The effect of indoor temperature on work performance of fifty-eight people in a simulated office environment

Abstract

There is general agreement that indoor thermal conditions affect Office Work Performance (OWP); however, consensus on the specific characteristics of this relationship, such as its shape, effect size, and prediction accuracy, remains elusive. To address this gap, we conducted a study with fifty-eight participants exposed to temperatures (23°C, 25°C, 27°C, and 29°C) in a simulated tropical office environment over 165min to determine how temperature affects OWP. These temperatures were chosen to mirror typical conditions in tropical buildings. We maintained constant variables, including relative humidity (50%), clothing (0.5clo), metabolic rate (1.1MET), and airspeed (0.1ms-1). We measured OWP using one cognitive ability and seven neuropsychological tests targeting executive functions like flexible thinking, working memory, and self-control. OWP remained constant across all tested temperatures, despite some participants reporting thermal discomfort at the higher temperatures. Our findings support the Maximum Adaptability Model – aka extended-U model – which claims that human performance remains relatively stable over a wide range of thermal conditions typically found indoors. Given the consistent performance within the typical temperature range for tropical office buildings and participants’ preferred and accepted 25°C the most, we caution against lowering air conditioning set points below this level as it may lead to unnecessary cooling. We shared the database and code, to ensure our research data is openly available and our methodology can be used in other climates to reproduce our results.