We’ve also found that innovative fitness features are key to ensuring the happiness, health and well- being of our tenants.
A dedicated health and wellness educational seminar series is held in Mirvac’s headquarters in which professionals educate staff on health and wellbeing.
Pilates and yoga classes are offered twice a week in the office with a professional instructor, as well as an online wellness library with a range of health and wellbeing literature.
Mirvac’s commitment to support the health of its employees led to it achieving the first GOLD WELL Certification for the new EY Centre headquarters, from the International WELL Building Institute, as well as several other sustainability accreditations.
The WELL Building Standard is the world’s first building certification that focuses exclusively on human health and wellness.
It is an international assessment method that encourages healthy eating choices and active lifestyles, as well as promoting natural light and a high standard of air quality, based on seven years of scientific, medical and architectural research.
WELL-certified facilities can help create a built environment that improves the nutrition, fitness, mood, sleep patterns and performance of workers.
Focusing on a range of scientific measurements, such as how light is related to sleep/wake cycles and how temperature affects an employee’s mental health, the certification aims to encourage and enable healthy habits.
After a year in operation, the Mirvac team had participated in 62 pilates classes, four wellness talks, 4000 keep cups were handed out and 28 bookings were made for The Burrows, the retail space and amphitheatre at the base of EY Centre.
These learnings have been taken onboard and are being implemented across other buildings.
One such example is Olderfleet, on 477 Collins Street in Melbourne, a new flagship commercial tower that’s targeting a Platinum WELL Certification for the core and shell of the building.
By incorporating these features into the design of buildings and adopting initiatives that support wellness, we believe businesses can successfully enrich employee mindsets and at the same time strengthen their bottom line.
If nothing is done, in Australia alone, businesses face a loss of $4.7 billion due to absenteeism, $6.1 billion to presenteeism (where employees are present in attendance, but are less productive due to illness or injury) and $146 million in compensation claims.
That’s a total of $10.9 billion lost each year!