Every office has one. The person who nudges the thermostat up when nobody’s looking, and the person who turns it back down ten minutes later.
It usually gets treated as a running joke, but the temperature of your workplace has a measurable effect on how much work gets done. If you run a business, that makes it worth more attention than a passive-aggressive sticky note on the dial.
Cold offices make more mistakes
The best known study on this comes from Cornell University, where researchers tracked staff at an insurance office in Florida. When the temperature was raised from 20°C to 25°C, typing errors fell by 44% and output went up by 150%.
The chilly workers were slower and sloppier, and the researchers estimated the cold was adding around 10% to the employer’s labour cost per worker, per hour. That is a lot of money to lose over a setting on the wall.
Too warm is no better. A later review of the research found that performance peaks at about 22°C and drops by roughly 9% once a room reaches 30°C.
Why nobody can agree
Part of the problem is that the comfort standards most buildings are designed around date back to the 1960s. They were based on the metabolic rate of a 40 year old man weighing 70kg.
A 2015 study in Nature Climate Change found this can overestimate how much heat women generate by up to 35%, which goes some way to explaining who ends up wearing a blanket at their desk in July.
UK law doesn’t settle the argument either. HSE guidance suggests a minimum of 16°C for most indoor workplaces, and there is no legal maximum at all. Everything in between is left to the employer.
What you can do about it
Start by measuring. A cheap thermometer on a few desks will tell you more than a week of complaints. Quite often the issue is that the room is uneven, with one side roasting by the radiator and the other freezing next to a draughty window.
Aim for somewhere around 21 to 22°C and put the heating on a schedule, so the place is already warm when people arrive instead of catching up at 11am. Smart controls make this easy and tend to cut the bill too.
Then look after the system itself. A boiler that packs in during January costs far more than the repair, because your team is either working in coats or working from home until it’s fixed. An annual service in autumn is the cheapest insurance going.
If you’re in London, a Gas Safe registered engineer such as H3GS Heating & Cooling can handle the servicing, repairs and smart controls, plus air conditioning for the summer end of the problem. The same goes if your office is the spare room at home.
You won’t keep everyone happy. But a couple of degrees either way is one of the cheaper productivity fixes available, and it might end the sticky note war for good.
