Chilly offices may lower productivity

Now that the weather is chillier, it may be tempting to conserve energy by turning down the thermostat in offices. But that may not be the best move for worker productivity.

Researchers know that work performance suffers when working conditions are too extreme. People become stressed out by loud, annoying noise or offices that are frigid. Now they’ve found that even subtle temperature changes affect performance. In short, comfortable employees do better work, they say.

In a small study of workers at a large insurance company, when office temperature increased from 68 to 77 degrees, output jumped 150%, errors dropped by 44%, and costs in lost productivity were reduced by $2 per hour, said Alan Hedge, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who headed the research team.

For a month, nine workstations at the Orlando, Fla., firm were equipped with matchbook-size sensors that provided a snapshot of the air temperature every 15 minutes. Researchers also used software to record the amount of time employees made keystrokes on the computer and the time spent correcting errors.

At 77 degrees, people were keyboarding at 100% of their capability with a 10% error rate. But at 68 degrees, their keying rate dropped to 54% of maximum with a 25% error rate, researchers found.

Even if people don’t consciously notice the dip in temperature, their bodies still react. “When people start feeling chilly, they get distracted, their body and mental processes slow down, and as their hands get cold, they lose some dexterity,” says Hedge. “So it makes good sense to keep the environment comfortable.”

The recently publicized findings were presented initially in June at the Eastern Ergonomics Conference in New York City.