Janelle Penny: Hello, and welcome to a special episode of the Buildings Podcast, sponsored by Schneider Electric and produced by Endeavor Business Media, a division of Endeavor B2B. I'm Janelle Penny, Head of Content for Buildings, and today I'm here with Tyler Haak. Tyler is the Global Digital Energy Solutions Service League Leader for Schneider Electric, and he has over 15 years of experience in the digital building sector. Today, we're going to talk about the most valuable building metrics that don't appear on your utility bill. Tyler, thanks for joining me. 

Tyler Haak: Janelle, thanks for having me. Nice to have the opportunity to chat with you again. 

Janelle Penny: So, what important outcomes can be missed when organizations focus primarily on energy use? 

Tyler Haak: There are all sorts, but it probably makes good sense to kind of hone in on why organizations might focus primarily on energy use. And we kind of know why. Energy and buildings account for 30% of global energy use. And regardless of the type of segment that you are in, or the business that you're running, it's easily trackable. You can associate the kilowatt-hours you use with the rate you pay for them, or the carbon you emit, and it's pretty simple to be able to say, "Okay, this is how our building is performing. Let's measure it primarily on energy use." 

The problem with that is buildings exist for a reason. Every building is in place because there's an organization that set out to accomplish a certain goal. And those outcomes are very specific to what those businesses are there to do. So there could be, in healthcare, operational uptime or the ability to use your operating rooms more frequently. In the data center space, it's definitely around uptime in lifecycle, or life sciences, or pharmaceuticals. It's definitely around production. So there's big-time outcomes, human performance outcomes that we often miss when we just focus on energy use, and these can have an even bigger impact on what it is that we're trying to accomplish. 

Janelle Penny: What does it mean to think of a building as an enabler of business or organizational outcomes? 

Tyler Haak: Yeah, for me, it kind of speaks to what I was talking about before. Actually, I'll give a little self-indulgent plug here that I've recently titled a blog, which is "The Most Valuable Building Metrics Never Appear on the Utility Bill." And the reason is, again, a building is there for a certain purpose. People are employed there to do certain things. A building is really there to help people do those things better. We should be looking at it as an asset that allows us to do the things that we set out to do. 

Nobody built a building to run it efficiently and save energy. They built a building to put smart people, doing important things, in place to achieve their intended business outcomes. And so, that building needs to be thought of as something that is worthy of investment, worthy of high-level service, worthy of pulling analytics and data from, to make sure it can help us drive toward what it is that we're trying to get to as business owners or production runners. It really is something that, I think, for all too long, can be looked at as a cost to be optimized on the balance sheet, when it should be something that we should be investing in to help us flourish and do the things that we know our enterprises are trying to accomplish. 

Janelle Penny: Buildings already generate significant amounts of data. Why is information alone not enough? 

Tyler Haak: I think we could all relate to this today, which is that we need expertise. Even in the world that we're in right now, of unforeseen abilities with things like AI, we can see that these tools can generate reviews, opinions, and really act as agents for us. Even in this period of time, we still need a final word. We still need expertise, and that's really where building services come in. 

How do you parse through this information? Are the recommendations that we might be seeing that are getting better and better over time applicable to the customers that we work with, or the folks that are operating these facilities? Because we live in a world where we're swimming in data and information, and it really comes down to, how do we put it to the best use? 

I just turned 40, and I've started to look into my health a little bit more. What that means is I'm taking all types of counsel, all types of tech and information from streaming services for workout platforms, or recording steps. I'm sure everybody's familiar with getting into things like calorie counting. There's apps for all of that, but that's not enough where I would say, "Okay, I'm comfortable that I'm fully healthy." I need something to help me evaluate that information. I need something that allows me to know that I'm doing the right stuff, but here are ways to do it a little bit better, even with all this data that I have available to me. 

So why should that be enough for somebody who's running a building enterprise to be comfortable? There's always additional counsel and comfort level that we can get, along with this data, that comes from expertise, and there's plenty of that available in this space through service providers. 

Janelle Penny: What's one practical question that our listeners can take back to their organizations? 

Tyler Haak: I think we could even go back to where we started in the conversation, where it's not all about energy use to determine whether your building is functioning appropriately or not. But we lean on that, because we like to measure. We like to understand, "Are we doing better today than we were before?" And so we look for the simplest ways to go about doing that because it's easier to track, and it's consistent regardless of where you are. That's something that we could always look at in a building and say, "Yes, our building is running well or not." But because we like to measure, I like to measure the mission. And that begins with this question that any organization could ask, which is, "What are we trying to accomplish? What have we set out to do? And can our building help us do that better?" 

Some examples could be, "Does my building allow me to find more uptime? Am I confident that I'm able to run 24/7 if I need to? Is my building allowing me to have better employee engagement?" Maybe that's the number one metric you want to look at if you're in a commercial real estate space. Are my people engaged? Is their quality healthy? Do I have that metric covered? Are we getting better patient experience in the healthcare space? Is that what the outpatient surveys are telling us? If we're a university, do we have better research continuity? Are we able to keep the top professors because they're happy with the lab experiences that they have? 

All of these are different questions that you could be asking yourself, depending on what your enterprise is, what kind of business you're after, but really it's, "What are the most important things to us, and is the building helping or hindering us from getting there?" And that should be a pretty good indication of where you could start on your journey. It allows this to tailor to the specifics or the custom needs of any type of enterprise, and it allows us to be a little bit more creative in our pursuits. 

Energy efficiency is near and dear to my heart and super important for us, and when we prove that we can do that, we can invest in more things. But let's not make that the default knee-jerk reaction of what it is; as the end-all, be-all for building performance. Let's ask ourselves, "Is our building an asset that's helping us get to where we need to get to?" 

Janelle Penny: Tyler, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Tyler Haak: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I hope it was time well spent. 

Janelle Penny: And thanks to all of you for listening to this special episode of The Buildings Podcast, sponsored by Schneider Electric and produced by Endeavor Business Media, a division of Endeavor B2B. We'll see you next time.