeing technical group, and a member of the International WELL Building Institute's Covid-19 Taskforce. 

A rising star in air quality in many ways including on the  Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2021 for her work with Air rated.

With a Masters in Environmental Geoscience specialising in indoor atmospheric chemistry she was Formerly Head of Research for Air Rated, before taking on the role of CEO in  2020. 

Since then she has been dedicated to promoting and educating audiences from all walks of life about the importance, benefits and management of good indoor air quality.

Francesca is a top-tier communicator and can frame a complex subject in ways that are resonating with the audience, clearly. 

Air rated is a standard with a laser focus on air quality and is growing in recognition year after year under her leadership.

We discussed the value of labelling air quality in buildings and the challenges around building the business case. How Air rated is approaching the sector and creating accessible on-ramps for all classes of building. How air quality impacts performance, the bottom line ESG and so much more.

Air Rated
Francesca Brady LinkedIn
Our Air in Review 

Transcript

Simon: 0:14

Welcome to Air Quality Matters, and this is a conversation with Francesca Brady, ceo and co-founder of Air Rated, an indoor air quality certification company. She is an advisory member for the Camden Clean Air Initiative, the Bream Health and Wellbeing Technical Group and a member of the International Wellbuilding Institute's COVID-19 Task Force. A rising star in air quality in many ways, including on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2021 for her work with Air Rated. With a Masters in Environmental Geoscience specialising in indoor atmospheric chemistry, she was formerly head of research for Air Rated and was promoted to the role of CEO in 2020. Since then, she has been dedicated to promoting and educating audiences from all walks of life about the importance, benefits and management of good indoor air quality. She is focused on improving air quality and discussing the best ways to foster healthier living and working environments.

Simon: 1:24

I always enjoy talking to Francesca. She is a top tier communicator and is able to frame a complex subject in ways that is resonating with the audience. Clearly, air Rated is a standard with a laser focus on air quality and is growing in recognition year and year. Under her leadership, we discussed the value of labelling air quality in buildings and the challenges around building the business case, how air rated is approaching the sector and creating accessible on-ramps for all classes of buildings. How air quality impacts performance, the bottom line ESG and so much more. I hope you enjoy this one. Thanks for listening. As always, this is Francesca Brady. Why label a building at all for something like air quality? What's driving decisions within businesses to do that?

Francesca: 2:17

I honestly think it's a couple of things, because I'm sure back in the day people are like well, why would we start labelling the energy performance of a building? It is one of those things you can't see. It is fundamentally important to understand. With an EPC, it was important from an operational perspective to understand. With air quality, yes, it's important from an operational perspective, but it's also important from a health and wellbeing of the people coming into the space, so the employer slash occupier, but also the employees.

Francesca: 2:54

I think it is one of those metrics where you're like well, we probably should and we should be transparent about this, but there's no mandatory requirement like there is for any PC. It tends to be those who know that they've probably got a good building that will choose to do it. But then that starts to get attention, generates awareness, and then others think, okay, is this something that is going to either be a mandatory requirement, or are people going to ask why we don't have it? Because the building next door's got one, so why don't we have one? It's one of those things where, yeah, you don't have to label it right now, but why wouldn't you? I'm sure this is going to go the same way as EPCs energy performance certificate. Air quality performance certificate.

Simon: 3:40

And you're seeing that with a lot of these other energy-based labels like LEED and BRYAM, increasingly including more and more air quality parameters to their labels, aren't you so? It's clear that's the direction of travel.

Francesca: 3:56

Yeah, and with a lot of them it was it's going to sound bad a token gesture to begin with. So it was like, oh, there's something in there about indoor air quality. Maybe it is a kind of light touch check, a light touch test, or maybe it's just a policy requirement. And now more and more of them are wanting to do more with it. But we're also seeing them seek the expertise from the air quality industry. Because we're all here and we're all ready and willing to help. They're going out and they're seeking these kind of expert groups. So an expert air quality group. So and there's quite a specific example. So Fitwell have version 2.1. That is still in progress. At the moment they're coming out with version 3. They went out into the air quality industry and said we're not specifically air quality experts. We're going to need your help because we want to make more of this air quality section. It was pretty prominent anyway, but they wanted to explore where there were gaps missing and all that sort of stuff. So that is going to be seen when version 3 launches. But it's really positive and particularly from their point of view.

Francesca: 5:05

Well, fitwell, they are healthy building certifications. So they can't not. They have to include air quality and it has to be a fundamental part of what they're doing because it is a fundamental determining factor for human health. With LEED and with BRYAM, it's still, it's there and it features. It doesn't feature heavily, but I think that's okay. It's okay if a building is going for LEED and it's also doing a healthy building certification, regardless of which one. That is because the two can work in harmony and they should work in harmony, and having both certifications validates that the two are working in harmony. You don't need to have a certification that does everything. You need to have a select few certifications that work together to form this picture of performance, and performance being everything from sustainability to health.

Simon: 6:02

Yeah, that's a really good point, and I've been meaning to ask you actually, like if you could have a do-over of the last three years, would you have taken COVID or not? From an awareness perspective, clearly there was an acceleration in awareness of air quality in the built environment because of the pandemic, but you also get the sense it really took organizations down some rabbit holes and down some dead ends and also was incredibly distracting for organizations and any plan you had to slowly build awareness over time was thrown out the window when something like that comes around, like if you could write the script from 2019, would it have included COVID? Do you think? And I don't, obviously nobody wants a global pandemic.

Simon: 7:00

You know, I prefaced that, but you know.

Francesca: 7:05

It's as, like brand awareness, render air quality. It's such a good question because, on the one hand, it captured the attention of the population that ordinarily it probably wouldn't have registered with. This is the problem, because there's, almost, like this, awareness that was generated on an individual level. So with us as people, that is perfectly fine. In terms of decision making, yes, the kind of mass awareness helps drive change, but it is quite slow when it came to business decision makers. Regardless of whether it was COVID or productivity benefits, it all came down to economic benefit. So there was a with Joseph Allen and John McComber before COVID and all of the work they were doing around indoor air quality, ventilation and economic commercial advantage for organisations. That was such a compelling business case in itself and we've kind of reverted back to that anyway. So it feels like you're right and a distraction is the right phrase to use. It does sort of feel like the last three years were a distraction and quite a lot of investment went into a lot of stuff to address COVID, but not necessarily the right stuff. So it felt in so many ways knee jerk or response and it was like, oh my God, okay, we have to show that we're doing something. Let's just do the first thing that we see on the first page of Google and we'll just invest in that. So there was a lot of investment that could have been used better. I think that has been used in the past three years to address COVID. The business case has done a complete 180 and come back to where it was before COVID. So it's back to what is the economic benefit, what's the bottom line advantage, what's the productivity angle? All that sort of stuff. And health still features. But you have to position health in the economic benefit arena, otherwise you just don't really get the attention or the specific investment you need to make those improvements in the internal environment. So, yeah, the last three years.

Francesca: 9:41

Would we have wanted COVID for the end or high quality scene? No, I think it was too much of a distraction. I think it was getting there anyway. I know lots of people suggest it was a catalyst. So it's bought the attention and awareness it deserves and it would have taken five or 10 years to get otherwise.

Francesca: 10:04

I just don't think it's necessarily put anything in the best light either, because it's also made it very scary. So people are into air quality. I'm going to associate that with COVID and all those horrible lockdowns and the deaths and all that sort of stuff. And air quality air pollution indoors and outdoors is terrifying enough when you think that you can't really control what you breathe a lot of the time. So it's trying to make it less scary. It's trying to educate people, because there was a huge amount of awareness and it was plastered all over mainstream media, so awareness was accelerating at a rate that education wasn't. So what you had was this point where people were aware, aware, aware, but they didn't really know what they were aware about. Or it's like okay, I get like indirect quality is a thing, I get, that that's a thing. Now I am aware of it. I don't understand it, though.

Francesca: 11:01

And it's the same with so many things that come into mainstream media. You're aware of them. Do you understand them? Maybe not.

Simon: 11:07

Yeah, and time will tell if one of the drivers for businesses and organisations making decisions to think and categorise the quality of their building performance will be driven from the bottom up by staff awareness, and almost certainly there's an element of it. It's unclear whether that's been, whether that's manifesting in a business decision to do something yet, but there is a, as you say, a very strong business case for thinking about air quality in the workplace. Isn't there? Absolutely.

Francesca: 11:43

I mean, and it's multifaceted, because the business case is different and I'm going to say it's different depending on what department you're in. So, which might sound a bit strange, but if you're in the finance department, so if you're the FD, if you're looking at the bottom line, then the business case is going to be predominantly around productivity. So like, how can we maximise the output of our workforce? That's one thing. How can we reduce absenteeism? Because absent people are people who are not working and are not contributing to profit of the business.

Francesca: 12:26

So that's a finance department's perspective the marketing and maybe the talent attraction and retention teams or recruitment team will be interested in how do we position things to be a more attractive, be a reputable brand that the next generation of workforce want to come and work for?

Francesca: 12:53

Because it's less around this race for the best salary, because I'm sure the vast majority of probably millennials, but definitely Gen Z, will say actually salary is important. So it's always going to be important to have money, to be financially comfortable and financially stable. But a massive thing is like do I feel valued by my employer? Are they looking after me? I don't have to work here. I could go and work anywhere, I could work for myself, I could become an influencer, all these other things, because the job market is shifting so rapidly that you have to be able to position yourself in the best way to attract the best talent. So, as I say, it depends which department you are in terms of where you see the maximum value in doing these sorts of initiatives, but that's going to look different, so you need to have a different narrative for each department. It depends who you're talking to and what their drivers are going to be.

Simon: 13:57

Do the HR department figure in those conversations as well? Are they thinking about occupational health and safety and risk, and are they seeing through that lens yet at all, do you see?

Francesca: 14:15

I'm not seeing that personally. So we have tried to target some of our approach to human resources departments, and I don't know whether their priorities lie elsewhere. Again, I think it might be an education obstacle. So it's only going to mean something and it's only going to feel valuable if you understand what it is that's being proposed to you in the first place. So if the HR department either don't think it's necessarily their remit or don't understand what value you're proposing it could have to them, then they're not going to buy into it. I think that is potentially the barrier at the moment is a lack of education in not even just HR but in some departments, in terms of understanding what value it can deliver to them in their roles, in their functions.

Simon: 15:13

Clearly, one of the drivers is the financial elements of this. I mean, you mentioned Joseph Allen. You know he's quite well known for talking about this 330-300 rule. You know that so much of your business cost is bound within your people. But also, in this knowledge economy that we tend to operate in, the driver for performance are the people, and and yeah, organizations will spend a fortune optimizing fractions of a percent of performance of various systems within the business, but there's an enormous amount of locked in potential isn't there in the performance of your knowledge base within your organization through things like air quality?

Francesca: 15:58

There is, and I think that's a good point actually, because a huge amount is invested in productivity tools, but it's the software, it's the machines, it's the systems that sit behind and as the kind of core of the business, but, from a very system-orientated perspective, it's not the people then having to use those tools. So, with Metta last year, I think they coined it as their year of efficiency and you had this blog by Mark Zuckerberg that was talking about how we're gonna streamline our processes and optimize our systems and all sort of stuff, but it was very machine optimization driven. There was nothing about the people in there. And I've read Metta's sustainability reports 2021, 2022-2023. In 2021, control find indoor air quality you find one reference to indoor air quality at links to lead. So, as we were saying before in this conversation, lead is very light touch on indoor air quality becoming better with how much they're introducing, but still very light touch. And they specifically said that it was going to apply to any building that they took on either as an owner or an occupier from 2021 onwards. It's like, I assume, the vast majority of their real estate they already had by that point. And then, if you look in the 2022 report control find indoor air quality nothing. 2023 control find indoor air quality nothing.

Francesca: 17:34

So there is a huge amount around efficiency and it is quite bizarre that you would be investing so much attention, so much money into optimizing systems that inevitably your workforce will have to use.

Francesca: 17:51

But if they are not feeling good, if they have sick building syndrome, it doesn't matter how good the system is. It doesn't matter really how automated it is, particularly if it relies on a human to catalyze a an automation. There is a fundamental missing piece of the puzzle and it is bizarre that that just gets looked over. Because when you look at high-performance sports teams and even racing drivers because the car is so, so, fine-tuned, but so is the person driving the car and so much effort is put into like psychologically how do you feel? What's your nutrition, what's your exercise schedule? How are you sleeping? Workers, you and me in an office no, we're not dealt with in the same way, but it's. Businesses want to be high-performing, they want to be highly profitable, but they, for the vast majority of the time, ignore the people. That will get them there in a different way to how you would look at a sports team or how you would look at a racing car driver yeah, and, as you rightly point out, you know you can.

Simon: 18:59

You can invest quite a bit of time and money in improving the performance of systems, but you then still have to get the workforce to actively engage with those systems to realize the potential of that optimization. If you spend time investing in air quality within a building, all the occupants have to do is breathe when they turn up to realize that performance gain. You know so it's an easy win from an engagement perspective. So much of the ability to capture performance is locked in to engagement in that process. There's no engagement, there's no engagement in a process of breathing in decent air and being sick less than performing better at half four in the afternoon yeah, and I think particularly with with Meta in mind, just because I was looking at this study probably about a year ago and it was.

Francesca: 19:53

It took lots of data from GitHub. So anywhere anyone who works in software development will know GitHub for those that don't Google it but it is something that lots of software developers use and it this study took data from that and it took data from individuals, productivity outputs via GitHub and air pollution data Across. It was a cohort of 25 or 26,000 developers across 46 countries, four continents. It basically said everything else aside and just looking at productivity output in relation to air pollution, you're losing about 4 percent output per day, which I think came to when they benchmarked all the salaries. It came to $11 per day. Then I was like and for the listeners they're not going to see that I've got my calculator out but if we just did the maths on that $11 a day, so it'd be $11 a day. How many workdays are there in a year?

Simon: 20:58

250? Something like that, yeah.

Francesca: 21:01

Let's go with 250. So 250. So for each of those 26,000 people, they're losing $2,750 a year. So times 26,000. I guess it's 71 million.

Francesca: 21:16

I know it's on a global scale, but that is a huge amount that is being lost through something that is relatively straightforward to control If you understand, first of all, which areas need to be controlled and how to control them.

Francesca: 21:32

But again, it's organizations like Metta, because they have a lot of workforce that is highly skilled. That sort of data is out there to work against and to build the business case around. It's probably just the fact that no one's doing it for Metta at the moment. It's like we do it in the air quality world and we're like my God, look at these statistics and we all tell each other about them, but it doesn't really get outside of our realm of interest. It doesn't get to the people at Metta who would make any decisions about this, unless you actively try and get to them. But I think that's the problem with all of it is all of these business cases are so compelling, so it's either the way that we're telling them that isn't resonating or the people that we're trying to position them to are the wrong people, and I think it's working that out.

Simon: 22:23

Yeah, and framing is so key to building the business case and I think people's perception and it's somewhat true is that it's difficult to prove the outcomes a little bit at the moment, that there are research questionnaires that you can put to workforce to try and understand whether their perception of air quality has improved since an intervention or whether they feel more productive, and it can feel a little bit disjointed and separated from reality. But increasingly now there are hard metrics that we're able to use but particularly depending on the type of work that you do, that can identify, like you were just describing, actual increases in performance for workplaces and it doesn't have to go as far as health wearables and monitoring individuals within spaces, just our use and productivity, the amount of data that we're able to capture. If we can segment that and identify that as being a result of an improvement to air quality, it's gonna build that business case so much more strongly.

Francesca: 23:34

Exactly, and I think there are plenty of functions, roles, jobs out there where, much like with GitHub, you can quite clearly see output. And actually in this case because what's really interesting about these air pollution studies is that it's basically saying with this one, with GitHub, it was saying that software developers weren't slower, that wasn't why there was this loss in output, they were just opting for the easier tasks because, for whatever reason and I don't think any of us truly understand what happens with our brains with the influence of air pollution we just understand that, okay, output goes down. Don't understand what's happening up here, but for whatever reason, when air quality or when air pollution increases productivity outputs go down. That is the relationship we're seeing with all other factors accounted for. So that's an interesting thing. And then there was a study with the S&P 500 and same day, returns dropped by 11.9% with a one increased standard deviation of PM 2.5. So particulate matter, air pollution, and that was because the people on these trading floors were more risk averse. So again, it wasn't that they were slower or they were making mistakes, it was just an influence that was happening that was making them more risk averse. So obviously, if you're making lower risk decisions, there's lower reward, but that was why.

Francesca: 25:16

So I think with software developers, there is a nice statistic or a nice metric to look at for productivity measure. With trading floors, same day returns is a good metric to look at. I agree with you that you don't need to necessarily be looking at wearable devices. You don't need to understand it on an individual level. You just need to understand that on a trade on a typical trading floor with this many people, this is the loss of output and that doesn't need to be looked at in any more granular detail down to a person.

Francesca: 25:52

You say this function performs in this way when this is happening. So I think that's a good way to look at it. With other roles, I think it can be slightly more ambiguous, and that's where you the only real way it feels that you can get some significant data is by asking about do you feel more comfortable, do you feel better that we've enhanced our filtration systems? It's something you can't see, but do you feel better now that you've been told about it? So that is more difficult to quantify, but these ones are very straightforward.

Simon: 26:34

Yeah, and that's only part of the picture as well. I mean, there are practical improvements from improved air quality, like absenteeism. So while you may not gain on some performance metric in working processes, you may retain staff more regularly because there's less absenteeism or what's the present is not presenteism.

Francesca: 27:11

Present? No, it is, it is presenteism when they come in. Yes, where they come in sick. Is it presenteism?

Simon: 27:18

I think that's the word for it and that really clicked with me actually, is that Jesus people dragging themselves into work with colds and flus working at about 30% because they're just not there. There's so many hidden benefits, so many co-benefits of getting the indoor environment right beyond making the right decisions more efficiently.

Francesca: 27:42

Yeah, and I think the because, when it comes to absenteeism, obviously you can be absent for a whole number of different reasons, but also maybe you come into the office and you feel fine when you come in, but then if you're exposed to a poorly ventilated place with pretty poor IAQ that would otherwise be classed as a sick building Sick building syndrome will impact you, even if you feel fine at the beginning of the day and you come into the office. So that is something that should seriously be addressed, because the amount that the UK economy loses to sick building syndrome is astronomical. I think it's something like 24 million a year, and that was a 2014 statistic. But in all reality, I don't think we've changed buildings very much in the last decade. I mean, most of the ones that were around in 2014 haven't been touched at all. Maybe a refurb of the interior fit out, but probably nothing more than that. So with all of those buildings, they've probably got worse.

Francesca: 28:47

So I'm sure that number has increased as opposed to decreased, which is and this is the problem with indirect quality. Sometimes you can focus and this is probably what Powell was saying you can focus too much on the negatives, but you can always spin a negative to form a positive. So it's like if we address sick building syndrome, then this is how much we could gain back in the economy. So you just reverse it. But I think it's a really important one, because absenteeism I mean when we did our air and review. So air rated annual indirect quality review pluggy, plug, plug, plug.

Simon: 29:25

We'll put a link into it, by the way, because it's a really it's not known? Is it beautifully pulled together? Is there some cracking information in there as well for people?

Francesca: 29:35

Yeah, it is. I mean I didn't write it, so congratulations to the team. But it is amazing, and I was looking at the statistics of who was surveyed because I kind of wanted to understand the demographic in terms of the ages of people that were surveyed, just more about the types of people. So I looked at it and of the 1400 people that we surveyed across the UK and the US, it said there was a question that they had to fill in. It was do you have any existing medical conditions that you know are impacted by poor indirect quality? And a third of people said yes, they did.

Francesca: 30:12

And I was like, actually, absenteeism aside, sick building syndrome aside, you've got a third of people and we randomly selected them. It wasn't like, hey, who's got a medical condition that's impacted by air quality coming in and then we'll just get some others. It was a complete random selection. So a third of those people already, I'm guessing, have to know, would really really like to know at least about the air quality in their space because it's impacting their health. And then you get those with a healthy interest that probably make up I don't know another 50%. And then you always have those that don't really care very much, but of the volume of people that you've got just in that random cohort that will either realistically need to know or want to know about indirect quality. There's a huge proportion of them.

Francesca: 30:59

So then it starts to be like, okay, yeah, we can dwell on absenteeism, but as an individual, if I'm sick, I'm sick. I don't really care that it's impacting the business's bottom line, because unless I'm an owner in the business, I'm an employee and I'm sick. So whether I'm sick there's no fault of the company or whether I've just got sick building syndrome, it's by the by. I'm interested if I've got medical conditions impacted by poor indirect quality, or if I just because I can control what I eat and what I drink, I also want to know a bit more about the air that I'm breathing. Now that I know that that's a thing, then I've got a healthy interest in it. So it and this is where it kind of it straddles between the want to know and need to know- yeah.

Francesca: 31:48

And straddles that line.

Simon: 31:49

And right before the pandemic it was almost a badge of honor, wasn't it, dragging yourself into work sick, you know. So, like before the pandemic, people didn't even care if they infected other people, in the office particularly, you know. I'm slightly hopeful that that kind of mentality has improved somewhat. I mean, you still hear it People going God, I've got a right dose. You're like well, what are you doing in there? You work from home three days a week.

Francesca: 32:11

Get away from me.

Simon: 32:12

We could have done without you for another two. Don't worry, you know, go home, you idiot yeah. You know there's a little bit of that.

Simon: 32:19

But you're right, and it's no surprising that you know what is it. One in five people in the UK suffer from some kind of respiratory condition, most of it asthma Like. It's not going to be a surprise. And you know, add on top of that immune response conditions and allergic reaction conditions. There's going to be a whole heap of people that should want to care about indoor air quality. And in fact you know, having a conversation with somebody recently, we were saying there's a good chance. If you've got a business of 100 people, there's probably half a dozen of them have already got an air quality monitor on their desk in the workplace as it is, you know. So this it's coming, whether you like it or not.

Francesca: 33:05

Because I mean, this is, I'm going to say, way before COVID. It wasn't. Way before. It was like 2017. We had an inquiry from someone who said we're going to need an air quality test because someone in this building has come in with their own air quality monitor and we don't think it's accurate. And when we sat down to have a conversation, being very blunt with them, it doesn't matter if the monitor that's being bought in by an employee is accurate or not. They've got data and you haven't. So if you want to disprove that, then fine. But the fact they've bought it in in the first place means that there's probably an issue because they have felt the need to do it. So either they are uncomfortable or they have an interest in knowing more, and you're. It's not the fact that you, as an employer or as a landlord, aren't being transparent about it. You just don't know about it and you should know.

Simon: 34:02

Yeah.

Francesca: 34:03

In reality now.

Simon: 34:04

And then I'm having these conversations with people across sectors, not only workplaces, but housing and education and so on. It's the fact that they're very difficult questions to answer from employees and tenants and customers when you don't have data and they do, and, yeah, it's a choice you have to make at some point. Do you get on the front foot on this and get ahead so that you can answer these questions openly and honestly and transparently and start working towards a good outcome, because the road is running out for anecdotal responses for people? You know, within a few years, the vast majority of our built environment is going to be providing us data of the condition of the space that we're in. That's just a fact.

Francesca: 34:56

Yeah, it is, and I think it's. I mean, in the US it's a more litigious society anyway, but there have been a couple of cases that have either well, most of them have settled outside of court but have been to do with this where someone's come in and gathered their own data around indirect quality and then the employer's been like let's make this go away, because it needs to go away. It would be interesting to know and obviously in lots of these cases everyone's anonymized but it would be good to know whether the employer then did anything off the back of that to address the issue, because it's not just going to be a one off Like, yeah, you got caught out once. What's to stop it happening again? You need to have certain measures in place as risk management. And then also, when you frame it as risk management to a business, they're like oh, all of a sudden, it's more critical because we had a response.

Francesca: 35:49

I wrote a LinkedIn post about this, so if anyone wants to go and see it, I'll link that too. But it just I was. So it was such a visceral response that I had to this email that said that they didn't this one person, senior management at this one company that will remain nameless. Lucky them where someone in senior management said that indirect quality wasn't business critical. So, okay, fine, I was like let me just Google business critical the definition for business critical and it's something like the systems and measures that you need in place for a business to be successful. I was like, okay, cool. So the one word there that's calling out to me is successful. So, yes, you can have core business operations in place and all these sorts of things and the measures that you need to survive, but survival is not being successful. Being successful is working on your workforce, making their, prioritizing their health and wellbeing, because you know you're going to see the feedback from that. Because and it comes back to this 33300, $300 per year per person on payroll you can have a significant impact on business productivity, on business profitability, even if you address that 300 as part of that pyramid.

Francesca: 37:16

So when it came across as not being business critical, I'm like okay. First of all, my reaction was very red mist and then I was like, actually, let me explain to you why it is business critical, because maybe that's just being lost in translation and I appreciate that I'm coming from what looks like a place of bias, because I work in indirect quality. I have vested interest in people being interested in knowing more about indirect quality, but let me explain to you why. For your particular business, I would position this as being business critical, and then would you think it was unreasonable to suggest that this should be part of your strategy going forward with particular regard to wellbeing in the workforce, esg a whole number of different things. And the response to that was oh, okay, helen looked at it in that way before us bring it up at the next board meeting and I was like, yeah, great, okay, and now where are we going to go from that?

Simon: 38:19

And it's amazing how framing, a subtle shift in framing, can all of a sudden it resonates and it can create action.

Simon: 38:28

We probably should explain a little bit, because the second time we've said 3300, that that is a real estate metric.

Simon: 38:38

Originally that was used to describe the spend on a building comes from the States and it's for every $3 you spend on energy you spend 30 on rent and for every 30 you spend on rent you spend 300 on staff costs, remuniation, bonuses, sick leave, all of the stuff that goes with staff.

Simon: 39:02

And it makes a point and it was used to great effect by Joseph Allen in his Healthy Buildings book to describe the IRR, if you like, on investing on indoor air quality that you can work very hard to reduce the energy of the building by 20% and it may have a fraction of a percentage difference on your bottom line half a percent on your bottom line but a reduction in even conservatively with a healthy building 10% improvement in performance across your staff costs will have a double digit impact on your bottom line. So that's what we're talking. We get used to talking about the 3300 rule, but it's like the structure or the foundation for a lot of the framing that we would use when we talk to businesses about why would you invest in indoor air quality and people. I hope I've explained that clearly for people, but it's quite an important premise, isn't it?

Francesca: 40:10

It definitely is, and in some ways it's a shame that you have to put a price on people because you would like to think it's in everyone's best interest. Even if you're a decision maker in a business, it is in your best interest to have good well-being initiatives for yourself. You are a member of that business, so you would like to think that everyone's doing it with employee satisfaction and employee well-being at the heart of everything. But the nature of business means that it's probably going to be driven by some sort of commercial gain. So if that's the foot in the door, then that's the foot in the door. So actually,