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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.
...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.
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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.
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!
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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...)
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...
No, but welcome your new office in sunny Bangalore, where the temps often exceed 100F and humidity reigns!
--Chag
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.
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When temperatures are colder im concerned with warming up, not with working. I think the idea behind this article is you work better in a more comfortable office, not that the more you crank up the heat the more you work.
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.
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 ??
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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....
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.
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
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 ?
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 ----
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
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...
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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.
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/
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
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?
"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.
"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.
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.
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."
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