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Warm Offices Boost Productivity

Posted by michael on from the turn-down-the-frigging-air-conditioning dept.

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?"

3 of 520 comments (clear)

  1. Warm Office=Faster Typing by ThurstonMoore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Too warm? by tambo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    For programming, at 25 my brain slows down to zero and I keep on losing track of what I'm doing, and end up spending all my time browsing the web.

    25 degrees C is uncomfortably warm if you're wearing a shirt and tie, or full battle gear (suit), as is typical of my law firm and many other professional groups.

    But 25 degrees C is damn perfect if you're wearing comfortable clothing, like shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. By no coincidence, I'm most productive when I'm comfortable, which includes how I'm dressed.

    I hope that this starts a trend back to more casual dress. We were headed there in 1999, but the shock waves of the .com bust produced a backlash to heavy, formal clothing. Hopefully we can resurrect the previous trend.

    - David Stein

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    Computer over. Virus = very yes.
  3. Re:This is old news by suwain_2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    productivity increased indirectly merely by changing the work environment.

    I was actually wondering if anyone else had mentioned this, sometimes called the Hawthorne Effect. However, it seems you have the summarization a little wrong.

    It's generally believed that productivity didn't increase because their environment was changing; productivity went up because they knew they were being studied, and/or that management cared about them enough to look. Remember that the Hawthorne study was one of the forerunners in the wild new theory that increasing productivity might have something to do with employees, not machinery.

    It's not entirely unlike the placebo effect, although I'd stop short of equating the two.

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