Too hot offices can affect a worker's productivity, Dr Thomas Chang says. Photo: IGOR STEVANOVIC/SCIENCE PHOTO LI
Many firms have overlooked providing a comfortable office temperature as a relatively easy way to improve workers' productivity, an academic says.
Dr Thomas Chang is a data scientist and a professor of finance and business at the University of Southern California who found himself working in an office where he was hot all the time.
"There's a joke that all research is me-search and this is definitely one of those cases. I had an office where the temperature was routinely in the mid- to high '80s F [above 26C] and I couldn't get facilities to do anything about it," he told Sunday Morning.
Chang said it was "hot and miserable" and it was too hot for almost everyone who worked on that side of the building.
The office was in southern California which had great weather year-round, he said.
"We got into our office... even in shorts and t-shirts, it's just too hot so we'd just leave and go home and work from home, which isn't ideal on many levels."
Zhang said his study used 500 to 600 German students sitting a number of tests in a room where the temperature had been either raised or lowered using heaters or air conditioning.
"Groups of students would take these tests in different temperatures, there'd be a math test, there'd be some verbal tasks and things and so we would just correlate their performance with the temperature in the room that they happened to be taking the tests in, and we found that - you know - this caused meaningful changes."
Women tended to do much better when the temperature was warmer, particularly on the math task, whereas the men did worse.
People do have varying preferences in terms of what temperature they like it to be, although generally women prefer it to be a little warmer than men, he said.
"In my household it's pretty classic - I like it cooler than the wife, but my daughter likes it coolest of all, so she runs the hottest."
People got sidetracked by issues like gender or how many calories a person burns when trying to determine how warm or cool it should be inside, but focusing on gender overlooked the key point, he said.
"I think the main takeaway here is if you're not comfortable, you're not going to perform at your best."
After his research paper on heating was released, those in charge of the air conditioning at his office dropped the temperature to 55F - just under 13C.
"It was so cold I would have to leave every 15 minutes just to warm up my fingers because I couldn't type."
There was a long history of research which looked at how temperature affected people's ability to perform, but a lot of it was done by the military which was "figuring out how temperature affects your ability to potentially kill other people", he said.
Chang said his research aimed to show that temperature also affected the productivity of knowledge workers or white collar workers.
"The people who are doing almost nothing with their bodies but type, but they have to think… this affects their performance on a meaningful level."
Zhang said temperature was a simple way to improve workers' performance and make them more efficient, but "we just don't think about it that much".
"When it comes to temperature there's a sense of you know 'just suck it up', people just don't care about it, at least for you know, indoor sort of white collar workers."
That was despite discussion over what the right ambient temperature should be in an office or home was often a hot topic of conversation, he said.
"But how many people when they talk about that put it in the context of 'well, since the temperature isn't ideal for the majority of workers in the room, we're throwing away money because we're not at peak productivity'?"
The link with temperature and productivity should encourage firms to pay more attention to the comfort of their workers, he said - there was no perfect temperature, so it was necessary to listen to the people occupying the space, whether it was a home or an office, to determine how hot or cold they wanted it to be.
Loosening office dress codes to perhaps allow those who get too hot to wear shorts is one way to help make a single temperature comfortable for a larger group of people, he said.
