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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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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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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.
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...
Add another problem: warmer temps mean lighter/less female clothing. The effects of this on male productivity should be obvious.
No, but welcome your new office in sunny Bangalore, where the temps often exceed 100F and humidity reigns!
--Chag
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
See this is why hawaiians can come up with things like a G4 emulator at 80% host speed.
I agree with you 100%
My motto is very simple
When its cold you can always put on more clothes.
When its hot you can only take off so much before your arrested!
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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
Women, on average, have a slower metabolism than men. This is due to them having a higher, on average, percentage of body fat (due to the natural features that women have). Thus, women produce less heat than men, on average, and like their environment to be slightly warmer.
There is nothing wrong with pointing out the phyiscal differences between sexes.
I have never worked at a company where there was an issue with men turning the heat up, which causes discomfort for others, just because they were a little too cold.
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
People who always bitch about it being "too cold" and try to get the temp increased are one of my big pet peeves.
and it's ignorant clods like you that make my GF's work life difficult.
she has Reynauds, a condition tha tcan cut off the circulation in her fingers if exposed to low temperatures... Yes a half hour in of 67 degree temperatures WILL trigger this condition. Many other people also have circulation problems.
Her last boss was so stupid that it took us filing for disability for her on his ass as well as a lawsuit on him for creating a hostile work environment before he turned the temperature back up to 70.
Maybe these people "bitching" have a real reason.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The funniest thing about that? Most office thermostats are placebos.
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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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!
--
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"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.