Office Temperature Puts The Chill On Typing Skills

If your office is too cold, chances are your workers might not be typing as accurately, or as much, as they could be. In a study evaluating the impact of indoor environmental conditions on worker productivity, Cornell University ergonomics professor Alan Hedge, Ph.D., found a 74 percent increase in typing mistakes and a 46 percent reduction in typing output when office temperatures fell from 77 degrees F to 68 degrees F.

Hedge placed data loggers--or miniature temperature recorders--at nine individual workstations in a Florida insurance company. The loggers sampled air temperature every 15 minutes for an entire working month. This data was then correlated with a month's worth of ergonomic data to show how typing performance worsened as temperatures fell.

"As employees typed, we knew the amount of time they were keying, and the amount of time they were making error corrections," says Hedge. "At 77 degrees F, employees were keying 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate, while at 68 degrees F, keying rate went down to 54 percent of the time with a 25 percent error rate." He estimates that the decreased productivity resulted in a 10 percent increase in labor costs per worker per hour.