Slashdot Mirror
Warm Offices Boost Productivity
bluelip writes "It looks like the real reason for offshoring is corporations looking for warmer weather. Instead of paying the energy bills to crank up the heat in the office to a more productive temperature, the offices are moving to warmer areas. This article shows a 44% error reduction and 150% increase in productivity for those working in warmer offices. Will this increase in output be enough to convince my boss to pay for us to vacation-commute from a tropical island?"
68F = 20C
/my/ productivity goes way down when I'm asleep.
77F = 25C
(for those of use that use Celcius)
25C/77F is very warm. I prefer to work around 21C/70F. Any warmer than that and I'd be falling asleep. Certainly
T.
You mean I can type more accurately when I'm not shivering?
Will make us more productive?
This is a load of bulshit.
The ideal office temperature is much like the ideal bedroom temperature: 17C. Just enough not to freeze, and not hot enough to think you're on some beach.
I work much better at cooler temperatures and sit and do nothing when it gets warmer.
As a SE, i find inof like this really scary! I need a job!
...but it does nothing to help with cold fingers. And when my fingers get cold, they get stiff. When my fingers get stiff, I can't type as well.
Common sense, really.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I wonder if mcdonalds will pay me more if i complain about the temperature.
http://eric.blogdns.com/
Were they studying offices full of women only? Seriously. Women love to play with the office furnistat, even if they've been told not to 100 times.
The worst thing in the world is to be working in an office that's too warm. It's just horrible.
Here's a secret people: if you're too cold, wear warming clothing! If I'm too hot, I can't take off all of my clothes (and keep my job).
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
Does this study take into account the lost productivity due to taking naps in the stiffeling heat?
Cooler temps = more alert workers. (lots of Hot coffee to 'warm-up' helps too!)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Or perhaps Canadians should just wait for global warming to kick in, and reap the 44% in error reduction rewards!
Go burn those fossil fuels, Canucks!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
And I am happy with my 67F that my house sits at!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Studies like this are as old as the hills, but horribly inaccurate.
In the end, if you wish to increase productivity dim the lights. And monitor the results, productivity will go up. Increase the lighting a week later, productivity will again go up. Keep this up until productivity exceeds 100% efficiency.
I'm only half kidding.
Which is why I doubt the AC is gonna be lowered anytime soon. It would be a battle between HR and upper management, and while certainly a glorious battle it would be, uppper management usually wins.
I am quite the opposite, as warm or hot weather makes me unable to focus...
Between 18 and 16 Degrees Celsuis are perfect for me, then again, I do live in Canada.
100% of the time? Does this seem a little high to anyone else? Don't people take breaks for bathroom, /., etc?
It's worth pointing out that perhaps the most productive university in the entire world in the field of astronomy is the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
It is just a coincidence? Astronomers/Astrophysicists always seem to know where to build the best ground-based telescopes (Hawaii, Chile, the Canary Islands...)
While this is a little bit of a common sense study, I think its a little bogus. There are so many other factors. One week to the next?? I know for a fact that last week I didnt do crap, this week I have worked like a dog, and its only gotten colder.
I'm forwarding this on to my facility manager. It's freaking COLD in here! And it's not just in the winter that it's cold - it's ALWAYS cold in here. Someone decided to put a ton of servers in the next room, and the servers like it cold, but guess what? There's no way to isolate the two areas. Yeah, it affects productivity - we're always huddling around our space heaters shivering rather than typing.
Oh, and now we're not supposed to have space heaters. Thank God for surplus AlphaServers...
I'd rather wear warm clothes and have a nice warm drink in a cool environment than sit and sweat in a warm one.
the sake of our productivity.
^(oo)^pig~
It's hardly rocket science.
Some people will like working where the temperature is less than 20, some (like me) like working in temperatures over 35.
It's all a matter of opinion, you can't change productivity this easily.
Perhaps when the office was raised to 77 degrees the employees decided "The sooner I finish typing this the sooner I can go home to where it's not a friggin sauna"...notice they didn't have any data on the *duration* of work...just that when typing, they were more accurate.
I'd also like to see the gender breakdown on this, from my experience women like warmer offices and men like colder offices. Since it is secreterial (sp?) skills I'm going to go with the generilzation that there are more women in the group and hence that may be why there is an increase with temp.
No, but welcome your new office in sunny Bangalore, where the temps often exceed 100F and humidity reigns!
--Chag
now our software sweatshops will involve actual sweat. sweaty programmers, ewwwww.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
...when they start outsourcing all chair-moistening. Sector 7G owns chair-moistening. It will be a sad day for America if we let a chair-moistening gap develop.
we have a lot of hotties in this office and they all start wearing painted on pants and crop top shirts...... i cant work. it's torture. i love it and hate it all at the same time. none of the other geeks can work either. you can almost see the ropes pulling heads from across the room as one of them walks by. now, put yourself in our position and imagine how much worse it would be if it was warm year round.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
Seems like a pretty silly study without looking at the other end. What about 78 degrees? What about 80? Here in the South, we have more of a problem with it being too warm. I can't stay awake at more than 77 degrees. For working and sleeping, I do much better at 74. Sounds like half a study to me.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Not to mention that in 77 degrees (F), people in typical business attire would sweat their balls off. This sounds like a load of bunk to me.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
At my job we must wear an undershirt and a dress shirt or polo or sweater. We also have to wear socks and shoes, never sandals, and are disallowed shorts. 25 C would be unbearable and would make most of us doze off. 20 C is much more acceptable. However, the women there complain that it's cold unless it hirts 27 C. Go figure.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
If temperature was the pprimary concern, all those businesses would just relocate to south Texas, New Mexico, Alabama, etc.
And a *lot* of us don't want it that warm. If it gets above 74 or so, most of the people in our office get sluggish.
Warm office, bah. I get all my best work done in the deep freeze. Nothing like having your keyboard frozen solid to make you work extra hard typing that TPS report.
Then why do I have a bloody fan on my desk that's on all year?
I don't know about anyone else, but a warm office really hurts my productivity. Heck, when the A/C goes out, I think more about the temperature than the job at hand. It's also unpleasant coming into the office after doing a little bit of exercise, and spending the next 20 minutes wiping all the sweat off. Plus, warm offices feel somewhat stuffy.
Personally, I know some offices are nice and chilly, and it can hurt productivity, but too warm is probably a lot worse than too cold. (Too warm - get a fan - if you're still hot, tough. Too cold - a heater, sweater, anything - when you're warm enough (or feeling hot), take it off.
Then again, maybe I'm weird to prefer cooler weather. Me, like airplanes, like cold air... not hot (and possibly humid) air.
My office is too cold, and I don't have access to any sort of controls on it. I end up using my desklamp as a heat source.
I find that the cold makes me think less about work and more about how damn cold I am.
Finally, scientific evidence. I can't even begin to count how many hours I've wasted having to stop typing to warm up my hands. I once had a job where the office was so cold that I spent every lunch hour sitting out in my car in the middle of summer, defrosting. I know it helps people stay awake, but if I'm too cold to work, what's the point?
I usually have a fan pointed at me at my desk. Sometimes I even need a light jacket with it on, but I like the cool breeze. Cool room and hot coffee makes for good coding.
What are these people wearing? T-shirt and shorts?
Many workplaces require slacks and a collared shirt. Add an undershirt and I'm good for 70F.
We had an issue with our AC for a while and had to deal with 80F temps. We complained and complained to get it to 70-72F.
Isn't "room temp" 72F/22C ??
Warmer offices make people more productive? This is news?
I'll bet next week there is a counter study that offices that are too warm exhibit a decrease in productivity too. Sheesh
Anybody get the feeling that most research into working conditions is going to eventually rediscover common sense? Respect your employees, don't treat them like productivity units or morons, and don't subject them to unfavorable working conditions like poor equipment or temperature control. Guess what - they'll appreciate it and be more productive!
Of course, maybe this type of report is the only way to compel certain types of management to cough up the cash and up the thermostat to sane levels, but if you're working in a place like that I'll wager the management is more of a problem than the temperature.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
From Article: When the office temperature in a month-long study increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing output jumped 150 percent.
This is a well-known phenomenon, first seen in the Hawthorne studies. One of the first productivity studies was in a factory where the researcher first reduced the light, and productivity increased; then the researcher increased the light, and productivity still increased. The end result is that worker productivity increased indirectly merely by changing the work environment.
Maybe that's why we keep getting reorganized....
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
I question the results of the study for several reasons:
-My productivity / output do not corrolate to how much I type.
-How much I type does relate to what projects I'm working on and what I have to do that day. Perhaps the people who typed more had assignments that month that required more typing.
-68 degrees is comfortable for me. 77 is sweltering.
-In warm offices, my productivity falls.
-In warm offices, I get sleepy.
Around 88% of the productivity boost was attributed to the constant syncronized nagging from all the woman in the office decreasing at once when the temperature was raised. Male workers found they could get a lot more work done when not responding to "Isn't it cold in here" by the female workers throughout the day. And Female workers found they could get more work done when not nagging Male workers about how cold it was.
Why turn up the heat when you can simply turn on Clippy the OfficeAsisstant® to correct mistakes.
Here is a link to a site stating optimal office temperature between 69-73 degrees. Here
Now I did do a study in college (don't have the resources as it was a while ago) and I also came up with the statistic that 69 degrees is optimal. For those that are cold - you can always add more clothing, while those that are hot (typically men get hotter then women) can only take so much clothing off...especially in many offices where men are required to wear a shirt, tie and potentially a suit jacket.
I try and keep the office temp at around 69. When it goes above 71 *I* do start to get uncomfortable.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Me, I have a half-dozen computers sitting under my desk, all generating a lot of heat. If the ambient temp is too high, my legs are sweating and I'm falling asleep. So what's comfortable for those in a wide open reception area is roasting me alive in my cube.
Until they can control the ambient temperature to small regions of each floor, let's keep the temp on the cool side; you can always put on a jacket.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I work in an office that gets very cold during the fall and winter and I have noticed that my typing speed decreases dramatically when my hands are cold.
I think one of the productivity killers is just how sweet some companies/campuses are. I've interned at microsoft three times now and I always found it hard to concentrate because the whole experience of being there was so very cool. I'm not diagnosed ADHD though as a tech geek I'm probably it to some extent, and being in that environment made it hard for me to buckle down and concentrate.
I'm not saying that this should be removed from the companies, cause it's the major appeal of some places, but it's definetly something to keep in mind for any particular employee I think.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I've seen that the temperature you like the most depends on the climate you were raised at. So enforcing one temperature for all is not the best. A solution that seems to work is to set the thermostat low and have people who want it higher get personal space heaters. Yeah, that's efficient. But it works.
Fellow Canucks, let's make it a reality.
This is a good reason to move your office to India or the Phillipines!
All this time I thought I was just born lazy, but its actually the working environment.
Thanks Science!
In the study, which was conducted at Insurance Office of America's headquarters in Orlando, Fla., each of nine workstations was equipped with a miniature personal environment-sensor for sampling air temperature every 15 minutes.
Wow, what a meaningful sample size.
That, and the references to keyboards and accuracy makes it sound like it's purely a study of a typing pool to me. Probably female, probably requiring little in the way of creative/critical thinking, just a cosy space to get on with the tiresome task of earning a dollar.
This passes for 'research'...? Oh dear.
The article, and I did read it, said nothing about offshoring. You certainly don't have to move to a warmer climate to warm up the office a bit. I personally think the 77F mentioned in the article is too hot, but most offices I've been in keep the AC so cold that my fingers get stiff. The solution to cold offices isn't to move to the tropics, it's just to back off the AC a bit. I try to keep my office between 72-74F. Any warmer, and I start to get sleepy. Any colder, and my fingers start to turn blue.
77 is horrible if you're wearing a T-Shirt, a dress-shirt, and a tie. Keep it at 70 or lower. If people are cold, too bad: they can wear more clothes. People who always bitch about it being "too cold" and try to get the temp increased are one of my big pet peeves. My dorm rooms were always scorching, even in the winter. Damn Temperature Fascists.
It's 68 in here year round. During the summer, if they just set the AC to 74-75 it'd be more comfortable and I could spend less time shivering.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
When the office temperature in a month-long study increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing output jumped 150 percent.
Those data don't warrant the conclusion "Warm Offices Boost Productivity."
The improvement could simply be a result of the change. The gains might not be sustained over time. Lowering the temperature another 3 degrees six weeks later could also yield an improvement.
A change is as good as a holiday.
Warmth may seem great when you lack it but then the same can be said for coolness.
Type that ass...
I have a hard enough time keeping the rail-thin business people from turning the thermostat up to 85 every chance they get without a study telling them it's more productive. I'm somewhat irritated this was even posted simply for the chance it might spread via Slashdot readers mentioning it.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
At one office I worked in, my hands would become almost immobile and typing was often difficult.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
In the lab I work in the thermostat and heat registers are kept in two different parts of a large room divided by some bookshelves. Result: Thermowar. I come in, sit at my desk, and it's coooooold (sometimes near 60). So, I go turn the thermostat up to a lovely 68. Heat registers pump out heat, but by the time it reaches the thermostat it's close to 70F in my part of the lab. So, we turn the heat down. But, then it's too cold for people on the other end of the lab, who turn the heat up making my area like a trip to Guantanamo (without the snazzy orange suit). So, thermostat goes down, other workers get cold, pump it up. This goes on all day long. The result of my own personal study: after 71F, I start to get WPS (Warm Puppy Syndrome). To see what I am talking about, take one (1) puppy and apply heat and food liberally.
Workers might like it warm, but the equipment doesn't. Especially in the data center. I wonder if there are higher costs associated with cooling the data center in an area with a higher ambient temperature? Would those costs be enough to offset the increased production of the workers?
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Interestingly enought, they keep the air temp in hospitals cold for that exact reason. The cold snap helps keep the Docs on edge.
I had this idea a while ago. That I should make a software company that has no office building. It would consists of a cabana, lots of really comfortable beach chairs, a big safe to store important stuffs in, and a wire box with network/server and a WAP. All the employees would lounge about by the pool, or in the pool with waterproof laptops, doing work and connecting via wireless.
I mean seriously, what beats coding on the beach? And customers would love to do business with us even if we charged more than the competition. I think its a winner. Every day will be Hawaiian shirt day.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
sweatshops...hence the productivity increase.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
A sedentary job at 68degrees is a nightmare. Just cool enough to not have the shivers kick in until you have been chilled to the bone. The cold sort of sneaks up on you. I'd prefer 58, as the urge to grab a coat and a cup of coffee is immediate. Now when I moved furniture for a living, 68 was PERFECT weather (you had to actually do something before working up a sweat).
I'd also guess that this study was comprised of mostly women. Women tend to be lighter (less body mass), and be comfortable at a slightly higher temperature than men. I would find 77 to be a sweltering hell after about 4 or 5 hours. Winter in my house is always interesting, as my wife wants the thermostat on 80 and I try to find a room with an open window.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
This seems to be an interesting story. I'm not sure that I'm more productive when I'm warm (probably a bit of the opposite if it gets too warm), but I do find that it helps me to make less errors. I guess I never thought about it like that before.
See, when my hands get cold I tend to make more typing mistakes. One of the computers in my office has a vent blowing right across my hands when I use the keyboard on it. If I work on it for too long (I'd say over an hour and up) my fingers tend to get cold and my typing rate goes down. I guess it's probably due to a lack of flexibility in my fingers.
Still, I think I'd prefer that to having my office set at 77 degrees. That's almost uncomfortably warm for me, and It'd probably just put me to sleep.
-Through the server, over the router, off the firewall... Nothing but 'Net!
Temperatures in India climb to around 120 F during summer. The lowest temperature in the cities during the winters are between 50-60 F, and that too for a brief period. More often the offices need to be cooled so as to create reasonable working conditions.
This doesn't agree with another similar study I recall reading quite a few years ago. A group of college students were given written tests (similar to everyday college class tests) under controlled temperature conditions. The students who took the tests under cooler conditions scored better than students in warmer conditions. Humidity was also tested, moderately high humidity also improved test scores, but after a certain point, it gets too humid and scores declined.
Perhaps there is a difference in environmental effects between relatively mechanical work like typing, and purely mental activities like test taking.
I keep my office in the 75-76 range and people often say "your office is always warm!" So now I welcome people to "my tropical office."
I'm not sure if my productivity is any higher, but I do know that when it's cold, I don't seem to work as well. I rather be cozy while I work, I just seem to do better. My fingers don't hurt while I type like when it's considerably cooler in my office.
Warm bodies boost productivity too.
12:50 - press return.
No correlation of humidity on productivity. And secondly, the study tests workers in Florida who are aclimated to much warmer temperatures. 68 F is freezing to southerners but is okay for northerners as long as you don't engage in any physical activity.
Studies have shown people are more alert in a cooler environment...
And just about every place I have worked with stacks of cpus had to cool even in the winter....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Right now its like a sauna in my office that I share with a few other people and I'm not getting much done. Warm offices make me uncomfortable.
Here is one for you,
Old people like to retire where it is warm, and birds migrate to the warmer climates.
By nature we are influenced by weather when it is rainy and crappy out more often then not people are feelin extra crappy and crank. Where as if it is nice and sunny and warm then most people will much happier.
So then people that have a work enviroment that is more to there liking make them more productive.
Life is marked by pain.
They are measuring environmental conditions inside the office where workers are working (fine) but there is an implied causation that e.g. higher temperatures cause better productivity, because workers are exhibiting fewer keystroke errors correlating with the higher temperatures.
What if you look outside the box (building)?
Strains on the HVAC system causing fluctuations in internal environmental conditions, are caused by variations in the external weather (outdoors environment). Perhaps on nice warm days, workers feel happier on their way to work and are more upbeat. During shitty weather they want work to fsck off.
So this does not mean that you can just crank up the heating inside a building and get better worker productivity. That would be a naive interpretation.
Yes, it's about the illusion of reduced costs, but it's also about having employees that always follows orders without question and not having to have a conscience, due to their circumstances.
Case in point: Has anyone noticed that when you call an offshored call center about a bill dispute, there is nowadays a whole lot less understanding about your issue? They now take the tack of "deny deny deny". They just follow their script and don't have to understand or care about your issue. In other words, since they're from another culture, they naturally cannot have compassion for you and your problem.
Note: This isn't a slight against those who aren't American (or who aren't in the "first world"). What I'm saying is that offshored call center employees are separated from Americans by culture and by distance, so they either don't understand or don't have to have compassion for any issues we call them with. It's not like we can get in our cars and drive to their office and confront them. They are totally safe to follow their scripts and screw us over... protecting the bottom line of the corporate masters they serve.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Bloody hell, there's nothing worse that a warm office, unless of course your a woman !
;)
The perfect temperature for an office is around 20°C/68°F if your a guy.
For women, the perfect temperature would be around 40°C/104°F, or at least you would think so
Where on earth the get the idea that a warm office makes you more productive I just don't know - more bullshit stats. It just makes you sleepy.
It's like some other stupid stats I read about the sex of babies - according to a study on about 3000 couples, they are more likely to have a boy if they live together. Yep folks, the results were 51% boy, 49% girl - for christ sake, who funds this rubbish ?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
In the new building where I work IT has it's own closed off area so we can work in peace and harmony. Only problem is, to save money, the CEO decided IT doesn't need it own thermostat. One half of the room is controller by a thermostat down the hall in the IT manager's office, and the other half of the room is controller by the thermostat on the other side of the building in the accounting department's office right under a heating vent. I tell you... we either freeze to death or sweat our guts out. One of the girls here generally moves into the server room to do her work during the winter. At any rate, I was pretty miffed about IT having to suffer like this - I've had a cold non-stop for about the past year and half - just to save a few dollars on building costs. I'm forwarding this article to the powers that be and hope they take it to heart before I die of pneumonia.
See this is why hawaiians can come up with things like a G4 emulator at 80% host speed.
When the office is too cold, my fingers are too stiff to type efficiently.
i wuold'nt be so shure of taht
I had an astrophysics prof in college from India who said in class, I kid you not, "It is very warm in here. It puts you to sleep. Maybe that is why the cooler northern countries have been historically more advanced industrially." Dunno if there is any truth to that but it certainly woke me up.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
In the slides, it's pretty clear that office temperature increased throughout the day on average, while errors decreased throughout the day. How do they know this isn't more about awakeness than than temperature?
Large scale data collection in the field is great, but you gotta make up for in analysis all the precautions you didn't take during experimental design....
I think the problem is we're talking about girls; something you may have read about, but no direct experience with.
Maybe today's moderators are commercial property managers. I used to be (18000 sq. ft building, 35-40 people), and I can tell you it's true. Some women just can't get enough of turning the thermostat up or down. Not all women do this, but if someone was touching the thermostat, 95 times out of 100 it was one of the women.
Heaven help anyone who has a thermostat and a woman going through menopause in their office. We had a lady who would adjust the thermostat four or five times a day.
Lockboxes on all five thermostats throughout the building solved that problem, although she still tried to stick a letter opener in through the slots in the lock box. (Strangely, there were six HVAC zones, but we could only find five of the thermostats. We think one of them was buried inside a wall during a remodel.)
We only have one woman in the office now since we relocated and downsized (six employees total), and she still gets up and looks at the thermostat but she's considerate enough to not change the setting. None of the men have ever touched the thermostat except for me, and I only make seasonal adjustments to it.
Putting moderation advice in your
150% increase in productivity?
Switching from assembler to a high level language doesn't give that much of an increase.
Raising the office temperature by 5C does?
My ass it does.
--
Toby
The hotter it is the more productive workers are. Logical conclusion for my management, I better start wearing shorts to work, or perhaps a bathrobe because I fully expect to come into work tomorrow to face sauna-like conditions.
Iran supports Bush
Scrooge should have gave Cratchet more coal, he would have worked harder.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
i work in sunny south florida, and i'm still reading slashdot just like i did in colder climates...
In the study, which was conducted at Insurance Office of America's headquarters in Orlando, Fla.,
News flash: People in Florida like it warm. They are acclimated to warmer temperatures. This is a city whose average high is 73 in December and it rarely gets below 45. Take the same study to Burlington, Vermont for instance, and they'll find out that people work better at 68 rather than 77.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
He obviously isn't a history prof. Northern European countries have been the most advanced for about 2-300 years. What about Italy? What about China? What about the Middle East? All were the most advanced during their times.
Correlation != Causation
When the temperatures were *lowered*, accuracy went down - that's direct, observable, causation.
Unless you're trying to suggest that subject's changing accuracy caused the researchers to lower the temperature?
The responses on this thread just illustrate perfectly the degree of brainwashing of most Americans. The corporate regime has been able to get Americans to go along with the idea that everyone should spend their lives working hard just like little hamsters on their wheels, little rats running their mazes.
Americans should see America as a business, but one where THEY are the owners, and not the worker drones. Do you see business owners worrying about how "productive" they are, about how many words per minute THEY type? Instead of worrying about helping the corporate plantation squeeze as much work as possible out of ourselves, we should be thinking about how America can be organized so that we have as little work to do as possible.
Life is finite, people....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
In Soviet Russia, this report doesn't explain shit.
I've been around long enough in the computer industry to have seen hundreds of studies like this produced over decades. Every one claims some remarkable productivity increase through some environmental change: raise the temperature, lower the temperature, paint the walls green, have everyone program in a big "war room," have everyone program in separate offices, have people program in pairs, waft chamomile scents through the air, conduct team building exercises, etc etc. Each time, the study claims huge productivity increases (>200%). None of the studies are ever replicated by anyone else. When their recommendations are put into practice, productivity always remains the same.
The lesson is this. There is no trendy, simple way of doubling productivity. There is no magic bullet. And, isolated studies can be quite mistaken.
I can say in complete confidence, hot offices kill productivity too. Aside from making staff miserable, it also makes it...you guessed it, hard to stay awake! Yay!
:)
Personally, having grown up in the North West I'd take a cold office over a hot office any day. I don't mind wearing a sweater or a parka or whatever, but bosses tend to get kind of wierd when you start stripping down to your skivvies.
Quack, quack.
Iran supports Bush
'nuff said
..., the Bat Cave only comes in one temperature.
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
I'm at my most productive when I'm in Antarctica. I'm going to be a lone coder for the first winter over at Dome C, starting next months.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Sorry bluelip but I think your WAY off base thinking that companies outsource to have more productive offices - via temperature. How about benefits, insurance and (the mother of all reasons) no payroll taxes. (At least the article didn't come to the same conclusion.)
Cherio, and good day!
Too much heat gives me headaches and causes co-workers to spend time complaining its too hot.. Doesnt improve anything...
"warm" as an abstract word is useless..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now the office is warm and I also have excuses :)
http://info.indiatimes.com/it/slide/1.html
The best ROI is from a sweatshop.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The results aren't too surprising for pure neuromotor tasks like typing transcription. Muscles and tendons work a good deal better when warmed-up. Hands loose heat quickly.
Older studies of more cerebral tasks (writing exams) have shown an optimum much colder, around 50'F (10'C). I have successfully written exams much colderi 40'F (5'C) , yet still found myself heated and sweating from the mental effort by the end.
With all the bosses in most offices, there should be no shortage of hot air.
There was a study decades ago where IQ tests were administered at different temperatures. It turned out we're smartest (as measured by those tests, anyhow) at about 45 degrees F, and decline above that.
Then again, intelligence may not correlate with the urge to produce. Wasn't there that study out a few weeks back showing that monkeys were more "productive" at a repetitive task if their neuronal reward circuits were disabled? Those who still experienced the pleasure of reward would put off work until just before the reward was anticipated, while those without the pleasure would just keep working no matter when.
So maybe warm = stupid = less feeling of accomplishment, but "paradoxically" if you're performing some drone task may make the boss very happy with the consequences.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
In the study, which was conducted at Insurance Office of America's headquarters in Orlando, Fla., each of nine workstations was equipped with a miniature personal environment-sensor for sampling air temperature every 15 minutes.
So 9 induhviduals is a valid sample for the good Professor? Where is the control group?
I can see why clueless media would report such tripe. However, I cannot believe that a scientist would actually put his name on such a "study". Prof Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell's Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory, a pox on your house for your lousy work and your low standards. You just gave a bad name to Cornell.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
The Hawthorne effect is widely know and widely taught in psychology curricula. It is also easily corrected for by using a control group. I think it's safe to assume that any study that actually gets published has done so.
Actually, errors were computed via keystrokes. If it's chilly enough, typing errors go up if you don't slow down. This may or may not be a productivity problem, since there are few workers for whom typing = productivity directly (usually there's thought).
Oh, and today we will have a high of 94F and 84% relative humidity.
(I'd kill for a 70F or less office!)
We got plenty of heat and third world humidity. Shit we have vultures and snakefish, cousins marrying cousins, no shoes, poor people and the worlds best white trash rednecks too.
Come to the Tarheel state. It's like Mumbai except the people don't speak English.
Here in Florida I'm lucky if my AC can handle keeping the temperature at 78! For us, 85 is warm, and 75 is a comfortable cool. You pampered bastards...
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Additional clothes are also an additional discomfort and barrier to motion (and therefore efficiency and productivity).
The parts of the body most essential to working are the your sensory organs, mostly concentrated on/in the head, and your digits. Both of these areas are difficult-to-impossible to warm-up using clothing solutions, without also impeding the senses or manual dexterity.
Wearing heavy or layered clothes in cold weather, depending on the fabric and design, can also be erratically uncomfortable due to human sweat response, condensation and subsequent evaporation.
Being from California, this doesn't come as much of a surprise. It's stating the obvious to say people prefer environments that they're comfortable in. That would explain why people who claim to be terrified-of-earthquakes-and-prefer-tornadoes keep moving here.
BTW, the article does not address what the climate is outdoors. So forget about using this as a justification for your boss to let you telecommute from Florida, as the story-poster suggested.
The article just looks at effects of indoor temperatures on workers who do brainless keyboarding for an insurance company in Orlando. It would be interesting and undoubtedly different results to find what environments people prefer for coding and other jobs that require thinking. For example, some coders perfer lower light settings. And I'd be inclined to believe each individual's own preference on such things is most likely to be what works best for themselves.
If they watched in secret, turning up the heat and secretly disabling the local thermostat and controling the temperature from somewhere else, then I think you would get a more realistic result. However, then you would have people freaking out once they knew they were being watched (about privacy etc). That is, unless they could monitor only keystrokes without watching people, and get results that would be useful for interpretation. Legally, in most if not all cases in the United States and Canada (I can't speak about other countries), what's on the computer at work is company property and not the employee's, so technically that wouldn't infringe on privacy. (It might piss people off and create bad feelings, but it wouldn't infringe on privacy.)
Mind you, they were talking about an insurance company, so they are probably looking at data entry people and the like, not programmers or commputer people in general. Data entry type jobs often do have some sort of 'head clerk/overseer/foreman' watching. So maybe the experiences of the people in this forum don't reflect the environment (no pun intended) of this particular study, and that's why we don't relate to it. In the environment the study was done in, perhaps it is true and the 'turning up the heat physically turns it up psychologically' idea has some merit.
OUCH! I started thinking. That REALLY hurts. I think I'll go put some ice on my brain.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
OMG, is _that_ where so-called research institutes abuse their massive DoD funding budgets for ??
I guess the former well reputed research institute has been evaded with high profile corporate marketing spin-doctors, calling themselves professor or such. Next they publish their report fag at the on-line sales page, where Fortune 500 corporations buy it like cheese cakes. Why? This report is the ultimate scientific spin-doctored proof that even more severe out-sourcing of jobs will boost productivity and thus Corporate Profits.
This makes me feel sick.
Robert
Why can't they just shut the heat off completely and rely on the CPUs and monitors to heat the room? Just tell the workers to deal with it and wear extra layers. Its good on the heating bill and keeps the PCs nice and chilly. Think about it, cooler temps help the PCs run better, and makes it so that they break less often (except with n00bs who dont RTFM) thus saving money on PC repair and replacement. So as you can see, keeping the ofice cooler is better on the budget in the long run.
I find that when we have the temp lowered from 82 F to 78 F we work more. When the temperature is 82 F, all we do is complain about how hot it is. Once upon a time it was 68 F in here, we were very productive then. We had to be or we'd start to chill.
Perhaps I am just a sissy but the room is just cold enough to make my fingers go stiff. The rest of the body I can dress up but you can't type with gloves on.
Luckily it was only for 2 months and the other work conditions made more then made up for it.
Advantage to working in a secure hosting location? The suits don't have a pass and security has a dog Oh and no mobile phones, Sorry :P Two months of undisturbed coding. Bliss. Cold but Bliss.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Reading the PDF, it appears that he's discovered that "people work more efficiently when it's neither too hot nor too cold" etc. No shit, Sherlock.
As to the "evidence", have a look a slides 19 and following (of 30) - VERY variable distributions with a "line" straight through them. Errors bars? No - doesn't look like he got that far through college.
Add to that:
o no definitions of assumptions (applications used, etc).
o I think he's assuming that the mouse is only used to correct errors (but because it's so vague, it's difficult to be sure).
One of my uncles was a union negociator. He was called whenever the discussions between management and unions went south and his job was to mend things.
Once, he was called in a machine shop where workers had gone on strike after fighting with management over apparently irrelevant issues.
After peeling the various layers of gripes, it became clear that tempers had flared for no real discernable reason. And then, my uncle noticed something: It was really warm in the floor (this was in the winter).
It turned out that the temperature for both the machine floor and the offices were controlled by a thermostat that was in the office of the boss' secretary, an older woman who liked it warm.
The thermostat was moved to the floor, the boss got a space heater for her secretary, and the work relationships improved markedly.
So maybe this study is relevant for nine female underactive office clerks. But put machine shop workers wearing their full security attire in a 77F environment, and they will mill your butt off!
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Putting on more clothes works to a point but there are limits. I've worked in an office that was so cold my hands we're practically numb. Typing in ski gloves really hurts my productivity.
>>
:-)
"I recomend my highly patentable invention: "typing gloves." Take a pair of cheap wool gloves (army surplus wool gloves work great) and cut the fingers off at the first knuckle (of the gloves, not your hands) and presto! all the warmth of not-cold hands, with the dexterity required to hit 90 wpm."
>>
High school marching bands have been doing that for years. I always felt it was kinda' silly, but when your [affordable-for-a-public-school] supplier only has two sizes of gloves and there are more than two sizes of hands, cutting off the tips of the fingers can improve dexterity (and blood flow!)
However, towards the end of football season, when it begins to snow... you'd wish you'd kept even that little bit of extra warmth. Just the opposite from your intentions
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Um, I officially want to call bullshit on this on behalf of all men on the planet stuck in offices that are blisteringly hot...because of women who DO NOT LIKE TO BE COLD.
This study should've gone further and broken down the data on gender, because I have yet to find a guy in the various offices that I've worked in that thought the temps in the office were TOO COLD to WORK PRODUCTIVELY.
On the contrary, I've had nearly drop-down-dragged-out fights with the ladies in offices where I've worked because of the thermostat. No -- I'm not a violent man -- I'm not putting smackdown on cold female co-workers. I'm talking about insidious "cold war" (no pun intended) tactics -- surreptitiously bumping UP/DOWN the thermostat on the way to the can; taking informal "polls" asking how COLD people think the office is; etc.
The only way I've found to combat the never ending "cold ware" in my office is to basically lay down the equivalent of mutually assured grossing out. I basically tell the ladies in the office whining about the cold that I can either take of my shirt to stay cool and let them turn up the heat, or they can put on more clothing.
Man boobs are a powerful weapon in the hands of the right male.
IronChefMorimoto
FAT PEOPLE STINK. Keeping the air cooler reduces their offensive odors. In any given office I've ever been in, at least half and usually closer to 75% of people are overweight with a fair portion of those being morbidly obese. And just like at movie theaters, when there is a variety of people in an indoor setting, you will encounter a wide variety of smells -- good, bad and ugly.
Since my employer moved to a new location, I know what warm office means. The windows don't reflect any sun, instead of that black, punctured plastic jalousies are available. This results in up to 35C during summer time, and 25C in the winter if and only if we open windows partially. North side of the building might be colder whenever heating fails.
;-)
May the people who created the study should come here so that they can do something more productive. But in the end they start producing hot air, heating the building even more
I live in Florida and my brain turns to mush in warm weather. In the 70's I read a Reader's Digest report of a study done by typists in warm vs. cool weather. The warm weather tests produced 800% more mistakes. 77 degrees is still a bit too warm for concentration IMO. I think 74 degrees is the best temperature.
All those workers in India (or other locations where development work is being outsourced to) work in COOL Air Conditioned offices - translation - being productive has everything to do with body comfort and nothing to do with excessive warmth in the office.
As someone above has said, it may have more to do with a change than to do with the actual temperature.
All views my own. Anyone else with the same views needs to have his/her head examined.
If that were true, then why isn't there a corresponding set of industrially advanced countries in the cool south?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hmmm, with the UberHurtz CPU's out there it would seem that the greater number of high performance CPU's an office had, the warmer it would be. A greater number of newer machines, may factor in to the productivity data as well.
I find that my productivity goes down when I'm too busy trying warm up my frozen fingers AND I can still fall asleep if its cold.
Another thing to think about... for every degree colder that the thermostat is set, the air conditioner has to work that much harder to cool the air which translates into more electricity used and more $$$ spent for it. For every degree the thermostat is raised, 2-3% is saved on the electricity bill and you have the added benefit of conserving resources.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
"At 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the workers were keyboarding 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate, but at 68 degrees, their keying rate went down to 54 percent of the time with a 25 percent error rate,"
The workstations had monitoring equipment fitted, the people knew what was going on (well, you wouldn't miss the temperature varying from 68 to 77, would you) and they worked out an appropriate response. Well, nearly appropriate -- that 100% could only be believed by someone with a very pointy head or by someone in a very high ivory tower.
Give me a cold machine room to work in any day. Temp is kept at 66F. Humidity is properly regulated. Plenty of air moving. If you were really hot you could just pop a floor panel and bask in the forced air. The only downside was the sound (Cyber 730s, band printers, disks and tapedrives, modem racks with at least one fan losing a bearing, etc..)
If the AC went out the environmental monitoring unit would set off loud bells throughout the entire building and things got fixed. Not like when the office gets hot these days and you're told "we'll have it fixed in a couple of days -- keep working."
Those were the days.. For those that remember the CDC Environmental panel you have to have fond memories of that innocuous button labelled "LAMP TEST". It tested a hell of a lot more than just the lights on that panel. As the unsuspecting operator usually found out during training.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
For example, when I'm working at LTF in Ohio in Summer, my office consists of either a spool or a picnic table. My chair is either another spool or a parts bin. And it's about 110-120 in the plant.
Now, when working at MBUSI, my office is still a picnic table. But it's in a cage in an air-conditioned plant. About 70 degrees in the Alabama Summer.
And the sweat doesn't make my trackball all slippery. And my safety glasses don't fog up when I try to squint at the screen.
I promise you, I work more "effeciently" in the cooler environment. "Effeciently" in quotes because effeciency is about as consistent in definition as TCO.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Americans should see America as a business, but one where THEY are the owners, and not the worker drones.
What does this even mean?
Do you see business owners worrying about how "productive" they are...?
Absolutely. If you own a business (or a part of one) then you're very interested in the value of the business. If you happen to also provide output for the business (there are many employee owned companies out there) then you're also very interested in efficiency, because you see a return on it.
...we should be thinking about how America can be organized so that we have as little work to do as possible.
We already do. Some people work more, some people less. Those people who work more don't have to. But for whatever reason, the rewards are enough to do this (they want more cars, vacations, enjoy their work, etc).JOIN US FOR PONG!
77 is horrible if you're wearing a T-Shirt, a dress-shirt, and a tie.
In that case, why not skip the T-shirt?
(Disclaimer: Fahrenheit temperatures are meaningless to me, so I have no idea whether 77 is hot, cold or reasonable)
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
The study neglects to point out is that all productivity increases disappeared when they took into account the effect of the increased levels of B.O. in the office.
Cuba awaits you.
Or you could try learning from history, but I guess then your precious little thesis crumbles, so it's best to ignore inconvenient little hurdles like facts. Ah, ideology.
or at least periodic relief from same...
From personnal experience, it might not be because of the temperature per se, but rather WHERE the temperature is warmer. :-)
I live in Canada, and in the winter months, I hardly see any sunshine. I noticed that people tend to become less energetic during those times.
In comparison, some time ago I lived in Japan for several years and in the winter months, especially in Tokyo, the sky was invariably bright blue in the morning. I don't know about everyone else, but the mood of peoples around me was very different. (Of course, in Tokyo, during the rainy season, people get just as down as canadians do in winter....)
Where do they get this? I've worked in climates near the equator and I can tell you, the fact that it's hot and humid outside has nothing to do with the temperature in the offices. Most people keep jackets at work because the AC is usually jacked way up...
Since working on a Data center floor for years I've become accustomed to sub 70F temperatures. The colder the better!
Other Data center people I know feel the same way. Am I alone here?
Maybe this was just the case of the Hawthorne effect. Hawthorn Effect The study should have included what would have happened if the temperature was cooled after being heated, etc. If you follow the links you will get to a summary powerpoint of the research. The powerpoint of the has pretty pictures of how 9 people were studied for 16 days. Hardly much of a study if there are not many scientific controls. The sample size seems a tad small for such a sweeping generalization that 25C is a better temperature. The study also looked at noise, lighting, air quality and vibrations.
This study flies in the face of all studies before it, where it was discovered and documented time and time again, that people are more productive in the 68 to 70 degree range F. I am assuming there was a genetic mutation involved, that, or the subjects knew they were being studied, and thereby increased productivity to skew the results. Come on people, double blind studies please.
On one contract I worked on, the office was regularly freezing cold during the winter months. One day it was so cold I had to code with gloves on. The boss saw this, saw how much it slowed down my work (I managed about 1 keystroke every 5 seconds). The next day a new heater arrived and the office suddenly became warm again :-)
In Puerto Rico the average temperature inside of an office building is 86F with high humidity. Therefore no money is spent on heating but a LOT is spent on cooling.
Coding under this weather will drive you insane.
Cheers,
Adolfo
"It looks like the real reason for offshoring is corporations looking for warmer weather."
Why does every third Slashdot story have to contain some sophomoric, contentious and/or unfounded sentence in the lead-in? These sorts of things generate, as a rule, a huge amount of off-topic flaming and often frame the actual article in question in a distorted light ("Ask Unix Co-Creator (sic) Rob Pike"). It'd be nice if there was a little less raw opinion and random editorializing splattered across the actual stories. It's only a few lines; for heaven's sake try to be a little professional.
It's 59 F outside. Someone tell me why in the world our ofice building AC is still ON? I'm typing this while feeling pain in my hands from the cold and wearing a jacket inside my office room.
IT IS FREEZING
This isn't really news... I've heard teachers say for a long time that a class' score on a test/exam correlates with the temperature in the room. Too cold or too hot, and the score decreases.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Whoops, silly middle mouse button...
... in the middle of snow season. If you're really nice, I'll let you climb up the 20 foot ladder to the 2nd story, get on the roof, and shovel snow off the roof (note- it's best not to shovel all of the snow, as you'll slip and fall to a painful death- always leave a 'walking path' of the snow to escape back down the ladder).
My house sits at 60F. I'm comfortable. My work is allowed to fluctuate between 72 and 81 degrees- which is a royal pain. All to save 'money'.
But all the solder in your computer was turned to gold, until you stopped looking at Google. I might be missunderstanding what I know about how Google managed to convert crappy old X86 into lots of money, but I think it had something to do with their software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Warm Offices "causea" increased productivity "causes" offshoring to warmer climates.
What a crock.
Editors, what are you smoking, and can I have some, too?
A few of my co-workers and I participated in an experiment like this at our office where they examined our productivity as a function of room temperature.
It turns out that at 0 K, all activity came to a complete halt.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Well, my post is highly offtopic. But might shed some light to your (or your teacher's) thought:
While I live in a colder part of Brazil, there are those to the northern parts (warmer) which are considered very lazy and slow (baianos, for instance). Yes, sleeping after eating in a warm climate is very easy.
But I think that's not the point. I think the point for better tech in cold climates is that if you don't work in the summer, you starve in winter. So you just work a lot... or bears get fat in summer.
Some people have summer the whole year, and plenty of natural growing food too. Why bother to work when you can get _that_ easy life... but then, it's just a thought.
reason defies logic
It seems that some of universities in colder regions pull off some amazing scientific research. We're always hearing about great things being done in Sweden, the UK, Canada, Iceland, etc. My guess is that if it's too warm everyone hits the beaches and the men are distracted watching women in their revealing summer apparel.
If all women had to wear several layers of clothing at work I would probably be way more productive. And less likely to end up involved in a sexual harassment suit that could cost a company millions.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think many offices are *too* warm. I often have to carry a personal fan to cool off. I don't think being sweaty or sticky helps productivity. But, it seems that everyone prefers different tempuratures. It seems to me that most females usually complain that it is too cold. Their metabolism is slower than males for the most part. Maybe warmer tempuratures make them more productive, but no me.
Perhaps productivity levels off when a person reaches a comfortable tempurature and then drops slightly when they are too warm. A productivity chart might look something like this:
|||||||||| Too Cold
||||||||||||||||||||| Comfortable
||||||||||||||||| Too Warm
If this is the curve for an individual, then the overall productivity may rise at higher tempuratures because the drawbacks of those who are too hot does not completely offset those with a slower metabolism brought into the comfort level.
In other words, the study might reflect an increasing total average, but may not apply to individuals. (Maybe they covered that when the article is no longer slashdotted.)
Perhaps they should do the study based on how comfortable people are, and put people together with similar comfort profiles and re-run the studies. That way the coldies are not altering the total so much.
Table-ized A.I.
I wonder if this has an effect on it. I like it cooler. Too hot and I become very unproductive. Also it can make me start feeling Sick. I've always slept in cooler climates. I literally like to sleep with 1 blanket in a 40-50 degree room. And Like to work in around 68-72 degree room. I wonder if the majority of to hot/cold people sleep in different climates also.
Let's warm up the whole planet, and then we'll all be living in tropical climes. Think of the productivity burst!
Of course, this may be somewhat offset by short-skirts and belly-tops being used year-round.
It's a win-win. Sweet!
Brilliance doesn't need a sig.
That is because 400 years ago, Northern Europe did not have the Potato. The introduction of the Potato into Europe is what enabled countries like Britain, Germany and Russia to grow their populations to the point that they went from backwaters to world powers.
Maybe typing increased because everyone was writing emails to their friends bitching about the office temp. Could have been working on their resume too.
The report is based on a very biased experiment. 9 cubicles were monitored for a short period of time (1 month) in 1 building in one physical location (florida). Not exactly a sample group that represents ALL workers. I would think that people live/work in florida because they like it warm. Monitor 10,000 cubicles in 1000 buildings across all temperate zones for 12 months and cross reference the internal temp with the external temp then write up what temp's are better for productivity.
It takes some getting used to temperatures. I personally love the cold, yea I am a bit over weight, but not by so much as to insulate myself at 9F (In t-shirt and shorts)(I just enjoy cold). On the other hand I have a hawaiin friend up here (snow country). When he comes to college in the fall he is wearing a sweater at 80F... By Winter there is snow on the ground and no more than 40F and he is wearing flip flops and T-shirt.
In fact in our office yesterday it was up to about 78F, by that temp most people had their windows in letting the 30F air in just so we wouldnt DIE. Plus, in a "78F" office, have you ever walked into a server closet that doesnt have its own temp control? DEATH... Boil an egg on the floor and the entire deal.
snowulf.com
New justification for running a sweat shop.
If only to partition the smell.
I do my best work at about 67-68 F.
At 77 I don't even breathe as well.
But then, I'm from the mid-lattitudes, halfway between the pole and the equator.
Then why didn't that happen to Peru and Bolivia where potatos came from?
'Keystrokes per minute' sounds like a crappy measurement for productivity to me. It could, for example, also be interpreted as MSN-ing a lot.
Same goes % of corrections for accuracy. It could be sloppy typing, but it could also be not noticing or caring about mistakes made.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
And I work on the internet.. Its so hot here (average 90+F every day) that I run air conditioning 24/7.
;-)
It definitely gets too hot to work and has a huge impact on productivity unless you have air conditioning.
I estimate that my productivity is 30% of normal without AC.
With that said, its pretty nice when you go to the beach.
It's not the heat, it's the humidity!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
just before reading the article as far as I know not such warm climate is optimal :)
see
http://www.usaweekend.com/00_issues/000116/000116b iology.html
Pay attention to air quality. Cool, dry air, especially on your face, helps keep you alert, while heat and humidity make you drowsy. Studies show that mental performance, such as rule-based logical thinking, can be reduced by 30% at temperatures not even warm enough to cause sweating. So keep the room at 70 degrees, the average optimum temperature for mental work in the United States. (Not everybody shares the same optimal temperature -- some are "cold-blooded"; others are "hot-blooded" -- so you may need to adjust up or down.)
see also http://schoolstudio.engr.wisc.edu/energysmartschoOptimal Thermal Conditions Thermal comfort has been shown to influence task performance, attention spans and levels of discomfort. In general, historical empirical studies going back 50 years have indicated that temperatures above 80 degrees F tend to produce harmful physiological effects that decrease work efficiency and output (McGuffy, 1982). Thermal conditions are below optimal levels affect dexterity, while higher than optimal temperatures decrease general alertness and increase physiological stress. One researcher (Harner, 1974) when reviewing optimal temperature levels for the performance found that reading and mathematical skills were adversely affected by temperatures above 74 degrees F. Reading speed and comprehension were most affected by temperature. A significant reduction in reading speed and comprehension occurred between 73.4 degrees F and 80.6 degrees F. This researcher also found that achievement is mathematical operations such as multiplication, addition and factoring have been shown to be significantly reduced by air temperatures above 77 degrees F.
Read Guns Germs & Steel - Peru and Bolivia were relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Civilizations in Eurasia were constantly trading animals, techology and diseases back and forth for thousands of years, which allowed them to collectively advance much faster then ancient Peruvians who were isolated. While Peruvians did have the Potato, they did not have good technology, horses nor diseases. They didn't even have use of the wheel because they did not beasts of burden that would make it actually useful.
For Northern Europe, who had access to Eurasian technology (some developed by Rome, some by China, etc) but could not grow much food, the Potato was the one last key that unlocked their potential. As soon as they did not have to have 99% of their people subsistence farming, England, Germany and Russia started kicking ass.
I'd like to see a similar study done for classrooms, especially now that all kinds of data is being gathered and "drilled down." Maybe it would convince my school to maintain a normal temperature in my frigid classroom. Actually my classroom is frigid when it's warmer out and hot when it's colder. The climate control has no middle ground. not that the little box on the wall in my room has anything to do with the temperature.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
... it's the effing TIE that gets me! Can't we come up with something better? Sheesh!
I prefer hot and my hot female coworkers with as little clothes as possible ( I work at HP but not in the US).
That explains why sweatshops are so efficient.
I can believe this. One of the reasons I left IT is that I got sick of the sysadmin being relegated to some shitty windowless office regardless of where I worked. There's nothing to make a man grumpy or groggy like having to go without fresh air or sunlight all damned day, especially when you're working all day and into the night during crunch times. The only exception was a dotcom I worked at that left the flourescents off, bought everyone halogen lights, and used short cubes so that what light did come in was spread around. Good luck getting an employer to do that now.
I remember reading that MSFT built the Redmond HQ offices in an X shape to create more window offices. The only other exception I can think of was Sallie Mae's Virginia HQ where they put executive offices and conference rooms in the middle of each floor and gave all of the window area to the cube dwellers, but they shipped IT to Indiana to save money.
Now I'm going into art & design. I have a home office with four big Windows, and a home art studio with six windows, four of which run floor-to-cieling. It's pretty fucking sweet.
Dr Yang Jwing Ming suggests that this productivity difference is due to the "natural" magnetic polarity of the human body and how the Earth's magnetic field helps or hinders that depending whether you are in the North or South Hemisphere.
FWIW...
I'm rather dyslectic and being dutch I make many errors, the english language is so much easier (which is why I write documentation in english).
:-)
However I found out that my spelling improves a lot when it is cold, like about 18 degrees C. Luckily the office I work in is at about that temperature.
I found out on IRC where I do use the dutch language, and someone commented to me that I almost didn't make any mistakes, and it was very cold in my house. Some weeks later it happened again. Sure that is not much of a statistic
So their saying comfortable and or content workers=productive workers. Theirs a suprise. Next news: The One Ring;;Headenism.
What, are you saying these guys don't look professional? Got to agree with you on the flip-flops, though.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a 6'5 male and NOT obese. I find that, my most comfortable state is in a pair of jeans with a long sleeve shirt around 60F.
Having a little cool fresh air always keeps me awake along with some caffeine. In a warm, stinky room, even with caffeine I can sleep.
-fresh air (that shit can get stagnant in comp room)
-cooler climate (60F)
-caffeine (3-4 cans of diet coke in a day)
-copious natural lighting (skylights if possible)
-privacy (door on your office and fellow staffers who are quiet)
-8 hours sleep the night before.
-quick 30 min run in the morning on the nature trail
This is all I need to be completely productive at work and on the days I'm just coding at home.
Perhaps it comes from living pretty much my whole life in an area where summers top out at 100-110F and a "cool" night is 80F... or perhaps it's the piss-poor circulation in my hands and toes... but even 77F would be too cool for me. I routinely have it 80-83F around my computer station at home. I have to wear sweaters whenever I go in to the lab (work at home mostly) where it runs in the low 70s and still end up with stiff joints by the time I get home. Should have seen the damage the cool temps did to my feet in college. Had to wear double layer socks all the time once fall hit or the toes would bruise and blister just from rubbing against the shoe due to poor circulation and temps below 70F.
but I call it Nice N' Nippley.
Way back when I was doing I/O development in assembly language in Hawaii, they had the place air-conditioned to the point that I'd bring a coat in.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Maybe they got the direction of causality wrong. More work and less errors = less entropy. Productive workers need to release heat to compensate.
This may have worthwhile applications... you could hire someone smart and productive to sit in your living room doing things as an alternative to central heating. Just give him random tasks and watch the temperature rise. Get him to do your tax while he's there.
Or, to move it down a level of sentience, we all know that a productive and useful computer generates one heckuva lot more heat than a useless one... could this measure not just its potential but its actual use? Does your box get hotter the less typos you make? Is the converse true?
Potential for case cooling: the dumber and more random your moves in [insert FPS here], the less heat your machine has to generate to keep the entropy up.
Interesting...
We already do. Some people work more, some people less. Those people who work more don't have to. But for whatever reason, the rewards are enough to do this (they want more cars, vacations, enjoy their work, etc).
Not necessarily. There are people who work less, that enjoy those rewards (cars, vacations, etc.) and alot of people who work more (like 2 jobs, etc.) and barely make enough to meet their monthly living expenses.
I don't know many people that work more than the standard 40 hours a week because they want to. Personally, considering how short life is, I think it is wrong to work 40 or more hours per week. But unfortunately we live in a society/economical system that demands that. I'm sure there are ways around it, though not too easily feasible.
A few years ago I worked in a lab with one other engineer. No matter how many times we complained, it was always way too cold in there.
At this company we made networking adapters. What we did was to install a hook in the ceiling and connect a CAT 3 cable to a networking card. We taped a paper towel to the card and had a coffee mug full of heat facilitating fluid (water) which was applied to the paper towel. By pulling on the CAT3 wire, we could raise and lower the paper towel over the thermostat and hence warm it up in the lab. (CAT5 wire was too stiff).
By cooling the thermostat, we could warm up the lab.
For the first time ever, the heater actually came on. You could smell that odor of burnt dust when a furnace comes on after not having run for a long period of time.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Wrong.
"The same goes for tea, juice, milk and caffeinated sodas: One glass provides about the same amount of hydrating fluid as a glass of water. The only common drinks that produce a net loss of fluids are those containing alcohol"
Read the "this is an urban myth" link - http://www.snopes.com/toxins/water.htm - before you try to "correct" someone, dumbass!
As one of my teachers would say, "Dead Bodies keep best in the cold" so a warmer enviroment would cause my productivity to go down. Cause i'm just a corp zombie....
;)
Studies show that people don't like "people who are sweaters" so a cooler office is a happy office.
and dead bodies keep best
Talk about sweatshops! The bullpen I work in has been HOT for months. It was once an executives office. Now it is home to 22 workstations. Facilities say they will do something about it if over 80 degrees for 3 consective days. The log taken 3X daily since mid-summer ranges from 79 to 84 degrees...can't wait until the boilers fire up!
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Ridiculous. More heat, and people get tired.
Anyone who has worked in aan office can see that.
Have you read my journal today?
As someone who works in a IT in a tropical environment, I would very much appreciate an opportunity to do some work in a sub-arctic zone.
Funny that Arafat choose kerry. Iran, Pakastan, North Korea, and Al Qaeda all chose Bush.
Good observation - I was gonna say pretty much the same thing. Crank the heat and I'm ready for a siesta - not a mezzoforte performance.
IMHO offices are usually too warm because of the women in them. I have a standard joke that goes like this: women have two temperatures - "too hot or too cold". Yeah I know it's !PC but that's reality...
Reread the replies and you will understand that there is in fact a band of correspondingly advanced industrial countries.
Yes they are fewer in number, but that is because there is more oceans at those latitudes.
You might also like the book "Plagues and People"
gain some fucking weight, beanpole
Congratulations, Paul Bunyan. Yes, you can "survive," and be moderately comfortable. I went from my air-conditioned dorm in New York to living in Mississippi for a week in the middle of summer with no A/C and I adjusted in a matter of a day.
You can bet your ass that I *noticed* the difference later when I got back, though.
And let's see how well you'd tolerate the temperature variance in a sealed-up office building with the air circ. fans turned off. 90 degrees. How's that feel, bucko?
+++ATH0
When it creeps upwards towards 80 degrees Fahrenheit I go to sleep. I work best at around 68 degrees or so when typing. So like everything this is simply a "most people" study following the standard deviation with regard to performance. The problem is that most people read this as an "in every case" sort of scenario.
I have a digital thermometer on my desk, and I've concluded that I'm most productive between 74 and 76 F. I feel cold below 74, and I feel hot above 76. (Note: I'm a guy with a BMI of 23.3.) Post your gender, bmi and low/high temperature limits. Then we can see if there's a trend in the data! :)
Male, 23.3 BMI, 74F, 76F