It’s been increasingly unclear of late when many of us will return to the office. Whenever the time comes, one thing is certain: We’ll all have much greater reason to care about the air we breathe at our desks than we ever did before the pandemic.

Indoor air quality, and its potential to affect the well-being of office workers, wasn’t a thing the leaders of most companies, or many employees, thought much about before Covid-19, say those who study the issue. This, despite the fact that research shows that better indoor air can lead to significantly increased employee productivity and fewer sick days.

Now, of course, the world has been radically transformed by Covid, the resurgent Delta variant and the specter of a virus that scientists predict will become endemic to the human race and never go away.

Visible through the fog of seemingly relentless bad news about the spread of the novel coronavirus, from transmission in schools to the prospect of yet another year out of the office, is some cause for optimism. Engineers and experts from a variety of disciplines say we now have the technology to reduce the spread of the coronavirus and other pathogens indoors. They’re arguing that the pandemic provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform our relationship with the air we breathe during most of our waking hours—and at least some of those who design and run office spaces agree.

  
“Indoor air quality is not a nice-to-have anymore—people have realized it’s essential,” says Arjun Kaicker, an architect at Zaha Hadid Architects, a London-based firm that has designed buildings around the world.

Many of the technologies bringing about this transformation are part of the oft-touted “Internet of Things.” It’s a combination of wireless, internet-connected sensors and automation, tied together by the cloud and millions of lines of code and sold as a service to solve a particular problem—in this case, the spread of communicable diseases and other air pollutants indoors.

As with other applications of the Internet of Things, such as in factories, much of the technology involved is about tying together existing systems so they can respond more dynamically to information their sensors are gathering, says Bobby George, chief digital officer of Carrier, which manufactures heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems.

The goal is relatively simple: In more than 95% of buildings, air-conditioning systems are set on a schedule that remains largely untouched. Smart-building systems can pump more clean air into parts of an office as occupancy or other factors change throughout the day, adds Mr. George.

‘Indoor air quality is not a nice-to-have anymore—people have realized it’s essential.’

— architect Arjun Kaicker
Wireless, battery-powered air-quality and occupancy sensors that can handle continuous monitoring are rapidly falling in price. They can be peppered throughout a building and don’t require opening up walls to connect to data and power.

Landlords and companies that own their own buildings also are hiring industrial hygienists and related experts—common in factories but rare, until now, in office buildings—to audit air quality. They use clusters of sensors, often all together in a single, wall-mounted box. The cost of such a cluster has fallen to around $800 from $10,000 just five years ago, says Ron McMahan, an engineer and director of business solutions at occupational-health lab SGS Galson Laboratories.

Fresh evidence about the communicability of the Delta variant among unvaccinated people, even in rooms with good ventilation, suggests that nothing is more important than vaccination and masking. But once workers are following public-health guidelines about those measures, ventilation and air quality is our next line of defense against the spread of Covid and other airborne diseases.

In a May letter in the journal Science, 39 researchers and experts in public health, indoor air quality and engineering asserted that our understanding of transmission of respiratory infections, especially Covid-19, has progressed so rapidly that it should spur a “paradigm shift” for those responsible for the health and safety of office workers.

 
No longer, they continued, should people accept the idea that there is little we can do to prevent the spread of airborne infections at work. Just as we take pains to eliminate the spread of waterborne and foodborne disease, we now have the knowledge and tools to reduce the spread of germs in the air. And we should start demanding employers do something about it, they said.

To make that happen, businesses and schools should follow guidelines like those offered by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, says William Bahnfleth, a professor of architectural engineering at Pennsylvania State University and the head of the committee that created these standards. Those guidelines include ensuring the right mix of fresh outdoor air and filtered indoor air, and using air filters that meet a higher standard of effectiveness.

Employees can use these types of published guidelines to inform their questions when talking to employers about returning to the office, Dr. Bahnfleth says. Similar guidelines are offered by the American Industrial Hygiene Association and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As office workers have become more aware of the importance of air quality, they are beginning to demand assurances that building owners and managers have assessed and, if necessary, updated heating, air conditioning and air-distribution systems, says Anthony Malkin, chief executive of the Empire State Realty Trust, whose properties include the Empire State Building.

Mr. Malkin says his company updated those systems in all its buildings before the pandemic to meet stringent standards for air quality—including particulate matter, harmful gasses, carbon dioxide and the like—and touts that as a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining tenants.

Wireless, battery-powered air-quality and occupancy sensors can be peppered throughout a building.

Technology that might be able to reliably sense virus particles in the air is still at the research stage, but measures of air quality like those used by Mr. Malkin’s company and many others—including levels of CO2, which humans exhale continuously—are thought to be rough indicators of how much fresh air is entering a room. Other, more direct measures that can be determined during audits by engineers, like the number of exchanges of fresh air flowing through a room every hour, have long been standard for industrial and medical facilities, and are now being applied to offices.

To demonstrate its clean-air bona fides, Empire State Realty Trust obtained a certification from the International Well Building Institute, a company that assesses whether an office meets experts’ recommendations for indoor air quality in the age of Covid. Its new “Well Performance Rating”—launched in collaboration with companies that make air-conditioning products such as Carrier, Honeywell and Trane Technologies —sends testing engineers from organizations that it authorizes to deploy a battery of sensors and tests.

 
Improving air-filtration levels, bringing in more outside air and measuring what’s coming out of the vents in an office are the simplest first steps to reducing the spread of airborne disease indoors, says Dan Diehl, CEO of Aircuity, a Newton, Mass.-based company that creates systems for monitoring and adjusting air quality.

The gold standard for assuring that a building is providing enough fresh and filtered air to its occupants requires monitoring the quality of that air continuously, says Mr. McMahan of SGS. That’s because both outside air quality and the number of people inside a building can have dramatic effects on the quality of indoor air, and the amount of filtration and circulation a building’s systems must perform to keep it from becoming stale, he adds.

If employees aren’t confident their employer has taken enough steps to increase the air quality in an office, employees still have some options.

Rachel Hodgon, CEO of the International Well Building Institute, says that in her company’s offices they have deployed personal HEPA filtration devices to further clean the air in the immediate vicinity of workers. Personal air filters are something that Dr. Bahnfleth also said can help when it’s not possible to update a building’s systems sufficiently.

Another device widely available for around $100: air-quality monitoring sensors that can be placed anywhere in a home or office.

What kind of discussion have you had with co-workers or supervisors about office air quality in light of Covid? Join the conversation below.
The overall message of academics, researchers and engineers who work on indoor air quality is that just because the air we breathe is invisible doesn’t mean we should neglect to hold it to standards like those to which we hold our food and water. And now that we have the technology to monitor and improve indoor air quality, it’s time we start using it.

“Covid has been an accelerator for change,” says Mr. Kaicker, the Zaha Hadid architect. “I think without it, it would have taken many more years to get to where we are now in terms of people’s understanding of air quality.”