Rachel Gutter, IWBI

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Rachel of IWBI. Rachel, thanks so much for joining us today.

Rachel Gutter: Thanks for having me.

SSR: I’m so excited. Not many people know, or maybe people know now, but Emerald, our parent company has partnered with the International WELL Building Institute and Rachel and her team to start working on a concept called the WELL Conference. So, that’s really exciting for us.

RG: It is, and it’s been really neat to explore the dimensions of that partnership, requiring us to be a little bit more creative and think outside of the box. But in a way that was already our mandate for a WELL Conference is to really revision what a conference looks like in this day and age, and the notion that you could leave a conference healthier than when you arrived. So, I feel like we already have that as our challenge and as our mandate, and now, we just had some additional parameters to consider.

SSR: So, speaking of which, how are you dealing amidst COVID-19 and our new fun reality that we’re all dealing with?

RG: All things considered, pretty okay. I think it’s incredibly challenging, but also incredibly rewarding to be leading an organization in this very moment, especially an organization that has so much to offer in this moment. I think what we keep coming back to on the team at IWBI is just how much of a gift it feels like right now to be able to be contributing and focusing our work on the one thing that’s taking up all of the time and attention in our heads anyway. So, to take the fears and the anxieties that everyone is really struggling with right now. But then, translating that into action and into solutions just feels really energizing and really powerful.

In my personal life, I’m healthy and safe, and the people that I love are healthy and safe for now as well. So, I count my blessings there every day, but it really does feel like a little bit of mourning everything. On Sundays, I just feel so sad and I feel a lot of despair and fear, and then on other days, I feel so hopeful and so inspired by so many things that I’m seeing. I think part of surviving and even thriving in this moment is about riding that wave. It’s about giving into the ups and downs of all of this, because I think if we’re not experiencing them, we’re not really connecting to the lessons that COVID-19 has to teach us.

SSR: Right. No, that’s such a good point. I feel like IWBI and all the work that you’re doing will have such a great role in how we in the design and the building community come out of this on the other side in a more effective and thoughtful way.

RG: I think never again does anybody question whether the building or whether the space that you’re in has an impact on your health and wellbeing. That in and of itself is a profound leap for us all to be making right now in terms of the market transformation mission that IWBI is in service to.

SSR: Exactly. So, let’s go back before we go forward and delve more into this. Where did you grow up? And growing up, were you in a house where the environment or social responsibility—all these things that define what you’re doing and what your career has embraced—were those part of your childhood and part of growing up?

RG: Well, I’ll dimensionalize that and say that the 10 years of my career before I came to IWBI, I was acting as the founding director of the Center for Green Schools at the US Green Building Council. It turns out that I’m born of an environmental lawyer, who got his start at the EPA right around the time when the EPA was started back in the ’70s and a teacher, an educator in the public-school system. So, I like to joke that my green apple didn’t fall far from the tree. My parents hate waste.

They were both raised by blue-collar parents who grew up during the Depression, so every piece of foil was saved. My father couldn’t stand the idea of a piece of chicken being left on one of our plates. So, I definitely think that there was an environmental approach to my upbringing, but I’m not sure we ever labeled it that way. I think it was mostly just the ethos that my parents carried forward. It wasn’t such a popular thing to self-declare as an environmentalist. But when I look back, I think about a lot of those different dimensions about all of the things that I was growing with my mother in the garden. Or, about all of the DIY nation stuff that was going inside of our house. But just generally, my parent’s commitment to not living within a footprint that’s outsized. I think they’re really cognizant of that, and that was born and bred into my sister and I.

SSR: That’s amazing. They were ahead of their time.

RG: Yeah, yeah. Also, we’re covering hippies, or something like that. So, native from that perspective, too. Do unto the earth as you would want the earth to do to you, which is a nice motto these days.

SSR: Exactly. Speaking of the built environment, was there any sort of design or love of architecture growing up as well, or early memories of that?

RG: Absolutely. I shudder to think about some of my earliest memories of the DIY projects in my house, specifically being 3 years old and my parents refinishing the floors. I don’t think we knew what we know now about particulate matter. So, I shudder to think about whatever that did to my lungs. My parents were constantly having a design project. They purchased a dilapidated Victorian house outside of DC, and restored it lovingly and painstakingly bit by bit. So, some of my favorite memories with my mom are designing and redesigning my bedrooms.

As I grew up as a child, we would spend hours at G Street Fabric picking out the perfect material for the pillowcases she was going to sew, or hours at the wallpaper store just paging through the borders and the wallpapers, because this was like a full on ’80s bedroom that we’re talking about. I grew up sharing that love of design, specifically interiors with my mom, helping her to stencil all of the borders in our Victorian house and stuff like that. But looking back, I also feel like I almost have always had a kind of allergy to bad design.

It physically makes me feel bad when I’m sitting in a space that’s like overly cluttered or has too much stimuli. From a very young age my room has been like my sacred space—not my home—my sacred space. So, even when I went to college, I would spend the first 48 hours. I wouldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t go out. I would do wall-to-wall carpeting. I would put all of the perfect storage in and hang all my pictures, and it’s like, ‘I can’t move until I get that stuff done.’ So, I definitely think that the design is deep rooted inside of me. I wasn’t right for being a designer. I don’t think I’m not talented but being able to work in design has been tremendous and being able to apply my best talents to helping design move forward is a real gift in my career, I think.

SSR: Amazing. What did you end up going to school for? What did you study at school?

RG: Renaissance Literature.

SSR: Obviously.

RG: So, it has lots to do with what I do today, I know. It still seems like a kind of funky choice, but I will say that the one thing that I find as a manager, and now, as a leader of an organization is that, the one thing that you can’t teach past a certain age is how to be a good writer. So, I’m very glad to have that foundation and feel like I got really lucky stepping into a white space. When green design was on the rise that allowed me to almost overnight carve out a position as like, ‘one of the world’s most renowned experts on the topic of green schools.’ Because there were like 10 of us. So, I think if I were arriving at USGBC today with the credentials I had, they probably wouldn’t even give me an interview. But it really is all about timing, and for me, the topic of green design was so central to what I cared about and what I was passionate about. I built up the résumé around me to be able to enter into the field. I actually started in interior design, and you run ICFF, and that was one of my most important informative experiences on the road to IWBI today. My first trip to ICFF totally blew my mind.

I just got so into the different materials, and I’m just thinking about product innovation and the intersection of that with sustainability. Then, the second conference that I went to for this interior design firm I was working at was Green Build in Denver. Then, the rest is really history. I threw my bags down in the first session on green schools, called my parents, left a message on the answering machine and said, ‘You can stop panicking. I know what I want to do with the rest of my life, and that English degree that we’re all wondering about, I’ll put good use to.’

SSR: That’s awesome. So, was your first job out of school then the interior design job?

RG: No. I wandered a bunch and all through college, and in fact, a good chunk of my high school career, I was a private tutor. I taught religious school on the weekends and figure skating; I ran community figure-skating programs. So, I cobbled together this collection of jobs right after school, because most of the stuff on the weekdays was tutoring school-age children, I could sleep in as long as I want. I did like nine kickboxing classes a week, and I was making what I thought at that time was a lot of money, like $50 an hour or something like that. I didn’t roll into work until like 2:30 p.m.

So, I thought that I had it made, but meanwhile, my parents are sending me books like, How to Overcome Your Quarter-Life Crisis, and What to Do When You Don’t Know to Do. So, it began a wandering path for me of really trying to sense into what sat at the intersection of what I was really good at and what I was really passionate about. I’m really grateful that I had that opportunity to guess and check like I did a little stint in journalism, and I worked on some curriculum development projects. I just hit it off with a woman who ran an interior design and architecture firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Within a few weeks, I went from being an intern to being her design director. So, what was supposed to be a couple of months in between cross-country moves ended up being over a year of immersive experience in design that, again, when I look back all these disparate experiences, at that time, I didn’t understand how much they would serve me—how much that knowledge, how much those skills—would serve me in a career that I certainly couldn’t see the trajectory of back then.

SSR: Right. When was it that green design really hit you? Was it at Green Build, or had there been inklings before that?

RG: Yeah, well, it was one of my responsibilities at the interior design firm to really build out our library as sustainable materials. In Albuquerque, that instinct is literally native. As in, when you look at the architecture or having spent a lot of time on the pueblos growing up, you see that reverence and that harmony that exist between the natural environment and the physical environment, the adobe, the stucco. You can barely tell where a manmade form ends, and a natural form begins. So, I felt like doing that work in New Mexico, it was a place where there was already a kind of elevated consciousness around green materials.

That’s really embedded in the culture of that state but also just in the Native American community that has so much influence and so much bearing, particularly from a design perspective. So, I was mostly looking into materials, and at that point, it was the Wild Wild West. You’re literally Googling or calling up the folks who do the carved particle board, to ask them about their VOC content. You’d get a guy in West Virginia who goes, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about’ and hangs up the phone on you. So, those were the early days.

Then the owner and I got this notice that said, ‘Last chance to register for Green Build in Denver.’ I had never even heard of USGBC before. Somehow, we had ended up on a mailing list. We probably went to a local event with one of the chapters. So, we packed up her husband’s pick-up truck full of bricks, because that’s what you do when you have to drive through a blizzard on a front range. On a whim, we showed up at this conference, and the first session that we went to was the opening plenary, where Rick Fedrizzi who now is the CEO of my organization, IWBI, but at that time was the CEO of USGBC, also one of the founders, he was giving his plenary and was talking about green schools. He is the husband of, at that time a schoolteacher, now a retired schoolteacher, and the father of two children. It was his deepest passion, and I just found that commitment to USGBC to absolutely speak to every fabric of my being. So, I did, I ran to that first session and then I creatively stopped the woman who was running the school’s development project for LEED. She eventually confessed to me, like the fourth time I accidentally ran into her in one of the largest convention centers in the country, that she was going to grad school.

So, I was like, ‘Cool, what do I need to do to get your job?’ She told me that USGBC really wanted someone who had experience working in a green building program inside of the school district. At that time, that was like a unicorn, but it turned out that that school district my mother taught in for several decades, the same one that I was educated in K-12, was one of those school districts. So, I ended up packing up my car, not full of bricks, but now this time full of my life possessions about a month after Green Build. I drove cross-country back to the DC area where I was born and raised.

In about two and a half days, I moved back in with my parents, which I said I would never do. I spent the next six months building up a résumé that USGBC really couldn’t resist. So, by the time I applied for the job, the story goes something like, I finished my interview and the hiring manager went sprinting down the hallway to his boss to say, ‘I found her. I found her.’ But it took about six months and a lot of nail-biting to get there, because I knew there was no other job in the world that I could imagine that I wanted more than that one. So, I feel like I got really lucky there.

SSR: That’s amazing. What were the jobs that you did to build your résumé? Was it going back to the schools and working there?

RG: Yeah, I took that unpaid internship at the school district within their facilities and construction office. My first assignment there was to edit LEED and Green Building requirements into their design specs, which is about 3,000 pages long. So, I thought to myself, ‘Well, if I just slog my way through this as fast as I can, whatever is coming next will be much more interesting.’ So, I worked days, nights, and weekends and finished that first project in record time. That was really an immersive experience, too, because you’re just like in the guts of every single detail that a school district thinks about when it comes to construction, all of the specifications.

Then, the next job I got was much more interesting. I was working with one of the school district’s first LEED facilities to get the students trained up on leading tours, and do some digital promotions around the online tour, and things like that. Then, a couple of months into that, a woman, who to this day is a kind mentor to me, a German architect named Anya Caldwell who was running the Green Building program from Montgomery County Schools turned to me and said, ‘I really love you but you need to move out of your parent’s place and you need to get a paying job.’

It was such this act of generosity, and she helped me to apply to a green building consulting job. Get this, my first assignment was as a consultant to USGBC writing the LEED for schools’ curriculum for the upcoming workshops. So, I remember one day I went to USGBC to drop off a CD-ROM of stuff, that’s really dating the story. I know I’ve embellished this in my mind, but in my mind, the elevators doors part and there’s this cool music playing and there’s this young, beautiful people collaborating in the hallway. I thought, ‘I have to be at this place.’

So, the woman who had told me she was going off to grad school and relinquishing her position running the school’s program, she and I had become friends along the way. She had gone off to attend grad school. I called her and said, ‘What do I do? I really, really want this job.’ She said, ‘Rachel, they already have all six copies of your résumés. It’s the one that you’ve been updating and dropping off like every few weeks. So, just call them. They’re waiting for you.’ So, I guess we needed each other.

SSR: I love the persistence, I love the persistence. So, you were at USGBC for nearly a decade. Talk a little bit about your role and how it evolved and your experience there.

RG: Yeah, it started out in the market development role. My job was to convince school districts and colleges and universities to pursue LEED certification or to work on advocacy-related initiatives to get it adopted through state and local policies. Then one day Rick, ever the serial entrepreneur, walked into my office and said, ‘Gutter, we’re going to start a center for green schools and you’re going to run it.’ It was Friday, and he said, ‘I want a business plan by Monday.’ It turned out that my boss, the hiring manager who had ran down the hallway was on vacation.

By the time he got back, we had basically already made our plans to start up this center for green schools. So, I got to do the amazing work of founding that center and building up a team where we were leveraging schools as a way at USGBC to open up more hearts and minds by having a conversation about healthy high-performing kids as opposed to healthy high-performing buildings. So, we use schools as the platform for advocacy, for volunteerism, for our activation efforts at the chapter level. We didn’t start the Congressional Green Building Caucus, we started the Congressional Green Schools Caucus. We didn’t start the 50-for-50 green building initiative. We started the 50-for-50 green school caucus initiative. So, it really became a vehicle for us in many ways to humanize the conversation around green building.

Then, along the way, I also picked up other responsibilities, like leading education for grown-ups, for professionals. That was where I got probably the coolest title of that I’ll ever have for the rest of my life, which was senior vice president of knowledge, which I still feel unworthy of to this day. That was really fun because it gave me the opportunity to build the Spoke education platform from the ground up. That’s another one of those things I look back on and go, ‘Thank God I did that when I did, because now I know how to do these things that I have to do today.’

SSR: Exactly.

RG: Yeah, it was nice. Both of my bosses, Rick and Mahesh Ramanujam, who’s now the CEO of USGBC, they come from Fortune 15 companies, and they really believe in executive rotation. So, the idea was, at any day, someone could walk into your office, and sure enough, Mahesh walked in one day and said, ‘I need to know by the end of the day if you want to run education.’ That was the excitement of working at USGBC, was we were growing so fast. There were always so many things that needed additional support and leadership, and I got a chance to step into a lot of those.

SSR: So many questions off of that, but what was it like early on with LEED, in getting people to adapt? It must have been a challenge at first, and then, almost inspiring to see it take off as it did. Can you talk a little bit about that?

RG: So, what’s really interesting, we’ve been thinking a lot back on those early days at USGBC, specifically 2006 and 2007, when the economy crashed, and the bottom really fell out of the real estate market. Even with a tremendous slowing of design and construction across the board, it was USGBC’s time of biggest growth. It was the time when LEED saw the greatest successes, because it became such an important differentiator for a market where opportunities were really, really scarce. We see that actually there are some parallels to the situation that we’re finding ourselves in right now, and just this tremendous uptick in interest that’s born out of crisis, and that’s born out of need.

Was it hard? Yeah. It was hard. I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder in my life except probably right now, but it was so gratifying. I call sometimes LEED the Tickle Me Elmo of sustainability. Nobody quite knows why it got so popular so quickly, even the people who created it. So, for us, we didn’t create LEED to be mandated, but all of a sudden, we had dozens of state-related policies, and hundreds of local policies that emerged on top of it. I remember when we were starting our advocacy work on the Hill, we were working with a lobbying firm.

Every time we would leave a meeting with the member of Congress, they would turn to me and say, ‘Meetings never go that well.’ After we had the fourth or fifth meeting, they finally stopped saying it. I think we realized that we were onto something that really resonated with people by way of the triple bottom line, of people, planet, and prosperity. We got really good at having a conversation that didn’t demand altruism around environmental and green building commitments but just said, ‘Can we intellectually agree that profit is good, that the health of people is good?’ That allowed us to really make some head way, because we were filtering the value proposition through the lens of business and through the lens of the imperatives that the people on the other end were having to answer to.

SSR: All right. So, it made sense financially, but also environmentally. So, when you put those two together, it’s very powerful, which no one had done before.

RG: Yeah. I think, of course, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but LEED was definitely a new way of tapping into the market’s desire to not only lead, but also the motivators of comparison and competition. People want a plaque. People want a score. People want to say that they’re better than the five other people who are trying to do the same thing. At the end of the day, that is what I believe fundamentally drove the uptake of LEED, and I think it’s also fundamentally driving the uptake of WELL.

SSR: Yes. I remember back then when everyone was trying to study for their LEED AP exam, and it is intense. The amount of knowledge that you had to have and the studying that went through it, but it was a badge of honor that they got it, that they understood, that they had a deeper meaning to what buildings could do and could be. It was really, really powerful and still is.

RG: I think it also gave people a deeper meaning around their career, and that was a big part of what drew those couple hundred thousand people to become LEED APs, was that they were more passionate about the projects that they were working on. I remember one recovering architect who came to work at the Center for Green Schools who said, ‘No one tells you when you go to architecture school that when you graduate, you’re going to be designing strip malls and schools that are based on the same floor plates as jails.’ So, I think that LEED became a mechanism that you could have conversations with your clients around. Instead of saying, ‘Do you want red lockers or blue lockers?’ You could talk about, ‘Do you want to prioritize indoor air quality or energy efficiency to put money back in the classrooms?’ So, it was a vocabulary that allowed for a much more dimensional and meaningful conversation with the client, and of course, much more meaningful outcomes.

SSR: Right, and it was a mind-shifter. It just changed how people looked at things. You mentioned that you’re glad that you did a lot of this, so you know how to do it today. What specifically from your time at USGBC and working with the schools were some of your greatest lessons, some of your greatest takeaways that help you today?

RG: Well, I’ll tell you first a little bit about what I learned, and then, I’ll talk a little bit about the challenges that I was frustrated we could never quite solve for, that we’re now putting through a new lens trying to solve for at IWBI. So, I think what I learned more than anything at USGBC was the art of market transformation, and the careful dance that exists as a push-pull, what the market is willing to do, what the market can take on, and then, what’s too much too fast? That’s the art of the work that we do.

So, alongside that in operating the Center for Green Schools, I was really learning the fundamentals of how to move movements forward. I learned so many lessons along the way. Like the importance of partnering as opposed to lobbying. We tried to identify who are the super powers of education in the case of green schools? But those super powers also amount to the protectors of the status quo if you can’t get them on your side early. What we learned was that, the way to get them on your side was to make them themselves champions of the issue. It was not to petition them, but instead to position them as the thought leaders. To position them as the owners of that movement. So, we worked with the National PTA, the School Board Associations, the Teacher’s Unions. Collectively, they represented more than 10 million members, but we put them out in front. We made that their issue.

We also learned a lot about the importance of not preaching to the choir, but instead deploying the choir. In a movement like green building, you kind of figure out eventually that you’re talking to a lot of the same people, and most of those people already bought in to exactly what you’re saying. So, the question is, how do you go outside of that?

One way to do that, I think, was to deploy the choir. It was to take all those people we were talking to and say, ‘Go create your own green school committees. Go run your own green apple days of service. Get out there and start converting.’ Especially with schools, it’s such a localized conversation. But we also learned along the way that the resources that we were creating really had to be highly targeted for the many different stakeholders that were a part of the conversation. Lots of different lessons along the way about how to architect a movement and how to grow it and expand it.

Now, in my work at IWBI, I’m really focused on trying to solve three, I think, fundamental challenges that collectively, as a sustainability movement, we face right now. One is to meet the needs of existing buildings. The vast majority of uptaking green building has been through new construction, and that leaves the majority of real estate off the table. So, figuring out how to address existing buildings and the way that they make change and matching your certification and market transformation vehicles to those realities is really, really important, and something I think we haven’t gotten quite right yet.

The second thing that I think we struggled with in green building and continue to be challenged by is how do we provide tools that scale to the modern organization. Specifically, some of the largest, most complex organizations in the world that aren’t thinking about making change one building at a time. Instead, they’re thinking about making change across their entire portfolio: one policy, one program, one sweeping series of retrofits. I think that a lot of the early positioning of LEED and the early positioning of WELL was really about that one-off building approach.

So, what do you do to adapt to be able to provide organizations with incremental milestones and achievements? Because you work for a Fortune 500 company, it can take you five years to get a single policy passed. We wanted to find ways to acknowledge that. And then, finally—and I think this one is probably more important than ever and goes back to that COVID-19 silver lining—how do we shift public awareness and consumer demand? At the end of the day, we will not go mainstream with healthy buildings or green buildings if mom isn’t demanding it for her kids, if the consumer isn’t aware of how to make better choices, if potential and perspective renters aren’t showing up and asking the right questions. It turns out, that’s something that’s really hard to shift, but it goes back to that notion of partnering as opposed to lobbying. When we work with our customers, we treat them like partners and offer them up a platform, but also try and take advantage of their platform, because lord knows their marketing budgets are bigger than mine.

SSR: So, I think this is a great time to talk a little bit about how did you get to IWBI and why did you want to make the shift over to IWBI? Then, for those that might not know, can you explain a little bit about—you just touched on a lot of the points—but what is WELL and how is it evolving what you had started at USGBC?

RG: Definitely. Well, I didn’t make the choice to get to IWBI. My mentors made it for me. So, it was another one of those executive rotation moments where Rick and Mahesh had already discussed my future, and they collectively approached me to say, ‘Rick is leaving USGBC and going to take the CEO position at IWBI. We would like you to join him.’ So, that made it pretty easy because I had envisioned that I would be working under Mahesh to support him at USGBC. But since he and Rick co-conspired, it made the choice really a simple one, and I trust both of them deeply in helping me to think through my own future. So, it almost took the choice out of it.

So, I started at IWBI about three and a half years ago, around the same time that Rick did and a handful of other USGBC family members who came over to help get IWBI and WELL off the ground. When we came into IWBI, WELL was a certification for buildings to really shore up health and wellbeing across a number of different concepts at that time—seven different concepts or categories. Today, WELL is still a vehicle for building certification, but also, it can be applied to communities and to whole organizations that are seeking to implement, validate, and measure features that support and advance human health and wellbeing.

We’ve launched a WELL community system shortly after I started. That was in development when I came on board. We re-architected WELL version two to really make it flexible and adaptable to all of these needs. So, WELL version two is in pilot right now. It was supposed to be out of pilot, but for COVID-19, we decided to hit pause and really do a scan for other ways we could fortify the system and the fight against the virus. Then, more recently, we launched the WELL portfolio program, which is really about meeting the needs of existing buildings and the large complex organizations. That’s a program that looks at organization wide commitments and allows for more of that incremental approach over time. So, the goal may not be certification ever. The goal my simply be to increase that portfolio score.

So, as opposed to the one-off building approach where you sign up, you’re going to get WELL Silver, WELL Gold, WELL Platinum, WELL portfolio is much more of a journey than a destination, which I think really speaks to the way organizations need to be approaching their commitments to health and wellbeing. As COVID-19 has taught us, it’s not static.

 

SSR: What are the pillars of the WELL building standard? What are people scored upon or what are the things that they have to take into consideration?

RG: So, I mentioned that there were seven concepts in WELL version one. In WELL version two, there are actually 10. So, those range from air, water, light, thermal comfort, material’s health, and sound, but also address nourishment, community connectivity, mental health and wellbeing, and physical activity and movement. So, we’ve really tried to identify all of the different ways in which our spaces, but also our organizations, can have an impact on our health and wellbeing. Then, within each of those concepts, we have what are called features. Features are basically prescriptions. They say, ‘If you do this, then you’ll get this point as a result.’

Those features range from design-related features to operations- and maintenance-related features, to organizational policies and protocols that really would largely set more on the HR side of the house. What we did in WELL version two was we moved away from the green building tradition of a static and fixed scorecard. We created a menu of options and we let people build their own scorecard. It’s like a choose your own adventure. That gives project teams the ability to say, ‘Well, we’re doing a new build, and we have a lot more control over the design of the space, but we don’t have a whole lot to say.’

Maybe there isn’t even a team assembled who’s going to be running HR for the new school in the district to keep on my schools example. So, we’ve introduced a lot of flexibility into the system. Nonetheless, in order to achieve a WELL certification, you have to select features across all 10 of those concepts. So, you have to have a really holistic approach to a WELL certified project.

SSR: I love that it takes wellbeing, as you just said, to a holistic approach. That it’s more than just the built environment, but how people act, and live, and play, and work within the environment, because that’s so important, especially in today’s world.

RG: Yeah, I think we stand on the shoulders of giants with USGBC and with LEED. One of the places where we really saw that things could fall apart on the ground, the notion of a green building or a healthy building only being as green or as healthy as the people who are interacting inside of it. So, we made a really important choice in WELL version two not to separate out that which the building can do from that which the organization can do. They have to be coupled. One has to go with the other. It’s all well and good to have a meditation and contemplation room in your space, but if you’ve got a work culture that discourages people from taking breaks throughout the day, that room is going to go unused.

You can build a beautiful kitchen and you can provide lots of gorgeous healthy food for everyone, but if the office culture is about cupcakes and pizza, or if you’re not addressing education around that, if you’re not encouraging people to take time away from their desk to eat communally, all of those amazing design features end up going to waste. So, I think part of the magic of WELL is that it prompts that integrative design process at the beginning and it says, ‘We know you might not control that, but you really do influence that, and you should exercise that influence from the outset of the project.’

SSR: Recently you formed an IWBI taskforce, can you talk a little bit about how that came about, and what you’re hoping that taskforce does?

RG: So, we were on the eve of our governance council vote to bring WELL version two out of pilot after about two years of piloting that new system. It was the very same day that we had announced to staff that we were closing down our New York headquarters and sending everybody to remote work environments because of the spread of the virus. It was the day after we had made the very difficult and devastating decision to postpone the WELL Conference that was scheduled for March and April in Scottsdale. So, all of that is happening, and I pull our chief engineer Nathan aside and say, ‘Nathan, I’ve been thinking, I feel like I know the team has worked so hard. They’ve been sprinting for the last couple of months to ready the system for this vote, but I feel like we have a moral obligation to press pause.’ Because we already knew, especially through our colleagues in China who were living the reality of COVID-19 in fast forward, two months ahead of us, basically. We already knew that WELL was a system that performed very well in service to the fight against COVID-19. We have features for handwashing, for cleaning protocols, and for air quality. So many things that we know to be material in addressing safer spaces with the presence of the virus, but we also felt that we could do more.

So, we made a game-time decision to pause the vote, and we made an announcement that we were standing up this taskforce. We lined up some iconic co-chairs, like Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, who’s also on the governance council. She’s the former head of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, one of the largest funders of public health in the world now at University of Pennsylvania. I should also mention Risa is a doctor. Dr. Richard Carmona, who was the 17th Surgeon General of the United States. Wang Yu, also a doctor, who is now the distinguished professor at the Center for Healthy Cities at Tsinghua University. But also, the former director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and on and on. The co-chairs that we found were unbelievable. Then, we thought, maybe we’ll get a couple of dozen really good additional folks who will raise their hand to be members of the taskforce, and instead we got almost 500.

They ranged from neurologists and scientists across many, many different fields, to medical practitioners, to architects, designers, engineers, acousticians, lighting designers, elected and appointed officials, city representatives, the heads of sustainability and wellness for some of the largest companies in the world, institutions of higher education, airports, folks who were running projects at airports and in hospitality. The diversity knocked our socks off. We very quickly built a bespoke online platform that would allow all of these folks to be in dialogue with one another 24/7 because the people who joined represent over 30 countries. So, how do you, in 30 days, suck all of the wisdom that they have to offer across all of those subjects.

We were able to find a technology solution and couple that with some live town hall meetings to do a rapid exercise of collecting just a ton of feedback. Right now, our standard development team and their advisors are in the process of digesting all of that and figuring out where enhancements can be made to the standard, and also working on new guidance for prevention and preparedness, resilience, and recovery. That will exist as a standalone piece of guidance that we’ll publish and make really available to anyone who is interested.

 

SSR: Were you surprised by this overwhelming response, and now that you have all these people that want to help, that want to give feedback, what else are you hoping to do with these resources?

RG: First of all, the level of participation and engagement from the taskforce just blows my mind. I just feel so incredibly grateful, and I think it really does cut to the heart of our collective desire to be participating in solving these enormous challenges presented by COVID-19. I think we all are feeling a call to somehow be a part of the solution, to be a part of giving back, and there’s just so much need across the board. So, I’m internally grateful for the folks who showed up to the taskforce. I mentioned two of the goals of the taskforce, to fortify WELL as a system in the fight against COVID-19, and to create a standalone set of guidelines for prevention, preparedness, resilience, and recovery.

Beyond that, there are a number of new resources and programs and offerings that have in large part been inspired by the taskforce. Just recently, we announced that we’ll be launching a health safety rating that will focus on facilities operations and management. We’re also working on a number of resources to address education and re-onboarding of employees and staff. I think this is a real missing piece. It’s great to have a policy on wearing PPE, it’s even better if you can provide those high-quality supplies to your staff. But if you don’t teach them how to wear them, if you don’t teach them about how to keep them clean, then, you’re going to see what I’ve been seeing. Walking around my neighborhood and listening to the news, where there’s a senior-living facility right down the street from me and every time I walk by, there are a bunch of people wearing a mask dangling from one ear and smoking a cigarette. It’s like, ‘It’s not really what we are going for here.’ But the lack of education is the barrier there. So, one of the needs that’s really become illuminated is the importance of providing that education and providing it in ways that are appropriate, that are going to meet the audience where they are, including sometimes at or below a 5th grade reading level and to people who speak English as a second language. This is such an area of need.

We try to sense into what we can do that is complementary and not duplicative, because there are so many organizations that, of course, have activated around COVID-19. In particular, you’re seeing a huge number of really great resources around re-entry. Lots of property-management firms, lots of real estate and construction firms have all published those pieces of guidance. We really felt like our position was to think about the white spaces around those pieces of guidance where things might really suffer in the way of implementation, verification, and validation. So, those are some of the ways that we’ve come up with so far.

We also just recently launched an advisory for arenas, stadiums, and other venues like that, because we know that everybody wants to get back to sports. Everybody wants to get back to concerts. The kinds of things that hold our social fabric together, but we also know that places that convene large groups of people for extended periods of time have a lot of challenges and a lot of risks. So, we’re also trying to be available and be in service to the sectors that are most hard hit and the ones that have a really particular set of challenges that have to be thought through. For instance, one thing we’ll touch upon with the new advisory is ticketless entry, touchless security screenings. These are the types of things that thus far haven’t been addressed in WELL. We’re going through another rapid 30-day exercise to develop new parts and new features in WELL, specifically for stadiums, arenas, and other places of large gathering. You should be interested to know, I thought about telling you this offline, but I’ll just tell you while we’re on the record that I think the next advisory that will stand up will probably be related to hospitality, and we’d love to, not to put you on the spot, but we’d love to have you participate.

SSR: Oh, I would love to. That would be amazing. Thank you. Yes, I was just going to ask, hospitality has been one of the hardest hit and as people open, or reopen, I guess I should say, there’s a lot of unknowns. No one really knows how to do it right. People are throwing cleaning ideas down and Plexiglass partitions, and it takes a lot of what hospitality is away. So, I think it’s a very fine line to reopen and still have that experience that welcome that embodies hospitality. What do you think hospitality needs to do or be focusing on right now in your opinion, and what can the hospitality industry do to restore the public’s confidence in feeling safe in these environments?

RG: Well, you used a really important word, which is confidence, and I think that we have to acknowledge that there’s a delta between perception and reality, and especially in a place like hospitality, you have to cater to both. It’s not just about whether the space is safe, but it’s also about whether you feel safe. Those two things will matter a lot, especially in a place like hospitality, given the way that people make selections about, for instance, where they’re going to stay, or where they’re going to host an event. Of course, at IWBI, we are strong believers in the importance of third-party verification that a system like WELL or like LEED is able to offer.

One thing that really differentiates WELL that we haven’t talked about yet is that it’s a performance-verified system. That means that you don’t get your final certification until you’ve actually demonstrated that your water quality is excellent, that your air quality is good. You go through visual inspection checks that you have to do with lighting, and the satisfaction of other requirements in WELL, it looks like, acoustics, and so forth. So, it’s not about design intentions. It’s about actual outcomes, and I think this is a place where we really do have to be focused on real outcomes and a validation process that puts that stamp or that seal on that does provide that sense of confidence. So, I’m anticipating that you’re going to see a real uptick in hospitality of spaces and whole organizations that are really starting to more deeply commit to these third-party certification frameworks. That, I think, is another really good thing, because hospitality has been one of the slowest sectors to embrace, for instance, the notion of green.

I’ll tell you my own personal example of that. I lived in a hotel for the first three years that I was at IWBI. I was straddling time between DC where I have a home and New York where IWBI is headquartered. So, for three to four days a week, I would be living at the hotel. It took me about 22 hotels to find my way to the NoMad. I’m like the worst guest you could imagine, because my list of requirements is like, I want hard wood floors, high-performing HVAC system, quality acoustics, green cleaning. I’m a monster guest from that perspective in terms of my expectations. In New York, but also mostly across the country and the world, it’s really hard to find that list of what I considered to be almost bare minimums for my own health and wellbeing. I’ll immediately start to get congested most of the time if I walk into a room with carpet, because of all of the particulate.

So, from a health perspective, it was important to me. I had stayed at the NoMad for over a year before I was one day hanging out with one of the bellmen. He said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ So, I said what I usually said, I said, ‘Well, have you ever heard of LEED?’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, our hotel is LEED certified.; I was like, ‘What? How could I not know this? Where is the plaque? Where is the information in your marketing materials? It would have been so much easier to find you.’ He said, ‘We don’t advertise it because we don’t think that it’s what our guests are interested in. In fact, we think that they’ll be worried.’ Actually, I’m embellishing the story. By this time, I had taken my questions from the bellman to the general manager. What the general manager said to me, although the bellmen are very well-informed at the NoMad, but what the general manager said to me was that, they don’t think that’s what their guest want, that a green mark might mean that you’d be short striped out of clean towels or sheets, or that you would take a shower with bad water pressure.

So, I think that goes back to what we are talking about earlier, about consumer awareness and demand. We have to redefine what these things mean in the mind of the public. We have to shift that notion that sustainability is about what you give up as opposed to what you gain. That it’s not about scarcity, but instead about abundance. That’s one of the cool transitions that I think we’re trying to help to make with WELL wholesale, but I’m really optimistic that in this moment hospitality will embrace it as the next frontier. Again, it goes back into that notion that it doesn’t have to be altruistic either. It doesn’t have to be about doing the right thing. It can be about doing the right thing to get back to business.

Right now, more than anything, hospitality needs to be putting measures into place that will provide that level of confidence and assurance that are going to get people to feel comfortable making reservations and showing up again.

SSR: I totally agree, and I think as you said, the silver lining of COVID-19 is that it’s allowing people to realize the importance of this on a different level. I think wellness was already having its moment. It was growing, numbers were astonishing, $4.3 trillion industry. It was invading every aspect of living, which I think was great. We, at HD, actually switched our March/April issue from the luxury issue to the wellness issue two years ago when they started to take off, and we’re seeing all these new concepts and just design infiltrating every aspect of wellness from a vet to the dentist’s office to these new wellness clubs. It was exciting for us to see something that we thought should have been more of a priority for a very long time, if I can speak for my entire team. Why do you think it was becoming so important, before COVID, this pre-COVID, why do you think it was having its moment? What do you think of all the new various wellness concepts that are coming online?

RG: We consider, at IWBI, we consider the work that we do to be a part of the second wave of sustainability, which is to say that we still very much consider ourselves to be an organization with a mission to advance sustainability. But we’re doing that through a common framework and a universal imperative that we all ourselves want to be healthy. We want our families to be well. We want our businesses to be growing. We want our communities to be thriving. So, in thinking about that triple bottom line, it simply shifts the center of gravity to talk more about the health of people. When what we know is that health of people and the health of the planet at scale, they’re one and the same. They’re inextricably linked.  So, what our buildings exhale, the people on the street inhale. What our cars exhausts, we breathe in.

COVID-19 also teaches us that planetary health and human health are positively inseparable. So, I think that a big part of what has motivated the rise in wellness at large, but particularly in real estate and in the built environment, are a series of studies that have allowed us to really touch the holy grail of green building and be able to demonstrate the measures that we’ve been taking to improve the health of the planet are actually improving our cognition, our productivity, our problem solving, our mood, our focus.

That body of evidence has been growing for decades. That’s exactly the body of evidence that undergirds every one of the features in WELL, but there were a handful of studies that have happened over the past, say, I don’t know, five to seven years, like the COGfx Study out of Harvard School of Public Health, which is now I believe in its third phase. That was a double-blind study that was able to determine that air quality had a direct impact on productivity and performance. So, studies like that, and being able to actually demonstrate the human benefits of sustainability has really moved this forward.

Then, I think you also just have a couple of generations of younger individuals who are not just obsessed with their own health and wellbeing but believe it’s the obligation of their employer to provide for it. So, another major trend that has evolved are like these overly amenitized—is that a word?— like these totally fancy, fancy, bling, bling offices that really came out of Silicon Valley. In order to attract the best talent and in order to keep them in the office for as many hours a day, they have scooters, rock-climbing walls, and massage chairs. All of a sudden, the Millennial that was being recruited as the top talent at that time goes, ‘Well, I don’t want to work at your office. You don’t have any of that stuff. Are you going to give me unlimited delicious food in the dining hall for no money?’

So, what’s interesting is that a lot of those early amenities were really just fluff. They didn’t go after performance improvements, for instance. You want good performance, you don’t feed people junk food, you feed people good whole food. Or, if you really want to help people keep their bodies in shape, encouraging people to take movement breaks throughout the day and giving them ways to do that at campus that allows for that, especially outside, where you’ll get the benefits of being outside, is a lot more effective than a massage chair. But what it did was it reconditioned the mind of the Millennial and what they expected in a great job. It was no longer enough to have a solid paycheck and healthcare benefits, they wanted it all.

That, in turn, put pressure not just on other firms in Silicon Valley, but all the way to the most droll law firm in Washington, DC, because they’re all competing for that same talent—the war on talent. So, I think we actually have that generation of top talent and the organizations that responded to it to thank for a lot of the wellness movement right now. Because what started to happen was those very same organizations started to apply a filter on top of their choices for amenities and benefits that really started to take a much more science-driven approach to the kinds of things that you could do that would actually improve upon your business’ bottom line. So, if you’re putting measures into place that provide for fewer sick days, that are improving productivity, collaboration, mood—each one of these things tracks to a business’ bottom line, and it turns out that’s a value proposition that’s so pretty easy.

SSR: Exactly, and it all make sense, right? It’s been interesting even at HD, we’ve been able to cover offices now that have hospitality-like amenities because it is all about the experience now at work, at home.

RG: Well, you’ve seen that in hospitality, too, right? The in-room workouts, and the gym clothes that you can run, which God, I hope they’ve done away with that in the line of COVID-19. But just like the yoga mat upon request, and the on-demand yoga on your screen. You’ve really seen that shift of wellness-based amenities in hospitality, too.

SSR: Yeah, and full hotels based on wellness, Six Senses and Equinox opening up in Hudson Yards and now growing across the country. Just the fact that wellness should be and is a priority. It’s exciting, and, as we said, going to be more important than ever. I don’t think you can talk about wellness without sustainability, so I think that’s where the WELL standard will be and is super important. I think it just excites me so much that this is now a holistic approach to what wellbeing should be.

RG: Me, too. The last trend that’s kind of worth mentioning is that the real rise of wellness particularly on the consumer side is often born of crisis. We’ve got plenty of examples pre-COVID to point to, in particular in China, which is by square feet our largest market for WELL. One of the most popular sectors that utilizes WELL is multifamily residential housing. Why? Because in China, when you have a baby in a city in the winter, you’re told not to bring that kid outside for three months, because the particulate matter, the pollution is so bad that you could actually harm your child. So, the typical consumer, the typical parent is highly, highly aware of the dependency that they have on their homes to keep them healthy and well, specifically from an air quality perspective. So, in China, when a new building that’s pursuing WELL certification opens up to take application, there’ll be a line around the block in China style. I think we’re seeing that same thing happens here more directly as a result of COVID-19 that people are really starting to make that connection at the consumer level. Not at the builder level, not at the owner level, but at the consumer level to say, ‘There is a relationship between the things that happen inside of my home and my ability to keep my family healthy and safe.’

SSR: Bodes well for your job. No, just kidding. No, but it’s just it’s so exciting what you guys are doing. I feel like we could talk forever, but I want to end this with one question that we end all of the podcast with, because it’s the title of the podcast, What I’ve Learned. What do you think in all your disparate experiences has been your greatest lesson or your biggest lesson learned over the years?

RG: It’s really hard to put my finger on one. Although, if I had to, I would mention what I mentioned earlier, which is that there’s just so much inner wisdom that you can find when you shoot for the intersection of what you’re passionate about and what you’re really great at. Similar to the triple bottom line, if you shoot for the intersections of those two things, you probably won’t go wrong. Another thing that I learned along the way in my journey is the importance of wandering and how impossible it is to understand how the sum total of your experiences will amount to something really terrific if you just keep following your best instincts, and to be honest, following your heart.

One of the things that I love about Millennials is that they almost feel entitled to love their jobs, but I find that really refreshing. We talked about my parents at the beginning of this interview, and I remember my father saying to me, ‘It just never occurred to me to pursue a job that I would love. I always thought of a job as just something that I would do to pay the bills, take care of my family, and then, I would live, on the weekends, I would live in the spaces in between.’

I don’t think that that is the only way to do it. I understand there’s a certain amount of luxury and even just being able to think expansively about your own career and what you do, but I do believe that if we continue to find the intersection of purpose and profit in our own lives, that we would be much happier as professionals, much happier as individuals, and that ultimately the planet and society as a whole will be greatly benefited as well.

SSR: So, well said. Thank you, Rachel, so much for taking this time with me and us today. It was always very inspiring and educational. So, I really, really appreciate and can’t wait to see what comes out of the taskforce and what comes next for WELL. Again, I’m happy to join the hospitality one, so just let me know when.

Rachel Gutter: On the spot acceptance, I love it.

Stacy: Yes, yes. But as I said, I’m a big fan of all that you’re doing, and I can’t wait to see what’s next. So, thank you so much.

Rachel Gutter: Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Stacy: Awesome. We’ll hopefully talk soon or see each other in real life soon.

Rachel Gutter: I’ll pray for the latter for sure.