11.3 Occupant Survey (C04), Enhanced Occupant Survey (C05) & Diversity and Inclusion (C12)

11.3 Occupant Survey (C04), Enhanced Occupant Survey (C05) & Diversity and Inclusion (C12)

Core Exam Takeaway: C04 Occupant Survey is a precondition that applies only to projects with ten or more eligible employees. C05 Enhanced Occupant Survey (4 pt / Core 2 pt) is tied with C06 as Community's largest optimization. C12 Diversity and Inclusion (3 pt / Core 3 pt) uses a three / four / five requirements → 1 / 2 / 3 points ladder. Do not confuse C05 (Enhanced Occupant Survey) with C09 (New Mother Support).

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Feature C04: Occupant Survey — Precondition

Intent: evaluate the experience and self-reported health and well-being of building users through occupant surveys.

C04 Part 1 — Select Project Survey

For projects with ten or more eligible employees, one of:

Option 1: Third-party survey. A survey selected from one of nine pre-approved providers:

1. Occupant Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Survey™ — Center for the Built Environment, UC Berkeley
2. Building Evaluation Survey Use Studies (BUS) Wellbeing Survey
3. Sustainable and Healthy Environments (SHE) survey — University of Melbourne
4. Space Performance Evaluation Questionnaire (SPEQ) — High Performance Environments Lab, University of Oregon
5. Leesman Index
6. Occupant Comfort & Wellness Survey — Institute for the Built Environment, Colorado State University
7. Comfortmeter
8. Healthy Building Index (HBI) — bba indoor environment & DGMR
9. Occupant Wellness Survey — Well Living Lab China

Option 2: Custom survey. A survey covering the topics listed in Appendix C1.

C04 Part 2 — Administer Survey and Report Results

Option 1: Survey administration

• (a) All eligible employees are invited to participate annually, with regular reminders.
• (b) The survey protects all participant-identifying data through appropriate measures such as anonymous reporting and safe data storage. Any communication of results should be on an aggregated basis, such that no participant can be identified.
• (c) Analysis of responses is conducted by a qualified survey professional.

Option 2: Result reporting. Annually, submit through the WELL digital platform:

• (a) Project and survey data: total number of employees invited and number who completed; date survey started and finished; project location; project type; level of WELL Certification; and sociodemographic information (age and gender at minimum)
• (b) Aggregated, anonymized survey results

WELL Core guidance: direct staff.

[!IMPORTANT] The ten-eligible-employee floor is a genuine scoping rule. Below ten eligible employees, no survey can be anonymous in practice — colleagues would identify one another from the responses — so WELL exempts small populations rather than forcing a privacy failure. Compare T02, which sets minimum response thresholds by population size (35% above 45 occupants, 15 responses for 20–45, 80% below 20) rather than exempting anyone.

[!TIP] Requirement (c) — analysis by a qualified survey professional — is easy to overlook and hard to retrofit. Collecting responses is not enough; the precondition requires competent analysis. This is also why C05 Part 1 Option 2 can pay a point for enhanced analysis: the baseline already assumes professional descriptive statistics.

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Feature C05: Enhanced Occupant Survey — Optimization (4 pt / WELL Core 2 pt)

Intent: build on minimum occupant survey requirements with enhanced and customized questions to comprehensively evaluate and respond to the experience and self-reported health and well-being of building users, both before and during occupancy.

C05 Part 1 — Utilize Enhanced Survey (1 pt / Core 0.5 pt)

For office spaces, projects with ten or more eligible employees.

Option 1: Enhanced survey administration

• (a) Meet C04 Part 1 using Option 1 — i.e., the project must use a pre-approved third-party survey, not a custom one.
• (b) Address at least one of the topics listed in Appendix C2 through at minimum three additional survey questions, working with one of: the pre-approved provider selected in C04 Part 1, BeWellLeadWell, OHFB-Afriforte, or The Thrive XM Index.

Option 2: Result analysis and reporting

• (a) Conduct enhanced analysis beyond descriptive statistics — e.g., correlations, inferential statistics such as multivariate analysis.
• (b) Annually submit aggregated, anonymized results for the additional Appendix C2 topics and the results of the enhanced analysis.

C05 Part 2 — Utilize Pre- and Post-Occupancy Survey (1 pt / Core 0.5 pt)

Option 1: Pre-occupancy survey administration. Administer a pre-occupancy survey using one of the pre-approved providers and use the same provider for the post-occupancy survey in C04 Part 1.

Option 2: Result analysis and reporting. Compare results from the pre-occupancy and post-occupancy surveys.

WELL Core guidance: direct staff.

[!IMPORTANT] C05 Part 1 Option 1(a) closes a door: it requires C04 Part 1 to be satisfied via Option 1, the third-party route. A project that wrote a custom survey under C04 Option 2 cannot earn C05 Part 1 Option 1 without switching. That is a genuine strategic dependency worth spotting early in a scorecard.

[!TIP] "Same provider" in Part 2 Option 1 is the methodological point. A pre-occupancy baseline measured with one instrument and a post-occupancy result measured with another cannot be validly compared — different question wording, scales and norming. Requiring provider continuity is what makes the Option 2 comparison meaningful.

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Feature C12: Diversity and Inclusion — Optimization (3 pt / WELL Core 3 pt)

Intent: promote an equitable culture through the implementation and disclosure of diversity and inclusion policies and initiatives.

C12 Part 1 — Promote Diversity and Inclusion

Option 1: Third-party program (1 point)

• (a) The project or organization participates in an approved third-party certification or reporting program listed on IWBI's website.
• (b) Results are made publicly available on-site and/or on the organization's website.

Option 2: Custom program. The project or organization meets at least three of the listed requirements through a custom internal program, reviewing policies and trainings annually to remove identified areas of bias:

The requirements include:

• (a) A comprehensive evaluation of current diversity representation, with goals for improvement established and annually tracked, including at least four of these diversity types: gender (assigned, identity and/or expression), sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, age, socioeconomic background, level of ability, or other metrics identified by the organization.
• (b) A comprehensive diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination policy established and made available to all employees that:
  1. Connects diversity and inclusion to the project or organization's goals and objectives, including the project's health-oriented mission, considering at minimum ethnic, racial, gender and gender identity, cultural, neurological, ability and age diversity
  2. Includes a hiring policy that bans the request of salary history and requires blind resume reviews — at minimum removing information such as name and home address that could indicate race/ethnicity, gender or socioeconomic background
  3. Establishes employee evaluation protocols with equitable and transparent performance criteria
• Further requirements address anti-bias training, wage equity, and employee resource groups.

WELL Core guidance: whole building applicability per the feature.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|         C12: WHY THE HIRING PROVISIONS ARE THE HIGH-YIELD DETAIL            |
|                                                                             |
|   BAN ON REQUESTING SALARY HISTORY                                          |
|      Past pay reflects past discrimination. Anchoring a new offer to it      |
|      carries a wage gap from job to job for an entire career.                |
|                                                                             |
|   BLIND RESUME REVIEW                                                       |
|      At minimum remove NAME and HOME ADDRESS -- the two fields that most     |
|      reliably signal race/ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic background.    |
|                                                                             |
|   Both are POLICY interventions at the single point where representation     |
|   is actually determined, which is why WELL names them explicitly rather     |
|   than asking generally for "inclusive hiring".                              |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[!IMPORTANT] Option 1 caps at 1 point; only Option 2 reaches 3. Participating in an approved third-party program with public disclosure is the low-effort route worth a single point. To earn the full 3 points a project must build a custom program satisfying five requirements and review policies and trainings annually to remove identified areas of bias. Note the parallel with C05 and T02: WELL repeatedly prices external validation lower than demonstrated internal practice.

[!TIP] C12(b)(1) requires the diversity policy to connect to the project's health-oriented mission from C02 Part 2 — another instance of Community's features cross-referencing one another. And note that C13 Accessibility and Universal Design is a separate 2-point feature covering physical access, wayfinding, developmental and intellectual health, operations, technology and safety. C12 is policy and representation; C13 is design and usability. Candidates frequently merge them.