Skip to main content
veris logo

Culture of Sustainability

VERiS envisions a future where green building design features and building and organizational management practices intersect to foster social and environmental consciousness. This future consists of a ‘green’ workplace environment where sustainable practices are the default and easy to perform. This is what we call a culture of sustainability (COS). A COS is defined as shared values, norms, language, and practices focused on making individual and societal choices that foster social, economic and environmental sustainability. Our research on COS aims to address the ‘performance gap’ in green buildings. While green buildings are designed to reduce the energy used and green-house gases emitted by the building sector, green buildings do not always meet their performance targets. This occurs when the bidirectionality of the human interaction with the building is not sufficiently considered in the building design and development of targets (Fedoruk et al., 2015). Our work aims to close the performance gap by exploring factors related to how a COS may develop and be maintained over time, and how it may influence building performance, and occupant health, wellbeing and productivity.  


What are we doing? 

VERiS currently leads 5 projects related to Culture of Sustainability. These projects particularly centre green office buildings as the built environment of focus.  

  1. An intersectoral partnership led by VERiS exploring human the development and impact of a culture of sustainability over time and how to close the performance gap of commercial green buildings. 
  2. Telling the story of how evolv1, a state of the art, green building was born out of an intersectoral partnership across NGOs, industry, universities, and regional government in Ontario, Canada. 
  3. Are green buildings better? A longitudinal multiple case-study exploring how working in a green-certified government office building may promote employee health, wellbeing and productivity and how a COS may impact this.  
  4. A culture of sustainability initiative in evolv1 exploring a peer support group for reducing meat consumption.
  5. Exploring young job seekers attraction to working in green building.  

 Read more below

Contact Us:

E: veris@wlu.ca
T: 519.884.0710 x2982
Office Location: 232 King st West, Waterloo, ON N2G 4V6

Office Hours:

We are currently working remotely.