Office Temperatures

Relationship between temperatures and workplace productivity

by Molly Badgett — Originally published in the November/December 2015 issue of THE LEADER—Earlier this year, Dutch scientists elicited some resounding “I told you so’s” from women the world over after releasing their findings on office workers’ metabolic rates and standards used to set indoor temperatures. That’s because the study reveals that today’s temperature settings are outdated, based on 1960s data, using the metabolic rate from just one, 40-year-old, 154-lb./70-kg. male who at the time represented the average office employee.

The findings came from biophysicists Boris Kingma and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt of Maastricht University in the Netherlands and were published late summer in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“If you really want to represent the entire population, you must look at men and women,” Kingma told theLEADER. “And it’s not just a matter of their clothing, but a matter of variation in their metabolic rates. That was the point of our research.”

In the study, the scientists suggested that age and ageing, body size and composition, health, and the type of work performed also should play a role in setting indoor-temperature standards. Currently, standards mean that temperature settings largely favor men.

It’s not a surprise to many women.

“I can speak from personal experience,” said Ashley Rigby, education specialist with Herman Miller in New York, where most of the employees in the 17,000-square-foot showroom are women, and where the thermostat, set at 73 degrees, is under control of building management.

“The majority of the time, everyone in my office is cold. We have a little storage locker and, regardless of the season, we have some sort of sweater or jacket that we’ll take out as necessary. Even in the summer months, everyone has some sort of sweater on.

”But ergonomic design is central to the company’s value proposition and Rigby appreciates other creature comforts the showroom has to offer. “Luckily, we work for a furniture manufacturer; we work in an ergonomically designed showroom. We probably have more comfort and more choice than most,” she said. “So, we don’t have too much to complain about.”

Futile Exercise? Not for Long.

As director of facilities/RWS and director of sustainability/HQ for Oracle, George Denise knows in an imperfect world, you can’t please all the people all the time with ideal office temperatures.

“It’s an assumption that we have good control over the temperature in the building,” Denise said. “The newer the building and the more high-end the building, that’s probably true. We‘ve only been developing these systems in the past 50 to 60 years. But, what works perfectly that we do make?”

Currently for most existing buildings, cooling a single corner office with incoming sunshine down to 78 degrees might involve turning the air conditioning up so high that a coworker across the hall must suffer in 68 degrees. Similarly, employees who bring space heaters into the office to warm individual cubicles might defeat their purpose. Said Denise, “It’s going to warm up that office and make the building blow more cold air.”

In both scenarios, energy waste is the real, unintended consequence. The solution? Controlling temperatures on a zone-to-zone basis for as few as, say, four workstations at a time.

Getting us there is innovation such as variable-air-volume (VAV) systems that physically modulate the amount of air put into a small(er) space, and direct-digital-control (DDC) technology, which gives individual users hyper-local control over temperatures through VAV adjustments. Smart as they are, some DDCs can even learn and adjust over time to the pattern of settings “voted on” by users within each zone.

Moves Away from HVAC

While innovation is valuable, nature is priceless, and Denise notes another trend – one toward operable windows that allow for naturally ventilated buildings. After all, in over half of the United States and half of the time, he said, the air outside is a temperature that would be “just fine” for an office environment.

Lower That themostat? image

Groups like the The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at University of California Berkeley have studied the relationship between operable windows and building occupants’ comfort for years.

In a 2004 study, ASHRAE suggests allowing office workers to open windows for natural ventilation actually creates a greater sense of comfort if for no other reason than the direct control it gives to employees over their environment. The CBE currently is conducting research on natural ventilation in commercial buildings throughout California.

If allowing for an open window here or there isn’t customization enough, the CBE has another idea for personalizing the temperature of individual space. It’s called the Personal Comfort System, which is an academic term for a desk chair that heats up or cools down at the touch of a button or two.

While testing the chair design, the CBE took the test facility to 62 degrees and to 86 degrees to replicate rather extreme energy-saving office conditions. Thirty test participants then were asked to adjust the chairs to their own personal comfort levels; few complained about room temperatures.

Rigby’s employer, Herman Miller, takes another approach. It focuses primarily on a chair’s breathability, aiming for a “neutral thermal effect” that allows for greater air flow to the body, plus the dispersion of moisture and heat away from t he body.

Whatever it Takes

For someone like Rigby, either chair solution might be welcomed, and not just because she has a heightened appreciation for ergonomics, thermal or otherwise. Instead, the chair innovations would be a matter of personal freedom and work productivity.

“At 6 at night, the air conditioning turns off and really prevents me from working late,” Rigby said, adding that Herman Miller makes arrangements with its building management to provide air conditioning (for a fee) during after-hour customer events. “But by 6:30, it gets too warm. I wish my schedule could be on my terms, not the building temperature telling me what to do.”

From the employer’s perspective, it comes down to finding what works to energize and excite dedicated employees like Rigby who are willing to work the long hours so they don’t end up working somewhere else.

It’s not an easy proposition.

“Ultimately,” Denise said, “we’re trying to develop a neat, clean, safe, healthy, productive, sustainable, uninterrupted, and inspiring workspace – at the least cost possible.”

Molly BadgettMolly A. Badgett is a commercial writer and marketing-communications consultant with a professional background in journalism, public relations and corporate communications. She has a journalism degree from Brenau University and an MBA in marketing from Georgia State University, and currently is on staff at both alma maters as an adjunct professor of business communications.