A landmark study conducted by Malvern-based Saint-Gobain has revealed ways to unleash employee potential through comfort, according to a report in Architect magazine.

The North American Headquarters Occupant Comfort Study was done in partnership with researchers from the University of Oregon’s High Performance Environments Lab. It began when one of the world’s largest building materials companies decided to relocate its headquarters from Valley Forge to a new 277,000-square-foot facility in Malvern three years ago.

This gave Saint-Gobain the perfect opportunity to measure the responses of groups of employees performing identical tasks in two significantly different workspaces.

[uam_ad id=”72116″]

The new headquarters includes more than 60 Saint-Gobain sustainable building materials that provide thermal, visual, and acoustical comfort and improved indoor air quality. Meanwhile, its “living laboratory” measured the transformative power of multi-comfort design, and provided pointers on how to best utilize it.

The company also uses the 85-15 rule.

“Fifteen percent of a company’s cost is building overhead,” said Lucas Hamilton, Saint-Gobain’s building science applications manager. “Eighty-five percent are the soft costs, the employees. If you can lift personal performance even five percent through a Multi-Comfort approach, company productivity skyrockets.”

Read more about Saint-Gobain’s study in Architect magazine here.

[uam_ad id=”73623″]