The 3/30/300 Rule: Boosting Productivity and Reducing Costs in Commercial Buildings

Designing a commercial building is a bit like skydiving. You have to think about human comfort, business productivity, sustainability and operational costs. If one of these factors gets out of balance, your project can quickly spin out of control, leading to increased costs or lower levels of occupant satisfaction — all with no parachute to cushion your landing.

The good news? Applying a simple rule can help you make better decisions. Find out how the 3/30/300 rule affects commercial building design.

Introduction to the 3/30/300 Rule

The 3/30/300 rule helps building owners and managers estimate their total occupancy costs. It refers to $3 per square foot for utilities, $30 per square foot for rent and $300 per square foot for salaries, benefits and other employee costs. This rule of thumb is helpful for creating buy-in when you want to incorporate certain features into your designs.

For example, if you recommend installing double-paned windows, your client may view the purchase as nothing more than another expense to worry about. If you use the 3/30/300 rule, however, you can easily show the client how much they can save by using double-paned windows to reduce utility costs and increase occupant comfort.

Understanding the Basis Behind the Rule

Utilities, rent and wages are operational expenses. Although they're grouped together in the selling, general and administrative expenses category of an income statement, it's important for building owners and managers to understand how their costs are distributed. Monitoring costs carefully makes it easier to determine when something is really out of whack.

For example, if a company has utility costs averaging $7 per square foot instead of the standard $3 per square foot, the building manager needs to investigate why. Overall, applying the rule makes it easier to understand the cost of ownership in buildings of all sizes.

Employee salaries and benefits cost way more than utilities and rent, as employers need to offer competitive compensation packages to attract talented staff members. Additionally, the average health premium for a single employee exceeds $8,000 per year. If a company pays a significant percentage of its employees' premiums, it could easily spend $100,000 per more depending on how many employees are eligible for health benefits.

Prioritizing Human Comfort in Commercial Buildings

The 3/30/300 rule also demonstrates the importance of prioritizing human comfort in design. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees discovered the joy of working from home. They got to wear comfortable clothing, sit on comfortable furniture and avoid the distractions associated with noisy commercial spaces. Now that the pandemic is over, some workers aren't willing to return to the status quo. They're looking for fully remote positions or hybrid positions that allow them to work from home a few days per week.

Window shades and acoustical systems are an effective, relatively inexpensive way to dramatically enhance working conditions, either through new construction or retrofitting. In many cases, you already planned to install shades, so level up your design by choosing building components based on how well they perform instead of focusing on aesthetics.

Designing for Human Comfort

When designing with human comfort in mind, you need to think about glare control, thermal comfort, acoustic comfort and occupant privacy.

Glare Control

One of the best ways to control glare is to conduct a solar study before you choose any shading solutions. A solar study makes it possible to determine how much natural light you can expect to enter a building based on the sun's position. As the sun moves from east to west, the amount of light in a commercial space changes accordingly. You need shading solutions capable of adjusting to varied conditions.

Another option is to install solar-control glass, which gives occupants a clear view of their surroundings while reducing solar gain. Solar-control glass keeps occupants happy by reducing glare and preventing natural light from making interior spaces uncomfortably warm. You should also consider the benefits of low-emissivity glass, which has a thin coating designed to reflect heat. The main purpose of low-E glass is to reduce utility costs, but it also helps reduce glare on screens.

Glare reduces visibility, causing building occupants to squint or put aside certain tasks until they can see what they're doing. As a result, glare has a major impact on productivity in workplaces. Occupants may also feel frustrated or annoyed about their inability to see clearly, reducing morale.

If shades are doing what they're supposed to do, occupants won't even notice them. If the shades are the wrong color and openness or they're not working as intended, the amount of light transmission may still be too high. As a result, occupants may continue squinting or get up and down multiple times per day to adjust manual shading solutions.

Thermal Comfort

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommends maintaining a temperature range of 68 to 76 degrees Fahrenheit. Effective shading solutions make it easier to reach this target range and prevent occupants from arguing over thermostat settings. To ensure thermal comfort in your designs, calculate the performance of the specified glass and the shade fabric together. Use your calculations to choose the best fabric for each space.

Low-emissivity glass and solar-control glass both reduce the amount of heat generated by the natural light in a commercial building. You can also enhance thermal comfort by choosing automated shading solutions instead of manual ones. As noted previously, selecting shades based on aesthetics alone makes it more difficult to reduce heat from the sun.

Acoustic Comfort

Noise prevents many building occupants from focusing on their work, leading to reduced productivity and high levels of frustration. If it's loud enough, occupants may even lose some of their hearing. Noise also interferes with the ability to understand customers, vendors and other key stakeholders, so it's important to think about acoustic comfort during the design process.

Although window shades are primarily used to reduce glare and limit solar gain, they also reduce echoing and limit the noise produced by talking. However, they don't do much to reduce noise pollution outdoors. Every shading material has a specific NRC value, so be sure to consider this value when choosing appropriate shading solutions for a commercial design project. You can also use acoustical wall panels and ceiling tiles to reduce reverberation and increase speech intelligibility.

Privacy Considerations

When choosing acoustical products, you need to balance the need for openness with the need for privacy. Building occupants need to have private conversations about personnel matters, strategic decisions and other topics. If occupants don't have the right amount of privacy, it's possible for outsiders to steal confidential information or hear personal information they have no business knowing.

One of the easiest ways to enhance privacy is to choose shading solutions with the right color and level of openness. For example, blackout shades and products with dense weaves give occupants more privacy than fabrics with relatively open weaves. However, choosing the right color is a great way to enhance privacy without changing openness. White colors are more difficult to see through than darker fabrics, providing more privacy without adjusting the openness at all.

To understand privacy, you need to understand where the dominant light source is. During the day, shades of all colors affect privacy due to the way light reflects off of window glass. At night, the dominant light source is inside, so dark shades become more transparent. This makes them easier to see through.

Economic Benefits of the 3/30/300 Rule

Using the 3/30/300 rule in your design process has several economic benefits. First, you generate a significant return on investment by increasing human comfort. Occupants are likely to renew their leases at a much higher rate if they're comfortable working from one of your buildings. Increasing human comfort also increases productivity. Finally, applying the 3/30/300 rule can help you increase energy efficiency and enhance sustainability.

For example, workers in an optimized building may increase their output significantly if you incorporate automated shading solutions into your design. Instead of squinting, dealing with headaches and taking long breaks until the sun moves out of the way, occupants can spend their days completing tasks and making important decisions.

Practical Applications for Architects and Developers

To apply the 3/30/300 rule in your projects, follow these tips:

1. Review the project requirements.

2. Perform solar studies, analyze the amount of heat generated by the sun and gather additional data to guide the decision-making process.

3. Look for ways to reduce utility costs while maximizing occupant comfort.

You can use software and other specialized tools to accomplish these tasks. For example, Autodesk allows you to conduct several types of solar studies before you design a single component of a building.

Apply the 3/30/300 Rule in Building Design and Management

Many building managers, owners and designers choose shading solutions based on their ability to reduce energy usage or save money. Because employee salaries and benefits make up the biggest portion of the 3/30/300 rule, it makes more sense to focus on enhancing occupant comfort. Connect with Contexture to learn more about using our Design-Assist services to make your project come to life.