Managing Office Temperatures

Research at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) “found no evidence for a relationship between temperature and work performance within the range temperatures commonly found in office buildings, and certainly none that should be adopted as an industry recommendation. The research team analyzed 358 performance measures from 35 studies on temperature and work performance (the term now preferred over productivity) published between 1946 and 2020.  These results stand in contrast to an earlier 2006 study [Seppanen, Fisk, and Lei] that concluded that worker performance would peak at 72°F (22°C), and that performance will decline as temperatures deviate either warmer or cooler from this temperature.”  The Berkeley team “created an online interactive tool for exploring relationships between temperature and office work performance, including various regression models, temperatures, and factors such as site climate, performance metrics, and task complexity.” The online interactive tool is available at https://cbe-berkeley.shinyapps.io/temp-performance/

David Lehrer.  2022. “New Study Throws Cold Water on Widely Accepted Relationship Between Temperature and Work Performance.”  Press release, Center for the Built Environment, University of California Berkeley, https://cbe.berkeley.edu/centerline/temperature-and-work-performance/