Transformative Service Research and impact of indoor environmental quality on workers’ productivity: Potentialities of neuroscience in its assessment

Abstract

Previous research demonstrated that there is a link between workers’ productivity and their overall comfort in the workspaces. Nowadays, the energy crisis is highlighting the need for energy saving measures also in workplaces to reduce expenses, thus posing threats to the overall comfort of workers: how to deal with this trade-off? In such a frame, this paper is a traditional literature review of the research, conducted so far, useful to understand the optimal point of energy needed to secure human wellbeing in workspaces (and thus, acceptable productivity). Moving from an overview of the most common adopted methodologies and related findings, this work focuses on applications and opportunities associated with merging methods from neuroscience. Neuroeconomics, in fact, uses some indexes (cognitive interests, mental fatigue) and techniques (EEG, heart rate) that allow to understand whether a person is focused on his/her work or not: this can represent a double-check of the optimal level of environmental comfort in offices. Environmental comfort studies concerning the adoption of physiological monitoring are compared here to business management studies lying on physiological indexes to assess employees’ interest and cognitive effort, which influence their productivity. This comparison showed up new perspectives in the investigation of occupants’ productivity and environmental comfort, which can be pursued in the coming years to understand how to achieve the optimum between energy consumption and workers’ productivity.