WLP+ (Whole Life Performance Plus)

542b3504-30d1-478e-a29a-a5c049dc1db1

Closed

EPSRC
EPSRC
EPSRC
EPSRC
EPSRC

£750,085

Feb. 1, 2016

Jan. 31, 2019

Studies from academic literature have demonstrated that staff productivity can be increased by up to 20% by improving
Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) such as temperature control, lighting and indoor air quality. The Whole Life
Performance Plus (WLP+) project will deliver a proven methodology for defining and measuring worker productivity, a
statistically proven model of IEQ for improving worker productivity, a means of identifying poor office environments, a
methodology for reconfiguring poor office environments to make them more productive and a control system for optimising
IEQ in offices in real time. Our approach will also allow performance data from many buildings to be collected from our
control system which will sit over and integrate with existing building management and control systems.

The goal of the WLP+ project consortium is to enable commercial building owners to increase staff productivity by 10%
while reducing energy use by 30%; targets that we believe are achievable and realistic, based on existing evidence. Since
expenditure on staff is at least 40 times higher than expenditure on energy, this offers a strong business case for the WLP+
user. The WLP+ project will develop and demonstrate empirically a link between IEQ and staff productivity in contact (call)
centres and professional business services buildings where large volumes of staff utilisation, productivity and absenteeism
data are available. The project will then resolve how the IEQ model can be used to monitor and control building
management and other building control systems to deliver these optimised IEQ conditions over the course of a working day
for minimum energy input. The WLP+ software solution will dynamically control commercial buildings and identify
interventions that are required for clients to optimise their working environments and minimise their building energy use.

Our target market consists of three customers: end user owners, organisations that own and use their buildings, landlords
& developers, who build, manage and rent space to tenants and tenants who rent and use space from landlords. Each
market segment is different because of their economic drivers and ability to change or reconfigure their space.
The outcome of the project will be the creation of commercial software tool and consultancy offering, creating a business
for improving staff productivity.
The project consortium is led by an SME (LCMB), working in partnership with a major building occupier/owners (Kings
College and clients of Emcor FM), dissemination partners (British Council for Offices and Constructing Excellence), and a
University (Oxford Brookes University (OBU)). The project team brings together highly qualified and specialised individuals
with progressive end users to combine cutting edge academic knowledge, data management skills and business
intelligence that goes beyond the benefits each individual partner could achieve in isolation.

The project will include seven work packages (WPs):
- WP1: Project management and reporting
- WP2: Technical definition of the IEQ parameters, staff productivity and energy metrics using available datasets
- WP3: Baseline data capture on IEQ, productivity and energy use.
- WP4: Deploy improvement interventions to modify IEQ for enhancing productivity and reducing energy use in the test-bed
are.
- WP5: Software development of WLP+ protocol interface for deployment in building control and management systems of
future projects.
- WP6: Testing, validation and refinement of software tool by deploying in a case study commercial office building.
- WP7: Dissemination and knowledge exchange.

Potential Impact:
There are a number of different users and beneficiaries of the outputs of this research. We will ensure effective
engagement with each group as follows:
LANDLORDS AND OWNER-OCCUPIERS OF COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS will benefit from buildings with improved
capability to monitor and fine tune the indoor environment to increase productivity and reduce energy use. When this can
be demonstrated, it can become a valuable selling point for landlords, when marketing space for lease or sale.
OFFICE BASED BUSINESS (and THEIR OCCUPANTS): to identify one office based business the WLP+ project is
focussing on, there are approximately 166,000 contact centres companies across Europe. Employees of office based
businesses will directly benefit from more comfortable and enjoyable work places. The business owners are expected to
increase profitability from increased productivity.
BUILDING INDUSTRY: beneficiaries in the building industry include architects, designers, engineers, and building controls
suppliers. All of the above would benefit from the results regarding design and construction of buildings with better spatial
configurations which promote greater health, wellbeing and productivity, including integration of environmental controls
which respond to user needs.

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT, ITS AGENCIES and NON-GOVERNMENT AGENCIES: Government is expected to use WLP+
outputs to inform policy, impact assessments, and analyse industry's response to change. The Department for Work and
Pensions and the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) will likely benefit from data collected and findings
regarding health and wellbeing of individuals working in office environments. As an example, the Department for Work and
Pensions has developed a tool to help employers calculate costs of poor employee health to their organisation and create a
business case for taking action. This tool and the background information used to develop it are expected to be improved
by the findings of WLP+.
ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH COMMUNITIES: We propose to share research results within the research community
through conferences and journal papers in the usual way. Oxford Brookes University (OBU) and British Council for Offices
would present the findings at relevant international academic conferences (PLEA 2016, Sustainable Building 2017),
industry events (Retroexpo, Ecobuild, CIBSE Research Symposium), and policy workshops (with DECC and DCLG).
LCMB team would disseminate the project outcomes through our memberships and task group work within Constructing
Excellence and BIFM. Publications will be made through academic journal articles and policy-relevant papers and an endof-
project workshop will be organised to communicate the findings to a wider audience. More detail is provided in
'Academic Beneficiaries'. For OBU specifically, the project would expand knowledge base into productivity metrics. IUK
funding will also allow research work to be demonstrated in real case study buildings owned and operated by King College
and clients of Emcor FM.

BROADER DISSEMINATION: In addition to those dissemination efforts detailed above, we will ensure an 'external'
presence throughout via press releases, web presence and promotion of the project by project partners and attendance of
conferences. The project team will actively consult the Modern Built Environment: Knowledge Transfer Network on
appropriate dissemination routes for different built environment audiences. Although our work will be disseminated
throughout the project, a workshop will be held at the end of the project to communicate the findings to a wider audience.