Office Air Quality: Why and How to Keep Your Office’s Air Clean

When you think about air pollutants you probably think of things like industrial smoke, car exhaust fumes, or cigarette smoke. There’s no denying that those pollutants can do a lot of damage if excessive amounts are inhaled, especially if someone has respiratory issues or heart trouble. But that’s just scratching the surface.

The truth is there’s a lot more to air quality than smoke, especially when you’re talking about contained spaces, such as an office. Depending on the age and quality of the building, you and your team might be inhaling mold or germs from other people working in, or even just visiting, your office.

Outdoor pollutants, such as smoke or car exhaust, can also make their way into your building. And if your building doesn’t have a good air filtration system, instead of getting rid of those pollutants, it might just be circulating them through the building.

You know when you walk into a building and the air smells stale. Not only is it unpleasant, but it’s unhealthy. The problem is, if you spend most of your time at your office and you do have an air quality problem, you might have become immune to the smell of your stale air.

Unfortunately, just because you don’t notice it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. It might be causing problems for you and your team, even if none of you can actively smell the problem.

Why Care About Office Air Quality?

If you and your staff work a standard 40-hour workweek you’re spending roughly a quarter of your life in your office. Even with lunch breaks and holidays, that’s a lot of time spent inhaling polluted air.

It’s easy to see how even mildly polluted air can cause problems, including:

No one is happy when they’re not feeling well. Even if they drag themselves to work, they won’t be as productive as they would be if they were feeling healthy and strong. They might put in the hours, but they’ll struggle to produce the same results.

So, now that we know why office air quality is so important, let’s talk about how to make sure the air quality in your office is top notch, and how to improve it if needed.

Conduct Office Air Quality Testing Regularly

You can’t fix a problem you don’t know exists. And if you try to fix a problem you don’t have, you might end up accidentally making things worse.

So, the first thing you need to do is test your air quality. There are multiple air quality testers you can buy that will check for things like particulate matter, chemical pollutants, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and humidity.

Your air quality tester might have an alarm if the air contains dangerous levels of certain elements, such as carbon monoxide. If it relies on someone to check it manually, you might want to install a carbon monoxide alarm just to be on the safe side.

If you do get a carbon monoxide alarm, be sure to test it regularly (at least once a month) to make sure the batteries are still good.

You should also buy a mold test. If your environment is excessively humid, mold can build up in the walls, or even inside the office, which can create a potentially hazardous health situation for you and your team.

How to Ensure Good Office Air Quality

The first step to improving and maintaining your air quality is to make sure you have a good ventilation and filtration system installed.

Ventilation brings air from outside the building inside so you’re not breathing in recycled air.

When ventilation is paired with a top-of-line filtration system, it also filters out all the pollutants you find outside so you end up breathing fresh air that’s even cleaner and purer than the air you would be breathing if you were standing outside.

A good filtration system can also target and eliminate airborne contaminants from inside the building, including COVID. This ensures you don’t have to worry about your coworkers accidentally infecting you if they come in to work sick, or if they come in when they’re contagious, but don’t yet know they’re sick.

Because filters are designed to trap pollutants, they tend to get clogged up with pollutants after a while. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your HVAC system receives regular maintenance so they can clean and replace filters as needed before they start losing their effectiveness.

This is also why it’s a good idea to do regular testing of your office air quality. If you notice a decline in quality, that’s a sign it’s time to look at your ventilation and filtration system.

Plants

Indoor plants provide so much more than decoration, although a splash of color never hurt anyone.

In addition to the benefits they provide to your interior decorating, plants also help keep your air clean, specifically by absorbing carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen.

Research also shows having green things around improves people’s mood and overall mental wellbeing. So, if you have not already put real (not plastic) plants around your office, consider doing so. You won’t regret it.

At Compass Properties, we know how important it is to keep you and your team safe at work. That means so much more than a building with a solid foundation and strong walls. It also means making sure you can breathe easy in the office. That’s why we only use the highest-quality ventilation and filtration systems in our buildings.

We also have lots of other ideas for how you can help keep yourself and your team safe at work, which you can read more about here.