By C200 Member Valentina Videva Dufresne
Organizations are built to drive and track results. As such, most leaders have clear visibility into performance metrics such as revenue, cost, output, and timelines. However, far fewer have visibility into one of the key conditions shaping those outcomes: the air people breathe.
Indoor air quality rarely appears in dashboards or leadership discussions, yet it directly affects how people think, how long they can focus, and how effectively they make decisions throughout the day. It sits outside the systems used to manage performance, even though it influences how that performance is achieved.
Leadership starts with deciding what to pay attention to before it becomes obvious or urgent. Indoor air quality is one of those factors. Improving performance requires more than tracking results.
Understanding the conditions that shape how people think and work each day becomes a fundamental aspect of workplace environment and a key consideration for leadership when evaluating organizational improvements beyond the standard performance metrics.
Air Quality Affects How People Think And Decide
People spend nearly 90% of their professional and personal time indoors and the conditions within a building directly influence how individuals process information, sustain focus, and make decisions throughout the day. The connection between indoor air quality and performance is measurable and it has been studied across both controlled and real-world environments.
In a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, researchers compared conventional office environments to “green” building conditions with improved ventilation and lower pollutant levels. In the latter, participants demonstrated cognitive performance scores that were, in some areas, more than 100% higher. These included strategic thinking, crisis response, and information usage, functions directly tied to how leaders and teams operate in complex environments.
Research published in Management Science reinforces this connection by linking indoor environmental conditions to the quality of decision-making. Additional research has also linked lower ventilation rates to higher levels of employee sick leave, highlighting that air quality affects not only how people think, but whether they are able to perform consistently at all.
While these studies approach the topic from different angles, they point to the same conclusion: the environment in which people work and the air they breathe influence how effectively they think and act.
What makes this particularly challenging is that the impact is often gradual and difficult to isolate. When air quality is suboptimal, the effects do not always appear as immediate or obvious problems. Instead, they show up as reduced focus, slower decision-making, or lower overall energy. These outcomes are often attributed to workload, process inefficiencies, or individual performance, rather than to the conditions of the environment itself.
This is why air quality is easy to overlook. It does not announce itself in a single moment. It shapes performance quietly and consistently, influencing how individuals and teams operate long before results are reflected in any metric.
The Ownership Gap of Air Quality
Despite the growing evidence, most leaders have limited visibility into the conditions of their buildings. They can speak in detail about financial and operational metrics, yet cannot answer basic questions about how air moves through their workspace, how much fresh air is introduced, or how systems perform during the day.
The information exists, but it typically sits within facilities or engineering teams and is not connected to performance or brought into leadership discussions. As a result, decisions are made without a clear view of the environment where work takes place.
Air quality also lacks clear ownership. It spans multiple functions, including engineering, facilities, operations, and sometimes human resources, but no single team is responsible for understanding its full impact. When an issue sits across functions, it is less likely to be addressed consistently. It lacks a clear owner, a shared metric, and a direct link to business outcomes. Even with guidance from the World Health Organization and standards from ASHRAE, air quality is not consistently tied to leadership priorities.
The result is a gap between what leaders are responsible for and what they can see. Performance is managed at the output level, while some of the conditions shaping that performance remain outside the system.
From Background Condition To Performance Variable
In most organizations, air quality is treated as a background condition. It is assumed to be working unless there is a clear problem, and when it is discussed, it is framed as a facilities or maintenance issue rather than part of performance.
This limits how it is evaluated. When air quality is viewed only through cost or compliance, its broader impact is missed. Balanced ventilation (bringing fresh air in while exhausting the stale and polluted air out), filtration, and airflow directly affect how clearly people think, how teams collaborate, and how well they sustain focus.
A more useful approach is to treat air quality as a performance variable. Like other operational inputs, it can be measured, monitored, and improved. Ventilation rates can be assessed, filtration levels can be evaluated, and real-time air quality conditions can be tracked using tools that are already widely available.
The opportunity is not to introduce something new, but to view existing systems differently. When air quality is considered alongside other performance inputs, it becomes easier to connect building conditions to business outcomes and to make more informed decisions about how teams operate.
How Leaders Can Improve Performance
Addressing air quality does not require leaders to become technical experts, but it does require a more deliberate approach to understanding building systems and their impact.
The first step is to expand what is considered a performance input. If something affects how people think, focus, and make decisions, it should be part of how performance is understood.
The second step is to build visibility into building systems. Leaders should have a basic understanding of how air is circulated, how much fresh air is introduced, what type of filtration is in place, and how systems perform during peak occupancy. Engaging an HVAC provider for a high-level assessment can provide a clear starting point.
The third step is to connect across functions. Because air quality spans multiple teams, it requires coordination. Facilities, operations, and leadership each hold part of the picture, and aligning those perspectives enables more informed decisions.
Finally, improvements should be approached as operational decisions. In many cases, meaningful changes can be made through adjustments to balanced ventilation, upgrades to filtration, or changes in maintenance practices. These are often practical steps that can improve conditions without significant complexity. After all, in most organizations, people costs far exceed building energy costs, so even modest improvements in cognitive performance or reductions in absenteeism can materially outweigh the cost of ventilation and filtration improvements.
Air Quality Shapes Performance Before It Appears In Metrics
Leadership is often judged by visible outcomes such as growth, performance, and results. These are the measures that appear in dashboards and reports, and they are the basis for how success is defined.
But those outcomes are shaped well before they are measured.
They are shaped by the conditions in which people work, including factors that are easy to overlook because they are not immediately visible or easily captured in a metric. Air quality is one of those factors. It influences how people think, how consistently they can perform, and how effectively decisions are made throughout the day.
Leaders do not need to manage every technical detail of their buildings. But they do need to understand which conditions are influencing performance and ensure those conditions are aligned with how their organizations are expected to operate. In knowledge-based work environments, even small changes in cognitive performance can have outsized business impact.
The most important leadership decisions are often made before results appear. Expanding visibility into the factors that shape performance is one way to ensure those decisions are made with intention.
C200 member Valentina Videva Dufresne is President, North America and a member of the Group Executive Committee at Zehnder Group. She is a global business leader with experience driving growth, transformation, and operational excellence across industrial and technology sectors. Her work focuses on the link between leadership, performance, and healthy indoor environments, including how air quality, comfort, and sustainability affect human health and productivity. Valentina holds an Executive MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and is a member of the Exceptional Women Alliance, where she co-chairs the Board Pathways Council. She was recently recognized by TWICE as one of the 10 Powerful Women in Consumer Electronics.
