What if we could increase our productivity while conserving natural resources…and all while making it easier on us human beings? With many densely populated parts of the world facing extreme temperatures, the advise to stay ‘cool, conscious, and connected’ takes on a key importance even into the economic sphere.
Katherine Gammon’s commentary on a recent paper published in the journal The Review of Economics and Statistics sheds a thoughtful light on minimizing energy consumption in workspaces while utilizing climate-based and energy efficient design:
‘When a work room is hot and sticky, it can be challenging to focus—and people can get grumpy quickly.
While many studies have looked at the impact of heat on individuals’ ability to work, few have studied the impact that higher temperatures have on teams.
Now, a new paper finds that teamwork breaks down even with modest increases in temperature, due to increased irritability and communication breakdowns. The effects were particularly strong in mixed-gender teams and teams with different academic experience.
Teevrat Garg, an economics researcher at the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and his colleagues studied undergraduate computer science students in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They were assigned to work, either individually or in pairs, on programming tasks, inside rooms with temperatures of 75 degrees Fahrenheit or 84 degrees Fahrenheit—temperatures commonly found indoors in office settings, Garg says. Compared to the outside, the temperatures were still modest—the summer heat outside in Bangladesh can soar well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It’s not that heat is making me worse at my job, but in tasks that require teamwork, we’re seeing this breakdown happening because the heat is driving up irritability and other forms of breakdowns in interpersonal communication,” says Teevrat Garg, an economics researcher at the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.’