Health and wellbeing in Swedish office buildings : A study on WELL Building Standard, Swedish legislation and Miljöbyggnad

Sammanfattning: Environmental certification systems has, apart from improving the environment, contributed to buildings with a better indoor air quality. The realization of this has led to the next focus in the built environment, building for occupant health and wellbeing. It is recognized that if buildings are designed with the occupant health and wellbeing at center, it increases employee productivity and reduce absenteeism, which in turn yields economic benefits for a business. This thesis project is set out to investigate how building for occupant health and wellbeing can be done in Swedish office buildings. The project is partly based on the relatively new WELL Building Standard, a tool for certifying, measuring and monitoring the functions of a building in terms of health and wellbeing. The largest part of the project is the analysis, where WELL Building Standard is compared to Swedish legislation as well as the Swedish environmental certification system Miljöbyggnad. A literature study is also included in order to see how the health situation looks like in Sweden, and what aspects are the most important to highlight in the scope of this thesis.  The thesis project is a pilot study of the health and wellbeing in Swedish offices and it shows that Swedish legislation includes a large number of issues set forth in WELL Building Standard. In some cases, Swedish legislation goes quite a bit further than WELL and in some cases Swedish projects can gather inspiration from WELL in order to build even healthier. Miljöbyggnad also fulfills some of the subjects presented in WELL.  As WELL Building Standard is a very extensive system, not all parts of it could be included in the analysis of this project. There are a lot of further research that needs to be conducted before drawing too general conclusions on how Swedish projects perform on the aspects of health and wellbeing. Generally, WELL is a useful system if a project intends to be as healthy as can be, even though the project does not use it to be certified. The system provides the building owners with arguments they can use to communicate how the building may benefit health and wellbeing to the tenants, as WELL puts the human at center rather than the building.