Making a book about better workplaces into a tool that could fix one
Expertise is only as useful as the number of people who can act on it.
JLL, one of the largest real-estate services firms in the world, had spent years learning what actually makes a workplace work — from the obvious (people want control over their own temperature) to the quiet (how much sound privacy shapes whether anyone can think). They'd distilled all of it into a book, The Green and Productive Workplace. But a book reads the same for everyone. It can describe a good workplace in general; it can't walk your floor and tell you what's wrong with yours. JLL wanted to close that gap — to hand every client the book's judgment, applied to their own offices.
Turning a book into a product
We started where the expertise lived: with the people who wrote it. Rather than work from the text alone, we sat with the book's authors and drew the reasoning out of their heads — which factors mattered, how they traded off against each other, what a good answer actually looked like. You can't productize judgment you don't understand.
The translation was the hard part. A few hundred pages of expert prose had to become a fixed set of questions and recommendations without losing the nuance that made the advice worth having — and no two clients wanted the same thing. Some chased environmental performance, others raw productivity, most a mix. So we didn't build one assessment; we built one JLL could tailor per client, standing up a focused version aimed at each customer's objectives, where they only ever saw the questions that mattered to them.
Collecting the answers was its own problem. A real assessment pulls on several people — a facilities lead, an HR head, a sustainability specialist — each holding a different piece, each free at a different time. We built a permission system and a collaborative workflow so the right expert answered the right question, over days or weeks, without anything getting entered twice or stalling on one person. And for clients running whole portfolios, we built powerful cloning and templating: a new building could start from one already assessed, turning fifty blank forms into a handful of real edits.
From a score to a decision
A recommendation only matters if someone acts on it, and different people act on different things — so the same assessment came back out as several reports, each built for a different reader. A two-page executive summary made the case at a glance for the people who sign off. A detailed breakdown gave building managers the full to-do list — what to change, and in what order. Portfolio views let an owner compare their own buildings against each other, and against an anonymized industry average, to see where they stood and where to start.
And underneath all of it, the numbers. Because payroll is the largest line item most organizations carry, we put real weight into modelling the financial case — estimating what each improvement would cost and the productivity it would return, and explaining why. A decision-making body could see the highest-bang-for-buck moves, weigh them against a budget, and understand the reasoning behind every figure rather than taking it on faith.
The tool ran quietly for the better part of a decade, assessing more than a thousand office environments on infrastructure cheap enough to leave running in the background.
The book told people what a better workplace looked like. The software told them how to get to one — one office at a time.