Why Indoor Air Quality Matters for Today’s Workplaces: Ep 19

Jennifer Heath 0:14
Hello everyone and welcome thank you so much for joining us today for another edition of the Hybrid Hangout. I’m Jennifer Heath, Director of Product Marketing here at FM:Systems.

Brian Haines 0:24
And I’m Brian Haines, Chief Strategy Officer here at FM:Systems.

Jennifer Heath 0:27
And today is a very special episode, because we, for the first time, have a special guest. We are doing an interview today of JJ Baird from Airthings. JJ, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

JJ Baird 0:41
Yeah. So I’m JJ. I am the VP for our B2B division for Airthings. So we generally have two divisions, one on our consumer side and one that focuses on K through 12 schools and corporate real estate. And I am fortunate enough to have a really awesome team here in the US that helps empower people to breathe better.

Jennifer Heath 1:04
Wonderful. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us how long you’ve been with Airthings. What really gets you excited about your job?

JJ Baird 1:11
So the first thing about me is, if you hear sort of a strange accent, I am South African. I’ve been in the US now for about 10 years, and I actually came from the biometrics industry, so everything to do with fingerprints, facial recognition. I’m sort of everything related to biometrics, and I work for one of the biggest companies in the world when it comes to biometrics. And about two and a half years ago, one of my ex colleagues actually reached out to me and said, you want to do something that makes a difference in the world. You want to actually change your career and change how you think about things and make a difference in people’s lives. And I thought, let’s do it. Let’s try it. Let’s see where this goes. And I’ve been with Airthings now for just over two and a half years, and it’s been an amazing ride. And I really- the thing that gets me excited about this job is our mission, which is to help the world breathe better. So we really try and make a difference in people’s lives, especially for kids in schools and sensitive people in the workplace. And then also, I’m a tech nerd. So I mean, I love the tech that we have, and I love anything techy, anything nerdy, and this whole IOT space really gets me excited about sort of where the industry is going.

Brian Haines 2:32
JJ, I’ve known you, I think, for most of those two and a half years we’ve been we’ve been partners with FM:Systems and Airthings, and now continuing that partnership with Johnson Controls, you know, we’ve known each other a lot through conferences and speaking and you know, really professionally. One thing that I don’t know that much about is who JJ is outside of work, I found out that you like cooking on a smoker before the podcast started. But, but what else do you do to just sort of spice up your life and make it a lot of fun.

JJ Baird 3:02
So as with most people, I’ve got very expensive hobbies that kind of keep me busy. And I think one of the most expensive ones is I’m an AV geek. I think that’s what they call it, or an aviation nerd or an aviation nut, and I have a private pilot’s license, and so I fly the Cessna 172 that is one of my absolute loves in life, is aviation. And I have a whole simulator set up here at home. And I’m a huge simulation fan on the on the flying side as well. Also enjoy boating. And believe it or not, even with my size, I can get up on a surfboard and stay up. And we do the awake surfing here as well. So you know, all kinds of cool sporty things that we do here, and then flying is probably one of the main things that I’m interested in.

Brian Haines 3:58
Very cool. Jen over to you.

Jennifer Heath 4:01
All right, so, of course, everything at Airthings, it’s all about air quality. And we did a survey here at FMS recently, and nearly 62% of respondents said that air quality is a priority for their organization. Is that surprising to you at all? Have you seen this market kind of shift and change in recent years.

JJ Baird 4:23
I don’t think it’s surprising. And I think if you know 2020, was, I think, a hard time for a lot of people, but I think if something good came out of the pandemic was the fact that it really shifted the focus for employers to create spaces that are healthy for their employees, and so air quality has come very much at the forefront in terms of what people think about when they think about going back to the office, and what is going to keep us healthy and what’s going to keep us safe in the office. So I don’t think it’s that much of a surprise, but, I think when we looked 10 years ago, it probably wasn’t as prevalent, and people really didn’t care about it as much. But certainly, and I think the thing that’s driving us now in the future is wildfires that are becoming more and more prevalent every single year, and people know about it because it’s actually in the news and people are talking about it, and this in itself, is also creating a lot of talk about indoor air quality and how we keep people safe, and what we’re doing inside of our buildings to have the air good.

Brian Haines 5:35
You know. JJ, we just launched the opening of our new Raleigh headquarters office about six months ago, and we’ve sort of packed in a lot of technology. We’re also nerds when it comes to technology as a company, and we’ve got sensor technology. And one of the sensors that we’re really highlighting in the office is your Airthings, indoor air quality sensors. And many times I see, you know, our employees walk up to the air sensor and they’re trying to figure it out, or maybe scanning the QR code that we’ve got on the wall so that they can get kind of a dashboard display of what the air quality is in the various spaces throughout the office. Can you talk a little bit about the different air specs, aspects of air quality, and what does it mean for air quality to be good or bad?

JJ Baird 6:21
Yeah. So generally, if we talk about indoor air quality being good or indoor air quality being bad, there’s sort of various aspects associated with them. And I think first and foremost, what we want to make sure is that the space is free of any dangerous gasses or pollutants. Like if we think about things like particulate matter, which is very, very small particles, things like volatile organic compounds or radon, right? We want to first get that baseline out of the way and say, is the air that we’re breathing safe for us to breathe? And there’s various things that the Airthings sensors actually measure to make sure that those levels are actually safe and healthy for people to breathe. And then there’s the second part of indoor air quality, which is the productivity portion. Is how do we create a space that is productive, that’s healthy for people to be in? And that’s sort of your CO2 parameters. So you want to keep CO2 below most people say around 1000 ppm. And if you’ve ever sat in a meeting room where you felt tired, or you kind of get to that point where it’s difficult to listen to the conversation or follow the conversation, that’s usually when the indoor air or when the CO2 levels are starting to get too high and is actually having an impact on our ability. But if we also look at the other side of indoor air quality, it’s a very subjective thing as well, where you look at things like temperature and humidity, and you’ll find that some people in the office like it really cold, and some people like it really hot. And the summer, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that skit. I think it was an SNL skit where they called it women’s winter, which was actually just the summer when the men basically controlled the HVAC unit and made it so cold that everyone had to kind of come with jackets, and that’s sort of the more subjective part of indoor air quality. And then there’s also the environmental part of it, which is looking at things like light and noise. And I think you, Brian did an awesome case study not that long ago. And I know you talk about it frequently as well, where you have those two rooms next to each other, they’re pretty much exactly the same, but the one that has the natural light coming in is the one that people are actually using. So I think when we talk about IAQ and IEQ, it’s very much a holistic picture that we have to look at between sort of the environmental impact, how it makes people feel, the productivity impact, and also the health impact of certain bad gasses and pollutants that could be in the air.

Brian Haines 8:55
You know that’s interesting. That’s the light one is a really good use case. The other one we have our old office, we had a conference room that hardly anyone wanted to use. We stuck your indoor air quality sensor in there before we moved to our new office, and realized that anytime anybody was in that room, CO2 was through the roof. And we went kind of back in time, and we looked we had done a renovation to that space, took a very large conference room and chunk it up into an office in a smaller conference room, and they didn’t fix the HVAC. They didn’t rebalance it so that room was not being conditioned properly, and just was basically, you know, people were just breathing out a lot of CO2, which was, you know, sort of aggregating in that space. It really would suck the energy right out of you. So that’s, that’s interesting. So Jen over to you.

Jennifer Heath 9:42
Yeah, so it’s funny. One of our co-workers, DK, was talking about that conference room in a webcast just recently, and he referred to it as the conference room of doom. The air quality was so bad, and it sucked the energy right out of you. So yeah, that conference room has got a bit of a reputation. So, and I also really appreciate the women’s winter reference. There was a time in my life that I worked at the Texas State Capitol, and it would be so hot it was in the summer, it was so hot outside that all the men, because there were dress codes in the Senate and the House chambers, all the men had to wear suits, and so the AC was blasting all the time, and the women were just frozen solid, because we’re all in, like, summer dresses, and, you know, summer attire, professional attire, but still more summer friendly. And I really realized that such a huge gap in the way we think about dress codes is the men are just burning up and the women are freezing. So I can definitely relate to that skit. Okay, so once organizations start measuring and collecting this data, and Brian gave a good example of, you know, what we found in our own conference room that there was an issue in the HVAC configuration. What are the typical next steps when someone recognizes that they do have an air quality issue? How do they start to implement positive change?

JJ Baird 11:15
So I think you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of where the actual starting point is. The starting point is start measuring right, because if you don’t measure it, you cannot improve it right. I think it’s an old management adage that you cannot have improvement without understanding the baseline first. And so what we always recommend is start with a baseline and start with snapshots right, and start to understand, what does my building do during certain events, like, let’s take a wildfire is one example, but that doesn’t happen as often. Maybe high occupancy days, maybe bad weather days when it’s maybe raining real bad or really cold days, really hot days, baseline your building. Take snapshots of your building and start to understand what your building is actually doing during these particular events. Because once you can start identifying, you know what your building is doing, then you can start saying, okay, let’s try to work on some solutions, and then run some comparisons on the same days where we had the same sort of event. So let’s say it’s a really hot day, the building isn’t able to keep up with the HVAC demands that’s on it. With some of the small changes that we’re implementing, is it actually getting better over time, and this actually helps as a measurement tool. I think the next thing that people start to do is then to use systems like FM:Systems, you know, IWMS systems, smart building platforms, BMS integration. How do we start automating some of these things? I never, ever recommend going from measure to automate. That’s a pipe dream. That that will never work, right? There’s always this layer of understand your data, understand what your building is doing, because before, you don’t know that your automation is probably going to go in the wrong direction as well, because you think this is what’s going to be the cause and effect, right? But that’s not always the case. So it’s very important to understand the building and then start to look at what makes sense in terms of automating, and automating is really split between two main portions. The one portion is throw more air at the problem. And a lot of people think indoor air quality equals, throw more air at the problem. But that’s actually such a small part of the issue. There’s actually a human portion to it as well, which is part of IWMS, create a work order and have someone actually go and have a look and see what could be the problem. We’ve seen so many times that it’s maybe someone that plugged in some sort of an oil diffuser in the office that’s causing some of the issues, right? And now you’re just throwing more air at the problem, and by throwing more air at the problem, you’re throwing more energy at the problem, and you’re making your building less energy efficient. So by taking that automated route is not necessarily the right way to go about that. So sometimes we’ve seen someone has painted over the actual air diffuser where the air comes into a classroom and they’re like, why is CO2 constantly high. If they just pumped more air into the room, it would have just, again, used more energy, but made zero difference in the class. We saw another one where there was VOCs. People were feeling sick. They had headaches. And it was actually the HVAC system that was sending bad air through the entire building. There was a hole in one of the ducts. One of the ducts blew out in their warehouse area where all of the forklifts were, and that forklift gas actually went into those ducts, being sucked in and basically being sent all over the building. And again, throwing more air at the problem would have just made the problem completely worse. And I think if we look at, you know, some other next steps that people can take is use the good press like indoor air quality is good press for you as an organization, right? We’ve seen HR actually use indoor air quality as a way to attract new talent into their organization, saying we care about our employees. I mean, I’m looking at a lot of banks and a lot of corporates, and we work very closely with the Fortune 100 and all of them have some sort of wellness benefits package that they’re offering to their employees. And we’re seeing some people now starting to say, well, indoor air quality should be part of that benefits package and part of that wellness journey that we promote as something that we offer our employees, and it really generates and fosters trust with their employees. So what we see people do is they monitor the air. They kind of keep it quiet for a while. They figure out what the problems are, how to fix it, and once they figured it out, they start to share it with employees. And I think you guys do this at FM:Systems is you share data with your employees, and what does that foster? It fosters communication and trust with your employer, that your employer cares about the indoor air quality and about your health. When you keep it to yourself, you know what employees think? The immediate thing they think is there’s a problem, and they’re monitoring the air because my employer knows there’s an issue in this building. I’m not coming here anymore, right? And we’ve seen that so many times, where people are so scared to share the indoor air quality, but sharing is an important part of that next step. And then I’d also say, you know, enhance your building performance. So by doing these things, by measuring, start to make those steps to make things just a little bit better. And a newer thing, I was at a conference recently where they started to talk about how people reduce their insurance rates by actually implementing indoor air quality so you can actually get higher rental rates if you’re a building owner, but also reduce your insurance rates because you actually have a bit of foresight in terms of what your building is doing. So if you’re building, for example, completely overheats, or there’s a leak, right? And it has really high humidity levels, this will help you pre identify a lot of those issues, and we’ve seen lower insurance rates with customers that have actually implemented IAQ.

Jennifer Heath 17:21
That’s a really interesting side benefit. I hadn’t heard that vocalized before. I did a webcast just yesterday, and we talked about smart building technology, just in a very broad way, and we broke it into sort of three perspectives, and it was planet, places, and people, how facility managers can use different technology to make an impact in these three areas, and air quality was the only concept that was represented in all three perspectives. So it really does have this broad reach. There’s a sustainability component of it, and to your point, making your buildings operate more efficiently. There is the places component of making your place safer, and then that wellness and that trust that you’re building for your employees and with your employees. It’s really just an incredibly powerful concept.

Brian Haines 18:17
Yeah, it’s interesting. JJ, because you were giving some examples of the Canadian wildfires, I was remembering an article I read a few years ago where, when those wildfires were happening, you know, a lot of organizations were struggling to get employees to return to the workplace. You know, the whole hybrid workplace dilemma, and many of them continue this. There was a large architecture firm in New York City that was using indoor air quality data to attract their employees into the office. Because they were telling them that the air quality in the office was safer than their air quality in their homes. They were monitoring it with indoor air quality equipment, which was pretty interesting and a driver. It’s interesting, I think as humans, often, you know, we question what we can’t see. You’ve got wildfires and smoke. It’s really apparent that the air is going to be bad. Also, you’ve got things like smog or air pollution over large cities. You’re going driving into a city, you just kind of see the dingy air. You know that the air is not going to be bad. How are you using the indoor air quality data, presenting it to occupants in ways that show them, that allow them to be able to see the proof? You know, in an environment where the air doesn’t look bad, I’m in my office, it looks fine, but maybe I don’t feel good. Maybe, maybe there’s a lot of other aspects as well. It’s not just the air quality itself, but the light but the noise level. How are you presenting that data?

JJ Baird 19:45
So the first thing that’s interesting about indoor air quality data is, if you have a normal sized building, you could be faced with millions of data points that’s being thrown at you every single day, right? And it’s. Very, very difficult to make sense of millions of data points. So, and I kind of love this question about, How do we actually present it? So our view on it is, if it’s good, there’s nothing really that we need to bring your attention to. So we have two ways of doing this. The first way is we do something called time over threshold. So what we will do is for a particular space, so you have the building within the building, you’ve got floors. Within those floors, you’ve got spaces. One space can have one sensor. It could have multiple sensors, right? And within that space, we want to understand for how much time has that space been over a particular threshold. And the threshold is either set by some sort of standard that the customer is subscribed to. So let’s take, Well, is a good example. Reset that Well led. I think there’s quite a number of them out there, but each one of them have a slightly differing opinion about what that exact correct threshold level should be, and then we try and color code it for customers and say, this is in the danger zone. This is in the red zone, and this is how much time we’ve actually seen your building performing outside of that zone. And by starting to measure by exception and understanding by exception, it gives us a good insight of where we need to focus and what parts of our building and even which buildings we need to focus on when it comes to budgeting and looking at how we do improvements within our building over the next year, because the spaces that have the longest amount of time the highest impact is going to give you the best rate of return or return on investment for every dollar that you’re going to spend, because that’s the worst places that people are facing, the particular issues.

Jennifer Heath 21:52
So JJ, air quality is, as we talked about, has become so much more prominent since the pandemic. And I think right now, a lot of people are really excited about, you know, the possibilities of being able to offer that to employees, to talk about it from an HR perspective, a wellness perspective. But the reality is, this isn’t going to be an optional nice to have technology for probably very much longer. I think there are already movements towards compliance and regulations and industry standards. Where are we today in terms of regulations and requirements, and where do you see that going?

JJ Baird 22:32
So, as I mentioned in the beginning of this call, you know, I’m South African originally, and I moved to the US, and I absolutely love it here. I you know, I’ve got my flag and I’ve got the whole shebang, but the one thing that we really don’t do that well is the regulatory side for indoor air quality. Europe is far ahead of the US right now when it comes to IAQ regulations, and they’ve really done a good job at prioritizing kids in schools, because there’s a very clear link between poor indoor air quality and poor test scores and vice versa, right? There are some states in the US that are doing a really good job now. So if we look at California as part of what they’re doing with their health shape program, there’s some really good movement and some really good regulation and guidelines that schools should be following and certain levels to keep things below, to ensure healthy and happy kids. We’re also seeing a good movement on the government side. So the government is starting to say, well, there are some regulations for government buildings in New Jersey. There’s some regulations now for all government buildings, and they have to maintain certain standards. But I think we have some really good organizations here. So people like ASHRAE, people like OSHA, the ANSI organization, the American National Standards Institute, they’re all working towards creating that one standard and pushing that so that it becomes something that becomes less optional, as you put it for building so, you know, we have people fighting the right fight. I think it’s going to become more and more ubiquitous. I think probably before we’re going to see it purely from a regulation perspective. I think the fact that we’re seeing major growth in the consumer segment for IAQ tells us that employees will start to demand it, so I think it’s more going to be a pull than a push at the end of the day. I think regulations will catch up, but we’ll likely see the one before the other. And so for right now, I think the other exciting one that I just thought about was last I think it was last year or the year before the President had this whole healthy air challenge or clean air challenge. I don’t know if you guys recall where they went out and did this challenge for buildings and so at least it is visible at that level, and people are starting to talk about it. But I think we’ll see how much time this is going to take for regulations to 100% catch up.

Brian Haines 25:05
JJ, you’re talking about compliance and regulatory requirements. When you’re talking to facilities management professionals. What are the other big hit items that you hit on in terms of, you know, how is this going to provide value to their facilities operations?

JJ Baird 25:20
So my first discussion that I have with a Facility Manager is, start monitoring, even if you don’t plan on using the data today, and there’s nothing that you plan on doing it you, believe me, you are going to find use in the data eventually. So step one, start monitoring right. Step two is now you’re going to start to see how your building is performing, how your building is performing against certain events, and this is going to help you prioritize how you’re doing budgeting. So I think I mentioned this in a point before, but I think it’s very difficult for us and for facility managers to say, I’ve got a budget of X how do I actually split this pie, and where do I get the best rate of return? And so by understanding where the worst performing parts of my building are and what I can do to improve my building, it really makes things a lot easier for facility managers. It also helps them understand if the things that they’re doing actually has a positive impact or not. So we had a wildfire webinar not too long ago, and we talked about, sort of, what is the packet that we wanted to give facility managers in terms of managing their building? And so, you know, the HVAC system is one component of it, but there’s so much more that goes into it like maybe there’s some localized air purifiers. How do they actually seal the building? Should they be trying to find where the building is actually leaking? Should they be finding the areas? What is the communication strategy that the organization has when really bad air quality is in the area and the building is not able to cope? Do they have a plan? You know, what is the actual documented plan for some of these events and some of these things happening, and if they don’t monitor it, they just don’t know. So I think the and the other last thing for facility managers is, I’m sure they get complaints all day, right? They’re like, someone says, Oh, I’m not feeling great. I want to go home. The air in here is really bad. And 9 times out of 10 the air is actually fine. And this actually puts the data in your hands. It gives you the control as the facility manager, because you can go back and use the data as part of your response mechanism and say, here’s the data. This is what’s going on in that room during that time. This is the temperature. This is the CO2. This is the humidity. It’s actually really nice in there. So it kind of puts the power back to the facility manager, because they control the data. And so as I talked about earlier, what we’re seeing is consumers are getting more and more savvy when it comes to indoor air quality. Consumers are buying sometimes these cheap sensors. They take it back to them with them to work, and then if the facility manager is not monitoring the air in the spaces that they’re in, they have nothing to actually talk against the particular point that’s being made.

Jennifer Heath 28:23
So my last question for you JJ, you’ve actually already answered my final question for you was, what is the first step for anyone that is interested in better managing their air quality? And it is simply to start collecting the data, right? You always have to establish that baseline, and we talk about that in terms of all of our different solutions and different business challenges that we help people work through. Step one is always start collecting the data. Just pick one area where you know you need to make improvements and start building off that baseline.

JJ Baird 28:59
I think, if I can leave you with this thought, we take 22,000 breaths a day, that is about the volume of a swimming pool of air every single day that goes into our lungs. We care about what we eat, we care about how much exercise we get. But by far, volume wise, the thing that we take into our bodies is air, and we should really care a lot more about it, because we cannot see it a lot of times. We cannot smell it, we can’t taste it. Sometimes you can, if there’s really, really bad shirt. I mean, I’ve tasted air before. I’m sure we’ve all been there, right? But the thing is that generally, very bad air and things that can cause really bad issues in terms of our health and our productivity are things that we cannot sense. So understanding it and measuring it is the first step. And I always say, start small. Don’t try. And boil the ocean on day one. Don’t try and go from measure to automate in day one, right? Just start small. Make small changes, make minor adaptations, and understand how those adaptations are making any difference. And I think it just talks to the point of make sure you have a plan like use it towards that plan. Is it part of your documented plan of how you’re moving forward within your building, how you’re making your employees safer, more productive, healthier, but also reducing your energy consumption and understanding your building’s performance?

Brian Haines 30:38
JJ, I thought you were going to say call FM:Systems and order some Airthings sensors. But your answer was pretty good, too.

JJ Baird 30:44
I like that better. Scrap everything I just said, that’s better.

Jennifer Heath 30:52
Well, this has been great JJ. We have so enjoyed having you on today. Thank you so much for joining us, and we will certainly do this again sometime,

JJ Baird 31:03
This was awesome. Thank you.

Jennifer Heath 31:04
All right. Well, thank you so much to everyone who joined us, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.

Brian Haines 31:10
Thank you, JJ. Thanks everyone.

JJ Baird 31:12
Bye.