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Cornell University ergonomics professor Dr. Alan Hedge found a 74% increase in typing mistakes and a 46% reduction in typing output when office temperatures fell from 77 degrees F to 68 degrees F.
“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.
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.”
Find out more about Dr. Alan Hedge and this study at http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct04/temp.productivity.ssl.html
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