January the 31st of this very year saw the implementation of a new partnership between BREAM and WELL that would enable companies wanting to gain accreditation from both organizing bodies in an easier and more effective way. The new paper itself, titled “Assessing Health and Wellbeing in Buildings,” was released recently in order to facilitate the processes that varies building and construction companies would have to take in order to gain a credit rating from the two risk reduction bodies. Inside the paper is included an extremely useful breakdown of the differences between the BREEAM and WELL certification standards, as well as the ways in which they are similar so that enterprises can use the credit approval ratings of one of the organizations in order to prove its capabilities and thus earn more credits from the other. Indeed, the joint collaboration of BREEAM and WELL in this enterprise will save building and construction organizations time and confusion by integrating the two certified standards together.

What this will mean is that companies wishing to be deemed certifiable by BREEAM will not need to gather different forms of evidence in order to be deemed certifiable by WELL: the evidence can be integrated and used in an application for both organizations. As the Technical Director of BREEAM, Alan Yates, explains, there are numerous parallels between BREEAM and WELL and around 35 per cent of credits from one of the standards can match into the other.

What this indicates is that building and construction companies will not have to fill out as many bureaucratic forms or gather evidence for the same skills and assessments: by collaborating with each other, BREEAM and WELL will make it easier and more encouraging for companies in the construction sector to think about how they can improve their health and safety measures in the workplace in order to achieve accreditation from both organizations.