Posted on: Monday, November 8, 2004
Cold offices have chilling effect on profits
By Dana Knight
Indianapolis Star
If there is a chill in the air at the office, get ready for the cold shoulder from your boss.
Nippy temperatures in the workplace result in a dramatic decrease in employee productivity, a new study by Cornell University has found.
And bosses typically don't warm to that.
Cornell ergonomics professor Alan Hedge's study found a 74 percent increase in typing mistakes and a 46 percent reduction in typing output when office temperatures fell from 77 degrees to 68 degrees.For about a month, he logged air temperature every 15 minutes at nine workstations inside a Florida insurance company. The data then were correlated with a month's worth of ergonomic data.
While keyboard performance was the study's key measure, Hedge says it can be assumed the study's general theme of "cold is bad for work" can be extended to other areas of productivity — like creative thinking, problem solving, sitting in on meetings or just about anything you are expected to do inside the office.
"We already know from other laboratory studies that when one feels cold, it slows thought processes, impairs judgment and impedes movement," Hedge says. "That's why people getting hypothermic often just sit down to die."
Whoa. Let's not go for the final goodbye. Just grab a sweater or jacket from home to hang on the back of the work chair. Keep a steaming mug of hot coffee or tea nearby. If the boss is smart, she will run out the door to the nearest big-box discounter to stock up on thermal underwear, earmuffs and gloves for us to wear in the office.
Cold cubicles don't just slow us down, they cost employers money.
Hedge estimates the temperature difference in his study cost the Florida insurance company 10 percent more in labor per employee per hour.
A detailed look at just how dramatic a change the colder air made shows why: At 77 degrees, employees were keying 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate. At 68 degrees, the keying rate plummeted to 54 percent with a 25 percent error rate.
The study, the start of a two-year project by Hedge that will test all sorts of environmental conditions with workplace output, found other productivity losses caused by the environment including offices that are too hot, polluted or noisy.
Performance also decreased when the employees felt they had no control over the air in the office.
Evan Lubofsky says his company hears employees' temperature gripes all the time.
"There is always a comfort complaint: This is too hot or this is too cold," says Lubofsky, spokesman for Bourne, Mass.-based Onset Computer Corp., which supplied the mini temperature recorders for Hedge's study.
Hedge's study also found performance decreases when:
Which means to do our very best work, we all really need a private office.
One with a thermostat would be nice.
