Germans Increase Office Efficiency With "Cloud Ceiling"

Griller_GT writes "According to the top researchers of the Fraunhofer-Institut für Arbeitswirtschaft und Organization (IAO) in Stuttgart, the human mind is set up to work at its best under the open sky, with changing illumination caused by clouds passing overhead. The unvarying glare of office lighting is sub-optimal, therefore, and in order to wring the last ounce of efficiency from German workers whose productivity has already been pushed to unprecedented heights they have decided to rectify this with a LED cloud ceiling."

Comments

I approve!

[snowgirl]

A lot of what injures productivity is boredom. Having a non-constant light source could definitely keep things more interesting, even when you don't particularly notice it.

Keep workers happy == keep workers productive.

Re:I approve!

[Synerg1y]

FTW,

when they see workers dozing off they should be able to initiate thunder and lightning. A bucket rain shower in an extreme case.

Re:I approve!

[Thud457]

Keep workers happy == keep workers productive.

you do know that could evaluate to false as well right?

If they were American companies, they'd improve worker productivity every year for 30 years, pocket the money, reduce salaries in $$$ (while the government devalues the $$$$ themselves), and accuse the workers of being ingrates engaging in class warfare.


Oh, and I would think techies would be upset and disturbed by the unfamiliar environment provided by this big blue room simulator. Does it go black at night?

Re:I approve!

[Talderas]

A snow girl or a LED cloud ceiling?

Re:I approve!

[Hadlock]

So what you're saying is that the real reason my office building's super won't fix the wild swings from hot to cold throughout the day is that it actually improves productivity (not counting the time I spend complaining about the temperature)?

Re:I approve!

[Gaygirlie]

I'd actually prefer the snow girl myself!

Re:I approve!

[Gaygirlie]

Heh. I know, I hear about that quite often! ...and I hear I am a god damn perv, too.

Re:I approve!

[kdemetter]

Well , thunder and lightning 'outside the office' also helps . There's nothing like looking out the window at rain,wind and lightning, to remind you that office job really isn't so bad.

I dunno.

[ackthpt]

I may be at my best, coding in a Zeppelin, cruising silently above it all.

I'd certainly like to try it.

Re:I dunno.

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be at my best, coding in a Zeppelin, cruising silently above it all.

So a LED Zeppelin then?

unprecedented heights of productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we PLEASE stop with this hyperbolic "productivity" nonsense? If people were SO productive, what are they producing? Why does it take 25 years to pay a house that can be built in 6 weeks? Why are we still working 40 hour weeks? The average work week went from 100 to 50 hours in the 19th century, with 19th century technology!

What are we producing, why, and for who?

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[singingjim1]

Stop your bellyaching and get back to work. You're obviously a slacker.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[egomaniac]

It's not fair to say that the house is built in six weeks. Yes, a house can be assembled from finished materials in six weeks, but you're not counting the effort to cut down the trees, transport them to a lumber mill, turn them into boards, mine the gypsum, turn it into drywall, mine the iron, convert the iron into steel wire, turn the steel wire into nails, refine oil into the raw plastic for pipes, mold the plastic into pipes and pipe fittings, transport all of these products all of the way from the factory to the building site, and on and on and on.

You can only build a house in six weeks because an army of people is busily creating all of these finished materials for you, and if you add up all of the labor, it probably does come to somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty man-years of work to create a house.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[emilper]

Why does it take 25 years to pay a house that can be built in 6 weeks? zoning => limited offer

Why are we still working 40 hour weeks? Because we consume a lot more than people that worked 100 hour weeks 200 years ago.

What are we producing, why, and for who? We're producing mainly to allow other products to be produced: 200 years ago the production chain had 3-4 links at most, now it's a lot longer and most work goes in producing inputs for the production of other inputs for the production of other inputs etc. One farmer does indeed produce more than 100 farmers 200 years ago, but in his work he consumes inputs produced by 50 other people ... there was a productivity growth but you get the wrong impression if you look only at one worker.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[Chemisor]

Can we PLEASE stop with this hyperbolic "productivity" nonsense? If people were SO productive, what are they producing?

These are office workers. Their main product is memos and TPS reports, and judging by how the production of these increases hyperbolically every year, I must protest your use of the word "nonsense".

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[jimmerz28]

You need to catch up on Holmes on Homes so you can see why those 6 week houses take 25 years to pay off.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[schlesinm]

The house took only 6 weeks to build because someone paid for the land and hired architects to design the house before they even started. Then they organized 30 different people (including many specialists) to work on it while making sure they are getting all needed permits, following local building ordinances and safety laws. Feel free to replace all that work by doing it yourself and see how many years it will take to finish the house.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[netsavior]

Or they would buy those man years for $0.50 a day from China.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[scamper_22]

"Why does it take 25 years to pay a house that can be built in 6 weeks?"

Because we've created a financial and political system dependent on infinite economic growth. Something has to keep going up in price... and people have to keep borrowing for it to function. Housing is pretty easy as you can just have zoning laws, boost immigration...
Funny enough, I was reading an article that in Toronto about an old man who was selling his home he bought in the early 1900s. It cost about 1x the annual income.

The 'housing market' is perhaps the greatest scam ever perpetuated on the people. We just outbid each other and take out larger and large loans so that bankers can get rich and government gets more money in property taxes... all the while... they can claim you're getting 'richer'. Make it easier to get a loan? That just makes it easier for everyone to get a loan and you're still in the same spot unable to afford it.

"Why are we still working 40 hour weeks? "
Primarily because people hate egalitarianism. People talk a lot about it. But they hate it. What does it mean to be 'middle class'. It means you're better than the 'lower class'. You the 'middle class' person gets to use the labor of the poor 'lower class' who works in the service industry. So we invent a lot of useless unproductive, yet time consuming jobs for people to do. Most of finance, legal... falls in this category. We also refuse to workshare as people need to feel 'privileged'. The public sector unions and 'educated' people will always say they're entitled to be paid more than other people. It doesn't matter if the other people are just as qualified... it just matter who 'gets in'. The rest must enter the service industry.

"What are we producing, why, and for who?"
We tend to produce most of what we need pretty well (Food, water, clothing...). However the powers that be in the banking system, progressive goals, entitled 'educated' people... require that money always end up in their hands which means we must always keep working harder.

It will probably take a complete economic collapse for us to actually reap the productivity benefits in terms of a higher quality of life. Bankers, investors, public sector workers, progressives... all feel too entitled to let it occur otherwise.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[danhaas]

When you're talking about a 25 years payment, don't forget the interest rates. I would say one third to half of the total money goes to interest rates.

The math isn't like this, you pay interest as you go, but considering the bulk values, I believe a house costs about 3 man-years to build, but you will pay that with 25% of what you earn for 12 years, and then another 12 years to pay interests.

If you think that's excessive, try paying rent until you can buy your house upfront.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[roman_mir]

Productivity comes out of capital, which is what one needs to increase productivity. Capital is what allows purchasing/building more/better tools, which makes a process cheaper/faster/increases quality.

So 100 men with shovels cannot be as productive as a man with an excavator, that's what productivity really means - 1 person doing work of 100 people because of all of the capital that went into the newer/better tools.

Capital comes out of savings (as opposed to the wrong idea that it comes out of the printing presses or taxes).

Capital is the difference between the production and consumption (call it over-production or under-consumption), so if a fisher catches 100 fish a month and only eats 50 fish, he can sell 50 fish (exchange 50 fish for something else) and store the value of catching the 50 fish - these are legitimate savings.

The man eventually saves equivalent of 5000 fish and buys a bigger boat and hires some help and now he can catch 1000 fish a month instead of 100 fish, it's because he increased his productivity by using his savings capital to improve his tools and even hire some labor. Now in a shorter period of time he'll save more fish equivalent units (so whatever he catches, minus all the expenses including the labor costs and whatever taxes) and he can now buy another boat, more nets and more labor - now he is running a real business, maybe he doesn't need to fish himself anymore, but now he changed from being a fisherman to becoming a business owner who needs to manage the business.

In the process of becoming a larger business, he now has more instruments to bring more fish to the market, this creates more supply and prices fall (given constant value of money), which creates more savings, as people now have to pay less for the fish they buy, and this drives more capital, more investment, lower prices (again, given constant value of money).

Then gov't politicians see all this new investment and new innovation and they want a bigger piece of the pie, so they create some rules that prohibit anybody from fishing until they buy a fishing license, giving gov't power to establish a monopoly on fisheries.

The man with the fishing business buys the license and because he sees gov't with this power, he goes to a politician and offers a bribe to make licenses more expensive, raise the cost of regulations, increase barriers to entry to prevent competition.

This prevents others from entering the fishing business because now they have to overcome not just the costs of boats and nets, but also licenses and regulations and more taxes (which the man with the big business is not paying, because again - more bribes).

So now the price of fish in the market is no longer falling, because there is no competitive pressure for it to fall, even though there maybe more fish caught by the man's fishing business.

People who can't start their own fisheries become dependent on hand outs by the gov't, who now sees an opportunity to grow further, by using popular demand for a 'living wage' (because they see they can't grow as the man with the fishing business) and the populist movement creates opportunity to introduce more taxes upon the workers, and it's done under the guise that the man with the big fishery will be taxed more. However the man realizes what's going to happen and starts moving his fishery business to another country, where the fishing licenses are non-existent and neither are most of the various taxes (liability costs, regulations, departments, all that were created by the gov't growing out of bribes of similar businesses and eventually from counterfeit money).

The man with the fishing business is still selling the product on the US market, but he catches 90% of fish elsewhere (true numbers for USA today). The people in the country are poor, can't have their own fisheries due to lack of investment, because they have no jobs and due to high costs of entry into the business because of gov't.

The politicians in the meanwhile understand that ther

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[dgatwood]

Funny enough, I was reading an article that in Toronto about an old man who was selling his home he bought in the early 1900s. It cost about 1x the annual income.

It still does if you design the floor plan yourself and build a small house and limit yourself to the basics (carpet, not hardwood, let your builder build your cabinets instead of hiring out to a cabinet maker, use imitation counters instead of granite, no texture on the walls, etc. You can build a very nice, large house for three or four years salary in most parts of the U.S., assuming you aren't building in a major city.

Alternatively, there are some fairly nice double-wide modular homes that will only cost you about $125,000 plus delivery. Admittedly, that's probably two or three years salary, on average, but it's also completely turnkey.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[jellomizer]

The 1% is anyone who makes more the $37,000 a year. Which is 10% of Americans.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[GameboyRMH]

THIS

This is where all the productivity improvements have gone, why we're not working 2-3 days a week or any of that other utopian stuff futurists thought was coming. There have been productivity improvements, HUGE ones, it's just that it's all collecting at the top where we don't see any of it.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[Hadlock]

Until very recently (1980, perhaps?) people regularly only took out a 15 year mortgage on homes - you only bought what you could realistically afford. The concept of being in debt for a full third of your adult life (or more!) to pay off your home is a fairly recent phenomenon, and with 30 year mortgages, that number jumps to 50% in most cases. You're in even worse shape if you buy your home after you turn 20.
 
For most of humanity's existence, homes were built by the community using locally sourced materials, and no long term debt was accrued. I'm here in Texas, and I'm pretty confident that there are no gypsum mines (drywall) within a 50 mile radius of this house. If you visit impoverished areas of the world, people live in watertight houses, generally cinderblock, but they're built one room at a time, as finances permit the purchase of additional materials. In other areas, it may be an adobe hut, slowly expanded, and then finally surrounded by a mud wall forming a courtyard. Unfortunately due to building codes (among other things) this isn't permitted except in the most rural of areas (areas settled along the Texas-Mexico border by immigrants being one exception) of the United States.
 
The problem is that a house should only take a week or two to build at most, with additions coming later as the family expands, and instead people are mortgaging their entire lives to live in a building that might have been envied by the british aristocracy 200-300 years ago, and then continue to live in giant McMansions long after their family grows up and moves out. Unfortunately we came up with the idea that everyone needs to own and live in a giant generational-sized house, but only have 1.9 children instead of a house within their means.

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[sootman]

> You can only build a house in six weeks because an army of people
> is busily creating all of these finished materials for you, and if you
> add up all of the labor, it probably does come to somewhere in the
> neighborhood of twenty man-years of work to create a house.

You're not really doing the math right. Yeah, it takes a lot of effort in one sense, but every step creates materials for thousands of houses. It's not like someone opened a gypsum mine to make enough drywall for one house. Aluminum gets mined, refined, formed into gutters, and painted... and then I buy it for a couple bucks per foot because they make (literally) tons of it.

If a house costs $100,000, and everyone who has a hand in it makes $10/hr, and there are no other costs (materials, transportation, etc.), even that would be just 10,000 person-hours, or 5 people working a standard work year. (2,000 hours -- fifty weeks x 40 hours/week.)

Re:unprecedented heights of productivity

[neyla]

True. After 1970, most of the productivity-gains in USA have *not* been passed on to the workers in the form of higher salaries and/or shorter work-years. Germany also hasn't done very well on that count for the last 10-15 years worker-compensation has been pretty much constant, while productivity has climbed substantially.

You're a democracy though. It's *know* what systems tend to concentrate wealth at the top, and what systems are better (not perfect) at making society as a whole benefit.

Have a look at Wikipedias maps over GINI-index by country (gini measures wealth-concentration), and you'll notice USA has a inequality that is completely uncommon for a developed country. (though common for a despot-run developing country)

Where I come from *every* quintile of society has seen real growth in earnings (i.e. salary-hikes larger than inflation) pretty much every year since 1970, and the gap between rich and poor is about a third of what it is in USA. (In USA if you're an average bottom-quintile person, you must multiply your income by 17 to become an average top-quintile person. The equivalent number for Norway is about 6)

I don't have a 3-day workweek. But I *do* have a 35-hour workweek as a programmer, with a Bachelor-degree and half a decade of experience, and a compensation of $8000/month for that. I ain't complaining. Oh yeah, and unemployment is 2.1% - most of that consisting of short-term "between-jobs" kind of things, and some people who are frankly more like "unemployable" than "unemployed".

The policies that work aren't secret.

Consistent?

[zandeez]

Is this proven to be consistent and will it continue to have this effect on the workers? I'd like to reference the Hawthorne Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect which basically states that any change to the working environment will increase productivity temporarily. So how long until it gets old and productivity slumps again?

CEO is a genius!

[GodfatherofSoul]

His "researchers" also discovered that humans respond better when working at ambient temperatures and when exposed to the elements. They also like to be beaten with whips when they're insubordinate.

Improved efficiency has not been proven yet

[Hermanas]

... or even attempted to be proven, for that matter. From the article:

The Fraunhofer Institute's press statement doesn't give any actual concrete figures on improved worker productivity

According to the "study", if you can call it that with only ten volunteers, they merely chose that type of lighting with the other choices being "that, but less so", and "normal office lighting". No conclusive evidence of improved productivity (yet) as far as I can see, but it is pretty nifty - I'd like one of these installed in my office. Now if I could just convince my superiors of docking up that €1,000 per square meter...

They shouldn't stop at clouds

[ks9208661]

Would be great to have other things flying over the fake sky, like birds, planes, pterodactyls, Superman, and UFOs, to make things even more interesting.

I live in the Seattle Area and I'm wondering...

[ravenscar]

What are the blue LEDs for?

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly enough, he did. I saw him just sitting in the park on a partly cloudy day, reading slashdot on his laptop just as a passing cloud cast a shadow over him, I saw the proverbial light bulb go on over his head. The rest, as they say, is history.

German CEO covering his ass

[million_monkeys]

I think it's more likely that someone tried to explain "the cloud" to some CEO and he completely misunderstood then ordered a bunch of these cloud panels made. After he realized his mistake, he had some people make up these productivity claims so he can avoid the embarrassment of admitting his mistake while simultaneously looking like an innovator.

Hawthorne Effect

[More Trouble]

Maybe I'd like these lights just fine, myself, but doesn't it seem like a repeat of the Hawthorne Effect?

just give me a damn office

[spiffmastercow]

For all that complexity, their office lacks an often-overlooked but very important productivity optimization: 4 walls, a ceiling, and a door for each employee (or at least those that need to concentrate from time to time).

Re:Awesome

[JWSmythe]

It's not about replicating sunlight. It's about making someone a metric fucktonne of money making LED simulated skies in ceiling panels.

According to the article, each tile is 288 LEDs. Excuse me while I do some math, so this will make sense in US dollars, and the size of a ceiling tile.

A standard office ceiling tile is 2'x4' (0.6mx1.2m).
The article shows a price of 1000 euros per square meter. (1 sq/m = 10.764 sq/ft).
92.90 euros per sq/ft, or $118.88 USD per sq/ft.
8 sq/ft per panel. or $951.04 per panel.

The density of the LEDs is pretty sparse. 36 LEDs per square foot, or 0.25 per square inch. So one LED per 4 square inches. That would explain why the room looks so dark, compared to the overcast day outside the window.

A modest size office space at 500 sq/ft room would cost roughly $60,000 to put this ceiling into. That's a lot of money to waste on ceiling tiles. It would have probably done very well during the dotcom bubble. Now, that's a lot of other equipment, or salaries for a few employees for a year.

They don't go into the cost of installation, nor MTBF of the equipment. If panels need to be changed yearly for whatever reason, that would get pretty damned expensive. The LEDs should live a long time, but who knows how long their control circuitry will survive.

Re:First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if the lightbulb had been sky-colored, he would have made a more insightful comment.

alternative

[Khashishi]

Or, you know, they could just install windows. (lowercase w)

Not really about the clouds

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

They are ignoring one fundamental principle of cubical life, anything new introduced into an office environment will increase productivity, as demonstrated on Better Off Ted.

They could have achieved the same results by replacing one black chair with a red one for a much more cost efficient solution. When the office productivity dips again, swap which person get the red chair. They will think its a performance incentive and everyone will be working hard vying for the coveted red chair.