Occupant Satisfaction with LEED Buildings--A First Glimpse

Are occupants more satisfied in LEED^® buildings than in conventional buildings? This would seem to be a critical question for LEED users, if not for the green building community as a whole, given the connection between occupant satisfaction and the much-touted economic benefits of productivity and well-being. Yet occupant satisfaction isn’t easy to measure, and good data is hard to come by.

Satisfaction Score Distributions at LEED and Non-LEED Buildings

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Occupant satisfaction scores for LEED buildings (circled) showing their ranking in the overall CBE buildings database.

Information is starting to trickle in, however, and one of the most promising sources is the occupant satisfaction survey tool from the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE). See EBN Vol. 12, No. 9 for more information on CBE and post-occupancy evaluation. Judith Heerwagen, Ph.D., of J. H. Heerwagen and Associates and Leah Zagreus of CBE used this tool, along with interviews, to produce an insightful study of occupant response to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s LEED v.1.0 Platinum headquarters. Their report shows how the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Philip Merrill Environmental Center and a handful of other LEED projects rate in terms of occupant satisfaction with the building overall, and on some key factors, including lighting, acoustics, and thermal comfort.

CBE does not reveal the identity of any project in its database, except with explicit permission from the owner. In the charts, LEED projects are identified by circles, among the overall data set of about 180 projects. The projects are primarily office buildings, according to Charlie Huizenga, a research specialist at CBE. Many, but not all, are newly constructed. The U.S. General Services Administration has been an active partner in CBE, so a large number of the buildings in the data set are federally owned or leased.

The charts reveal that, at least for this limited data set, occupants rate the air quality and thermal comfort of their LEED buildings quite highly but feel mixed about the lighting and are generally dissatisfied with the acoustics. Interestingly, occupants gave their “overall building” a higher rating than they gave their “overall workspace.” There is a lot to be learned from these studies, both in terms of the presumed benefits of LEED buildings in general and relative to the benefits of each project in particular.

Building owners who have used CBE’s survey tool have access to the responses to follow-up questions for any negative rating. Regarding lighting, for example, Huizenga frequently sees “complaints about glare on computer screens, low light levels, and high-contrast situations,” he told EBN. “Doing a good daylighting design is hard,” he adds. Supplementing these results with in-person interviews, as Heerwagen and Zagreus did for the report, is even more informative, providing opportunities to correct issues in the subject building and to improve the design and construction of future buildings. CBE’s survey tool is available at no charge to any LEED-certified project. “We’re hoping to present the data in the future with even more LEED buildings,” says Huizenga.

– NM

For more information:

“The Human Factors of Sustainable Building Design: Post Occupancy Evaluation of the Philip Merrill Environmental Center, Annapolis, MD,” April, 2005, prepared for Drury Crawley, U.S. Department of Energy, Building Technology Program. Download from: www.cbe.berkeley.edu/research/pubs.htm
The Philip Merrill Environmental Center is profiled in the BuildingGreen Suite’s Case Studies Database.

June 1, 2005

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	CBE Releases Occupant Satisfaction Study for Green Buildings EBN: Newsbrief - September 2006		Cascadia POE Shows Encouraging Results EBN: What's Happening - April 2006
	Free Occupant Surveys for LEED Buildings EBN: Newsbrief - December 2004		Post-Occupancy Evaluation: Learning from Experience with Green Buildings EBN: Feature - September 2003