The return to ROWI

Last month my paper on “developing the return on workplace investment (ROWI) tool”, co-authored with Matt Tucker and Hannah Wilson of Liverpool John Moores University, was published in the CREJ. The paper has been long in the making ...

It started back in 2012 when Adrian Burton of the AWE asked me to develop a means of estimating the productivity benefits gained from good workplace design. I responded to the challenge by reviewing 75 solid papers that reported a change in occupant performance due to improved environmental conditions, such acoustics, temperature, lighting etc. Initially the results of the different studies were so varied that they lacked any credibility. However, I worked with Paul Bartlett and the Office Productivity Network to weight the results according to the research environment, performance metric and type of activity so that they better represented a real office. The weighted results were more believable, were accepted by the AWE to use in their cost-benefit analysis of new workplace projects and we were accepted for publication by the JBSAV.

Fast-forward seven years and I presented that research to Matt Tucker’s Built Environment students. Matt was impressed with the methodology and approached Chris Moriarty and Peter Brogen at IWFM to sponsor further research. Since then, Matt and Hannah expanded the literature review increasing the reliable studies to 105, with 194 reported performance metrics, also recognising different types of performance. The results were again weighted and the potential impact of workplace design on task performance was recalculated as below.

Furthermore, we created a prototype ROWI tool with eight distinct sections. Sections 1 and 2 replicate a standard cost sheet, but sections 3 to 7 are key where the benefits variables are input, resulting in the predicted ROWI in section 8. We tested the principles with a panel of friendly experts, shared it with the IWFM community and we are now testing it with legacy data provided by a corporate occupier.

The published paper can be obtained at the link above, or you can download the original client report from my website. Academics might claim that it is impossible to predict performance benefits. Meanwhile the justification and “cost-benefit” analysis of workplace projects is continued to be based on property cost and space savings rather than the impact on the occupying organisation. The ROWI tool clearly requires further development but it’s a start. I would really like to hear your views on our approach – does it make sense and is it useful?