A New Website, and a New Vision for WELL

Welcome to the future of WELL. Today we launch our spectacular new website and with it a new vision for WELL that is informed by each of you, our core users and advocates who have helped us advance the idea that our buildings and communities can be a powerful tool to enhance our health and well-being.

As active and engaged partners in the development and adoption of the first market version of WELL, you have been instrumental in helping us identify what we need to do to scale rapidly and to find ways to simplify every step of the WELL Certification process.

Some things we have been able to act on immediately through our alternative adherence path (AAP) process. Last month, we released a list of new AAPs, and more recently added four new AAPs that will be especially useful to our global users. We’ll continue to release our AAPs through our quarterly addenda process going forward so we can continue to make ongoing improvements.

We’ll also streamline internal certification processes to ease the flow of communications between project teams, IWBI and GBCI. We’re advancing an end-to-end review of our requirements to make sure we ask for only what we need and that the “hand-offs” are seamless.

We’ve released credit “crosswalks” with Green Star and BREEAM, and will soon release them for LEED and Living Building Challenge, all designed to help project teams deliver more easily on both fronts.

As of today, we are announcing an “all projects in” strategy so our customers won’t have to wait for us to deliver a new adaptation of the standard to accommodate their building type. Project teams who are interested in pursuing WELL Certification for a building type that today does not align with one of our current project types or pilot programs can fill out our new assessment tool designed to help project teams determine their readiness for WELL Certification. Project teams review each WELL feature and evaluate its applicability to their project. Once this preliminary evaluation is submitted, IWBI Technical Solutions will work with the project team to solution potential challenges and determine the best path for the project to achieve WELL Certification.

We’re also going to give the market more transparency to what makes up our pricing, underscoring the value of WELL as we develop new coaching options, and begin offering WELL education sessions and resources to assist with educating and engaging staff and/or residents about the benefits of a WELL Certified project.

We’re already working on the next version of the building standard, to be released in late 2017. It will streamline how project teams identify features they can use to reach the various levels of WELL Certification across all building types.

We’re also focused on solidifying our market growth and one of the key ways is to enhance our support for WELL APs. Through our new education portal, WELL APs will have at their fingertips an ever-expanding catalogue of educational offerings, including world-class exam prep materials and a rich variety of in-person and online courses.

We’ll be standing up formal working groups of core users and experts around building types, so input about the building standard, the registration and certification process, education and information needs can be captured and acted on more quickly and in partnership with our customers and champions.

We’re also increasing our market-based support, welcoming team members in China, Australia and the UK, as well as adding numerous opportunities to engage with our teams in person and online.

And we want to make our presence known in every way possible. One way is through strong partnerships with leading organizations, such as ASID, USGBC, GBCA and BRE, Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, and a host of others.

We’re going to be ramping up our case studies to take a more specific focus on the cost efficiencies and high returns that WELL delivers, starting with the excellent case study information we’re getting from Structure Tone, which certified this week – the first WELL Certified project in New York.

And we’ll continue to look for big stage presences at events across the globe, not just our traditional buildings-industry base, but in health and human resources as well.

I hope you’ll bookmark wellcertified.com and refer to it often as your one-stop resource - we’ll be adding new information, new features and new education sessions and tools in real time. Whether you’re looking for a general overview to share with a client, a case study to reinforce a strategy, or simply a community where you can ask questions and share experiences, we’ll look forward to seeing you here.

Each day brings new opportunities to put humans at the center of our work. I’m more convinced than ever that the WELL Building Standard is real estate’s next great opportunity to shape a better world. And we’re looking forward to going there together.