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The Modern Office Building in a No-Touch World

Blog 29, August 2024

Thankfully, the height of the COVID pandemic is behind us. But what has remained is an increased awareness of the germs we come in contact with each day when we’re simply out living in the world. This opened the eyes of facility managers and has helped them to realize the importance of making their buildings as touch-free as possible. As a result, the modern office building is changing.

Shared surfaces that are touched by many people are potential infection points. When you’re planning a hands-free office, even something as routine as entering and exiting buildings poses a unique challenge. It used to be that building visitors might scan a badge, put their hands on a door, and even write their names on paper using a community pen. People touch shared surfaces on a daily basis without thinking about it. Fortunately, those days are coming to an end. And automatic doors, of course, are the original no-touch entrance solution.

The need for no-touch access extends to doorways other than main entrances. After all, the germ-free benefit of touchless access becomes obvious once occupants have to start touching the same interior doors.

For these interior doors, automatic doors with touchless wave plates connected to the door operators are becoming more common. Users simply place a hand near the activator and wave to make the door open. No one needs to actually touch or press any surface. The germ-reduction here is clear; no touch means no transfer of germs from hands to door, and from door to the next hands that touch it.

'Automatic' safety

The automatic door industry's history of customer-focused innovation has already driven companionability with access control systems. This relationship is evolving as the need for hands-free access integrates with the need for building-wide security. When a building’s automatic doors and its access control system work in harmony, users gain the ultimate in easy-to-use touchless access combined with safe and reliable security features. It becomes easier to grant access to authorized personnel, and to deny it for those who aren’t authorized.

There are other benefits, including the ability to automatically unlock all doors in the case of fire for easy exiting. Or the reverse, automatically locking all doors, popular with financial institutions at risk of robbery. Some systems even have remote capability, so door settings can be changed at will.

A green advantage

The modern, no-touch office building has other advantages, too: energy savings. The World Green Building Council says that the building sector accounts for a whopping 39% of the world’s carbon emissions. That’s nearly double the transportation sector at 22%. Meanwhile, 71% of buildings’ energy consumption goes toward interior heating and cooling.

Every time that interior climate is disturbed, heating and cooling systems must work that much harder, and use even more energy, to bring the temperature back to the set point.

Taken together, these statistics demonstrate why it is so important to avoid disturbing a building’s interior climate to maintain temperature. Which brings us to automatic doors.

When a door saves energy, the whole building saves energy. Doors (along with windows) are likely places where air can escape. They’re usually thinner than walls, plus they open and close dozens, maybe hundreds, of times during the normal course of business. Automatic doors are faster, smarter, and better suited to high foot traffic areas than manual doors. Therefore, automatic doors are a necessity for sustainable commercial buildings, helping to minimize heat transmission, air leakage, and air infiltration.

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