AutomatedBuildings.com Editorial

I am in awe of the power bestowed upon us and our potential as an industry to have a significant impact on the wellness and overall satisfaction of the occupants of our automated, connected, smart, living, buildings. Increasing satisfaction and wellness by engagement means creating a dialog path that flows both ways and is a giant first step for our industry's entry into the productivity puzzle and its lucrative paybacks.

Satisfaction & Wellness are components of productivity. These new measured variables require a considerable change in thinking and attitudes towards maintaining buildings and assets, including the budgets to support, and the resources to execute. The impact on the total "Qualitative and Quantitative" value of productivity of the people sharing the space via hoteling of our built environment drives new metrics. In many discussions at AHRExpo Vegas as to how we might use social media to achieve occupant engagement, it was noted that we are sensitive to listening to social media but seldom use its powerful broadcasting as a method of engagement. As an industry, we need to work on evolving these social connections, which have the ability to tell the occupants of our maintained environments what we have already done for their satisfaction and wellness thus opening dialog to engaging each of them in our equation. We need to to strive to better understand "Qualitative" the measurement of the quality of something rather than its quantity in degrees or lumens.

Your Homework for IoT Day April 9 Share your thoughts with the world on how IoT will help engage wellbeing, satisfaction, productivity, in buildings.

I was very pleased with the great response from this article, Human beings as part of the Internet of Things published in the connected contractor magazine. This allows us as an industry to get our message out to a larger crowd.

The Power of People, An Industry Discussion "youtube link here."
At AHRExpo Vegas Industry thought leaders in this panel discussion provided their views on productivity, occupant engagement, and comfort. If we consider energy as the only justification, then we are missing the bigger issue – the impact of the built environment, and its dynamic interaction with the people. This was our fifth annual Connection Community Collaboratory.

There is a great discussion about the ethics of what we are doing, which came from the crowd and is part way through this video. That was not on anyone's agenda, but the panel did an excellent job of opening dialog. I had not thought much about the ethics of the power of the people puzzle. Interesting. In the video, Brad points out the potential to widen the social justice gap with sociometric technologies. Likely the subject of another discussion.

Jacob Moreno defined sociometry as "the inquiry into the evolution and organization of groups and the position of individuals within them." He goes on to write "As the ...science of group organization, it attacks the problem not from the outer structure of the group, the group surface, but from the inner structure.

This article speaks well to our theme, Wellness Keeping employees in an office setting healthy and well is critically important, and smart buildings are making it easier to achieve than ever. - The Comfy Team

Satisfaction will likely be much harder to define, but digital mindfulness is likely to be part of it.

Mindfulness is not incomprehensible, but just another incredible change in our future in this fun poke, I note,"We have been here before The History of Awful Mated Buildings and the climb over the Digital Divide and now with a journey to "Digitalmindfulness."

I had not seen as clearly, as I do now how we all become part of the Digital Distraction in achieving wellness in our buildings.

While the smart building revolution is well underway, McHale suggests we still need a fundamental change in thinking in order to turn smart buildings into an effective solution to our urban challenges. There is little use in building technology-rich, smart buildings if their occupants do not know how to use them. Instead, the smartness of a building should be judged on how well it is understood by its occupants;“we need to build buildings based on outcomes, not output,”

People are looking for work environments that embrace technology to enable seamless, collaborative, healthy and comfortable working experiences.

Productivity Posted by The Comfy Team Over two-thirds of the U.S. workforce find themselves disengaged from their work, according to Gensler's workplace surveys. Across the last decade, workplace stress has risen—with more workers struggling to focus and work effectively. Most scholarly research agrees that the key workplace design factors impacting the performance of knowledge workers include noise, lighting, temperature, and spatial arrangements. Are we experiencing a productivity crisis? Fortunately, smart building tech offers solutions by way of greater customization—fine tuning work environments to the needs of employees and occupants. Let's investigate some of those factors.

I love Brad's take this month, wait a minute, maybe I am part of the problem, we do not need to talk about change we need to be the change. Great wisdom and example.

If You Spec It, They Will Come Out of date and over spec’d designs are failing to address the major problems of most control systems. - Brad White, P.Eng, MASc, Principal, SES Consulting Inc.

Many Fear Automation Will Wipe Out Jobs. But Automating Buildings Will Be a Jobs Creator - As more buildings begin to demand and pay for HVAC maintenance, there could be growth in the overall number of staff to support these new customers, even if automation and technology play a role in the delivery of the outcomes. Job growth could occur even if individual buildings do not grow their existing facility management, teams.

As always this new issue is a collection of great articles, columns, reviews, new products, interviews and of course the steady stream of news depicting our rapid evolution and journey to Engaging Satisfaction & Wellness.

Welcome our newest sponsor: Analytika Analytika from Cimetrics enables BACnet based whole building analytics, providing building owners and managers tangible insights on the performance of their facilities and assets - from energy efficiency to regulatory compliance and improved tenant comfort.

Tell all our sponsors you saw their ads on the AutomatedBuildings.com web-site and thank them for supporting your free access to evolving Automated Building Industry information. Click on their ads and view their valuable products and services. Please review all Our Sponsors.

The news just keeps flowing thru our web-site, and RSS feeds daily, and of course the only way to find what you are looking for in the vast quantity of information on our site is with our site search engine http://www.automatedbuildings.com/search/sitesearch.htm

As always lots of new products, plus be sure to check our event calendar to see the number of events we have in our future.

AutomatedBuildings.com's interest is growing; we now get over 4760 average daily visits to our website. I believe this is a combination of stronger social media connections, our shift in focus to engaging the people, plus a merging our AutomatedBuildings community with IoT and Lighting communities.

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