We all know that homes and offices need to have ample ventilation. With the boom in corporate style offices since a couple of decades, it has become inevitable for all offices to be multistoried complexes with centralized air conditioning. This has given rise to concerns of indoor air quality.
Indoor air quality (IAQ) refers to the quality of the air inside your home or office. Closed air conditioned offices do not always have enough ventilation to keep away air pollutants. This can make the indoors unhygienic and affect the health of the employees.
There are three strategies normally used to improve indoor air quality. They are:
Ventilation eradicates air pollutants that originate inside the building. These pollutants include bio-effluents. Studies have found that the outdoor air supply rate provides subjectively acceptable indoor air quality. Preventing the accumulation of moisture in the building is usually sufficient to maintain the pollutant concentration at healthily low levels. Periodic cleaning such as vacuuming is essential as well.
People who work in offices spend over 90% their time indoors. This holds true for people who live in apartments too. Increasingly, people are found indoors at malls, shopping centers, or in vehicles. Studies on realistic experimental exposures have shown that common indoor sources of air pollution are floor-coverings, air filters of the centralized air conditioners, personal desktops, mold growth from damp or wet porous areas such as carpeting, ceiling panels etc.., and much more.
Exposure to these indoor air pollutants can be short-term; but these short-term effects were demonstrated repeatedly in a study to employees. These employees developed subclinical SBS symptoms such as headache. Temperature and noise distraction were also studied and it has been found that the performance of real office work, measured over a period of time over time, will be would be significantly affected by the indoor environmental quality.
A number of national organizations, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the American Lung Association, and the Environmental Protection Agency, have studied and stated that air pollution in our indoor settings, could be more of a health concern when compared with the air pollution outside.
Here are some actions that employers or the management of a company can take to reduce ‘employee exposure’ to pollution inside the office: