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Office Temperatures and Productivity
October, 21, 2004
Warm workers work better, an ergonomics study
at Cornell University finds.
Chilly workers not only make more errors but cooler temperatures
could increase a worker's hourly labor cost by 10 percent, estimates
Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and
director of Cornell's Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory.
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. Hedge's study was exploring the
link between changes in the physical environment and work
performance.
"The results of our study also suggest raising the temperature to a
more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about $2 per worker,
per hour," says Hedge, who presented his findings this summer at the
2004 Eastern Ergonomics Conference and Exposition in New York City.
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. The researchers recorded the
amount of time that employees keyboarded and the amount of time they
spent making error corrections. Hedge used a new research approach
employing software that can synchronize a specific indoor
environmental variable, in this case temperature, with productivity.
"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," Hedge says. "Temperature is certainly a key variable
that can impact performance."
He will continue to study the impact of indoor environment on worker
productivity. "Our ultimate goal is to have much smarter buildings
and better environmental control systems in the workplace that will
maximize worker comfort and thereby productivity," Hedge says.
An abbreviated Power Point version of Hedge's study is available at
http://ergo.human.cornell.edu.
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