25 November 2015 The national Association for Sustainable Building Support organized the first edition of the conference on 21st century offices. The conference focused on measurable profits from investing in the quality of the indoor environment in office buildings. The conference was attended by leading commercial real estate companies, such as APA Wojciechowski, Cushman & Wakefield, Drzewiecki Tomaszek & Partners, Ecophon/Saint-Gobain, Go4Energy, Halton, JLL, Kinnarps, OKRE Development, Skanska Property Poland, Swegon, Xplan.
During the conference, OSWBZ President Tomasz Augustyniak presented the new Green Building Standard certification system, which is in line with the trends of sustainable construction. The GBS certificate promotes issues important from the tenant's point of view concerning the quality of the internal environment.
The main topics discussed during the meeting were:
- productivity of work and quality of the internal environment in modern office buildings
- the quality of the indoor environment and its importance for the tenant. What a tenant really expects from a modern office. New trends in adaptation of office space.
- the importance of the quality of the internal environment for LEED/BREEAM certification, or how to gain additional points
- Do modern offices attract talent?
From a number of lectures it emerged that the attention to the quality of the internal environment in the BREEAM and LEED certification systems is only the beginning of the road that the commercial real estate industry has to take to turn to the tenant. However, the implementation of solutions is not everything, it is also necessary to educate the lessee/user in order to make the best use of the facilities offered by the developer/investor.
The conference participants had the opportunity to fill in a survey on the productivity of work and the working environment. From both the surveys, lectures and debates a clear conclusion emerges - investing in the comfort of employees/tenants is and will be profitable.
This year's edition of the conference is only the beginning of the cycle. According to the organizer, the future edition is to be strongly focused on office space tenants. "We would like tenants to express themselves what is most important to them and what allows them to perform their professional duties more productively. In fact, tenants' expectations should be a kind of a set of guidelines for investors, developers and architects," says Tomasz Augustyniak, the president of the Association.
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