Industry perspectives on making post-occupancy evaluation routine

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is widely valued but weakly embedded in practice. Ant Marsh, Kate van Someren, Lara Clarke and Tom Randall (Arup Building Performance and Commissioning Services) explain the findings from a survey and focus groups with UK construction industry practitioners. They identified fragmented responsibility, split commercial incentives and a persistent fear of “bad news”. Making POE routine requires a shift from producing reports to a focus on improving outcomes by owning and acting on learning.

Why POE matters

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) asks a straightforward question: how well does a building work once people are using it? The answer can reveal where design intent and operational reality have diverged, where systems need tuning, and where apparently small changes could improve comfort, usability, energy performance or cost. Historically, there has been a lack of integrated user feedback in design:

“However, unlike medicine which, despite its many specialisations has always held together and has always maintained the tradition of linking practice, research and teaching, architecture and the other professions in the construction, design and urban planning, with few exceptions, have not developed a tradition of practice-based, user research, preferring to outsource both user research and teaching almost entirely to the universities.” (Duffy 2008: 657)

Guidance has existed for years, and the case for learning from buildings in use is well established (Bordass & Leaman, 2005; Way & Bordass, 2005; Stevenson, 2019). Yet POE still is not embraced by developers, clients, the design team, contractors and facility managers.  POE sits uncomfortably at the edge of many projects: it is valued in principle, but vulnerable to being excluded in practice.

That vulnerability is familiar to construction industry practitioners undertaking POE. Building evaluation exposes the compromises, gaps and unintended consequences that accumulate across briefing, design, construction, handover and operation. It also asks organisations to revisit a project when budgets, teams and attention have already moved elsewhere. Feedback may be welcomed as learning, but it may also be treated as criticism, liability or evidence that something has gone wrong.

A recent exercise undertaken by Arup’s Building Use Studies (BUS) methodology team explored how some UK practitioners experience this tension. A total of 25 people working in roles relevant to POE completed a pilot survey (their organisational affiliations are provided in the Acknowledgements below). The findings were then discussed in two focus groups with a subset of respondents. Participants included practitioners in architecture, engineering, consultancy, local government, contracting and higher education. Participants’ POE experience spanned both non-domestic buildings (predominantly education, public sector and offices) and residential buildings, mainly social housing. The exercise was exploratory rather than representative, but it offers an insight into the conditions under which POE is currently commissioned and delivered.

Valued in principle, inconsistent in practice

The results confirmed a familiar implementation gap. A majority (72%) of respondents reported that POE was used only sometimes, rarely or never on projects where it would have been appropriate. A similar proportion said that findings from previous projects only sometimes or rarely influenced the way new projects were approached.

This was not because practitioners struggled to describe the value of POE. Focus-group participants emphasised a desire to close the learning loop for designers, understanding occupants’ experience, joining up design and operational knowledge, identifying low-cost improvements and avoiding the repetition of problems. These themes align closely with the established literature on feedback, building users and performance in use (Zimmerman & Martin, 2001; Way & Bordass, 2005).

The difference lay in the scale at which value was expressed. Some arguments position POE as a route to better outcomes across the built environment, including improved wellbeing and progress towards carbon targets. However, the immediate value of POE to a particular building or client was deemed to be more persuasive: reduced bills, improved productivity, enhanced occupant satisfaction, risk reduction or a more competitive design offer. These project-level benefits are also well recognised in the literature (Bordass & Leaman, 2005; Stevenson, 2019).

This emphasis on project-level value is not a narrower moral position. It reflects the commercial setting in which the decision to commission POE is actually made. A sector-wide benefit will rarely survive a fee negotiation unless it can also be translated into a clear project-level reason to act. As one architect participant observed, “the wins, the stats, the findings can be some of the most powerful ways for getting a client to want to do it.”

Who takes responsibility?

When respondents selected the largest barriers to POE, “lack of desire from the client” was the most common response (76%), followed by commercial or fee considerations (60%) and lack of desire from the design team (32%). The pattern points to a commercial problem rather than an ethical or methodological one.

It is well known that the construction and property industries lack continuity in their responsibilities and stewardship for the buildings they create. The party procuring design services is not always the long-term owner, operator or occupant. A developer may sell or lease a completed building before the consequences of performance in use become visible. Design teams may have dispersed by the time reliable feedback can be gathered. Facilities managers can inherit systems without access to usable data or sufficient knowledge of how sensors and controls were configured. Asset managers, meanwhile, contend with fragmented systems and piecemeal digital infrastructure while needing the building to function day to day. As a result, POE is often seen as an optional extra rather than a process that adds value. Split incentives arise because the people asked to pay for POE and the people most likely to benefit from it may therefore be separated by contract, time, organisational boundary and improved outcomes.

POE is also commonly perceived to be an additional service rather than part of delivering a usable building connecting all of the different parties. Under pressure, an optional fee can be removed without appearing to threaten practical completion. Participants in the focus groups described an expectation that a new building should work “out of the box”, making any later investigation seem like a search for mistakes. In that context, paying for evaluation can be misinterpreted as paying for bad news.

The same concern can inhibit design teams. Focus group participants reported nervousness about defects, liability and “opening a can of worms” after completion of a demanding project that may lead to accusations of blame. Some designers were concerned that conducting POE could affect their professional indemnity insurance, although others had found insurers willing to support it. Known compromises may already have been debated extensively, with no viable alternative available at the time. Reopening them can feel personal as well as contractual.

These problems help to identify and explain why evidence alone has not normalised POE. The issue is not simply whether learning is useful, but whether the project environment makes it safe, worthwhile and possible to learn. As one architect participant with many years of POE experience put it, “no one wants to pay to hear bad news”.

A report is not the outcome

What makes POE easier to deliver? Greater client buy-in was selected by 84% of survey respondents as the factor most likely to make POE easier to be commissioned as a service. Regulation and certification were also discussed as potential drivers. Both can create a reason to commission evaluation, particularly where voluntary demand is weak. However, participants described instances in which only the minimum activity was undertaken to secure a BREEAM or WELL credit, or in which the report itself became the endpoint. Requiring evaluation does not necessarily require learning or lead to rectification in the building itself.

This distinction matters. The product of POE is often treated as a report, but the intended outcome is a response to ameliorate shortcomings that affect the occupants, building owner and manager. Findings need to reach people who can make decisions, and be translated into proportionate actions, feed into operational practice, future briefs and design standards. Without a clear, targeted “owner” empowered to implement the findings from a POE, with a review point and a route to action, even a technically robust evaluation may have little effect.

Data collection adds a further practical layer. Occupant surveys depend on trust, relevance and participation. Sensor-based evaluation depends on access, calibration and operational understanding. Participants described delays in obtaining building-management-system data, particularly where teams had changed after handover, and cases where unreliable sensors postponed meaningful analysis.

These are not peripheral administrative problems. They are evidence that evaluation has not been designed into the project’s governance and information arrangements.

From optional evaluation to managed learning

Making POE routine therefore requires more than another statement of its benefits. Four changes are needed.

•    Agree the purpose early. The purpose of each POE should be agreed before occupation. It might support building tuning, test a design assumption, inform a refurbishment, reduce operational cost or improve a future brief. The choice of a specific focus for a POE creates a stronger basis for scope, timing and value. An agreed focus should guide the scope, but it should not exclude other significant issues that emerge; these should still be recorded and passed to someone able to act on them.

•    Make the approach proportionate. Not every project requires the same depth of evaluation. Short surveys, targeted interviews, walkthroughs or selected operational data may provide a credible minimum where resources are constrained. More intensive approaches should be used where the risks, novelty or potential benefits justify them.

•    Require a response, not only a report. Appointments, certification schemes and client requirements should identify who will review findings, who can authorise action and how lessons will be carried forward. Evidence of response is a better test of meaningful POE than evidence that data were collected.

•    Build a shared evidence base. Clients need commercially legible case studies showing avoided cost, improved operation and occupant benefit. Practitioners also need comparable benchmarks, validated light-touch methods and agreed approaches to data collection and analysis, so that results can be reliably compared and shared. Anonymised learning can support both immediate project value and wider industry improvement.

Professional culture must change alongside process. Complex buildings rarely perform perfectly from the first day of occupation. They are tuned, managed and adapted. Feedback should therefore be treated as routine performance information, not automatically as an admission of failure. This creates space to distinguish defects from operational issues, changing needs and reasonable compromises, while preserving clear routes for addressing genuine problems.

Mainstreaming POE

A minimum commitment can begin now: define the questions that a POE will address, protect a proportionate budget, agree access to occupants and operational data, name a client-side “owner”, and hold a post-occupation review with people able to act.

Researchers can strengthen this shift by validating efficient methods and making costs and benefits easier to communicate. Professional institutions and certification bodies can reward demonstrable learning and response, rather than the production of an evaluation report alone.

The construction and property industries do not lack reasons to evaluate buildings.  They lack a dependable way to ensure that POE findings have an identified actor to “own” and act on them.  Sharing key insights across industry will alert design teams and contractors to emerging problems and reduce risk for all involved.  POE will become routine when acting on in-use evidence is treated as part of delivering a building, rather than an optional examination of what happened afterwards.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are extended to practitioners from Allies and Morrison, Architype, Build Test Solutions, JLL, Hampshire County Council, Hodkinson Consultancy, Howells, Lara Pinchbeck: Research + Design, London Legacy Development Corporation, Richard Atkins Chartered Architect, Sheppard Robson, SOAP Retrofit, SRE, Twin&Earth, Robertson Construction Group, the University of Huddersfield and XCO2 Energy Limited for contributing to the survey and/or focus groups. The organisations listed did not review this commentary, and inclusion should not be interpreted as endorsement of its conclusions.

References

Bordass, B. & Leaman, A. (2005). Making feedback and post-occupancy evaluation routine 3: case studies of the use of techniques in the feedback portfolio. Building Research & Information, 33(4), 361–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613210500162032

Duffy, F. (2008). Linking theory back to practice. Building Research & Information, 36(6), 655–658. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613210802381017

Stevenson, F. (2019). Embedding building performance evaluation in UK architectural practice and beyond. Building Research & Information, 47(3), 305–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613218.2018.1467542

Way, M. & Bordass, B. (2005). Making feedback and post-occupancy evaluation routine 2: Soft Landings, involving design and building teams in improving performance. Building Research & Information, 33(4), 353–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613210500162008

Zimmerman, A. & Martin, M. (2001). Post-occupancy evaluation: benefits and barriers. Building Research & Information, 29(2), 168–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613210010016857