Uber-blogger Jason Kottke catches a January item in urban design/architecture mag Metropolis about the Navy Federal Credit Union's new green call center in Pensacola. The chunk Kottke excerpts is the surprise. The building is mostly in compliance with green building principles (shorthanded LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). But there are times when the designers didn't follow the green building consultants recommendations. Why? They were balancing the efficiencies of the green building with keeping employees happy. The greening of the building contributes hugely to this outcome. And the bottom line is pretty impressive:

"Well, we definitely have energy savings: we've had one study that said 25 percent and another that said 40 percent. We pay a lot of attention to the energy model because we want to be efficient, because that leads to less pollution. But that's not where the savings are. The savings are all related to productivity." Navy Federal's wealth (they don't exactly have trouble getting long-term financing) means that Ebbesen could swallow higher up-front costs if it means a longer life span -- and indeed this building is designed for a 40-year cycle (generous for its type). But to be conservative he sticks to 30 years for the following calculation: over that time 92 percent of the organization's costs goes to employees, 6 percent go to maintenance and operation, and a mere 2 percent are represented by the initial construction investment. "When I show that on a slide," Ebbesen says, "it's kind of like, 'Duh, now are you paying attention?'"

When they set out to build these new call centers, they had staff turnover of about 60%. They weren't pleasant places to work. The Navy Fed builders employed the LEED guidelines because, as the project's leader said, it "helped us make decisions that would continually reflect on this idea of 'employee focus.'" The proof is in one statistic:

Today Navy Federal's Heritage Oaks campus, in Pensa­cola, Florida, has a turnover rate of 17 percent...

It's an impressive story that bears wider dissemination. Inside DC, we hear not exactly encouraging stories of organizations with an energetic commitment to clean/sustainable/green behavior in lots of ways but which don't turn their attention to the human face of doing business. They are all related.

In an attempt to improve the quality of the work environment, and with an absolute absence of ide­ology save a commitment to the work task at hand, Navy Federal stumbled onto sustainable architecture as a strategy and then--in a petri dish of their creation--implemented it with a rigor and scale difficult to find most anywhere. They drank the green Kool-Aid because it tasted good. They may appreciate the financial savings and planetary benefits, but their primary rationale couldn't be simpler: green building is good building, and good building is good business.