Many organizations make substantial investments in ergonomic office furniture, team-building exercises, and technology to drive productivity. Then they leave employees to suffer through a heat wave in a building with a 20-year-old air conditioning system that can’t maintain a comfortable temperature. The physical work environment has a more direct impact on cognitive performance than most HR policies.
And the air conditioning system is the largest, most expensive variable within any organization that no one is paying attention to.
The Temperature-Performance Relationship Is Well-Documented
Researchers continue to investigate thermal comfort as a variable in the workplace for a good reason. Performance isn’t like a plane losing altitude. Temperatures may rise in a drift of gradual discomfort, but performance drops like a rock once they go past a certain point. A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report from 2015 estimated that office performance drops by 2% for every degree Celsius above 25°C.
It doesn’t sound like much, but look at it another way. A floor of 50 people at 29°C for six hours isn’t 10% less productive. They’re basically a write-off: irritable, distracted, probably making more mistakes, and unlikely to fully engage in processes that demand logical reasoning – which is a lot of them. This same goes for the cold end of the spectrum too. The ideal office temperature is often suggested to be 22°C, not because it’s a ‘nice round number’ or that everyone ‘so happens to find it comfortable,’ but because that’s the point at which the body is doing the least amount of work to thermoregulate itself.
The same goes for being comfortable. Your cognitive load is not infinitely expansive. A good portion of your mental ‘juice’ is always squirreled away to deal with the extra special ingredient of office discomfort – and the more of it there is, the less you can afford to think about what you’re supposed to be doing.
Humidity Matters As Much As Temperature
One system, for example, could be running at full tilt to get anywhere near target temperature and humidity levels due to refrigerant leakage or a filter blockage that causes it to cycle less frequently. Another might suffer from oversized components that quickly switch a unit on and off, failing to adequately reduce humidity in the air. A third could simply be an antiquated and poorly-performing model.
And yet humidity rarely gets the airtime it deserves. Most people can tell when an office is too hot or too cold, but the effects of poor humidity control tend to fly under the radar – a persistent dry throat blamed on talking too much, a vague sense of sluggishness that gets written off as a long week. In reality, air that’s too dry irritates airways and increases the transmission of airborne pathogens, while air that’s too humid creates the kind of heavy, stale atmosphere that makes concentration feel like hard work.
Neither shows up on a thermostat, which is precisely why it so often goes unaddressed.
Modern Systems Solve Problems Older Units Created
Older HVAC units cool the air and do nothing more. Volatile organic compounds from furniture, carpets, and cleaning products are left to accumulate. CO2 builds up in the inappropriately sealed room. Allergens continue to cycle without escape. The net result is what building scientists term Sick Building Syndrome – not a dramatic sickness, but a constant, low-level, background of headaches, dry eyes, fatigue that employees simply can’t shake.
Bring in modern filtration and the problem stops at source. The difference in air quality between a building running current Commercial Air Conditioning infrastructure and one that still has legacy units is a difference in sick days, not just a difference that can be reported by grab-sample comfort surveys.
Add Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) technology on top and, instead of batch-processing an entire building as one zone, you also remove the right to complain about the fact legal are enjoying the arctic wastes while the design studio swelters from the thermostat warriors. Different areas can be different zones. The executive raises the temperature on the whole system to be comfortable while the wage-slave sweats can be a thing of the past. Different staff have different activity levels, different clothing requirements, and different acceptable temperature ranges – zoned systems don’t compromise.
Energy Efficiency And Human Efficiency Aren’t Competing Priorities
Many people believe that by upgrading to a better HVAC system, energy costs will increase. In fact, the opposite is true in most cases. Older systems operate at a constant output, regardless of demand. New systems fluctuate output based on demand which reduces energy consumption and overall wear on the equipment.
The EER of a modern commercial system can be 2-3 times higher than the systems that were installed 10-15 years ago. Lower electricity draw on cooling means direct lower operating costs every month. For companies tracking these types of metrics, a lower draw on electricity also means a smaller carbon footprint. This is increasingly becoming a part of corporate reporting requirements when shares are traded publicly.
When you consider both the increase in energy costs and the productivity loss from an environment that isn’t working, the decision becomes very easy. The combined number is something that virtually no business has ever run.
Preventative Maintenance Is What Sustains The Investment
If you have a well-specified system, install it, and then forget about it, it will return to the same issues in a few years. Filters will get blocked, levels of refrigerant will change, and drainage lines will get blocked as well. It will continue to work, but not as efficiently as before. And, without knowing exactly what the issue is, occupants will gradually realize that the quality of air has been deteriorating.
Regular maintenance keeps the performance stable, addresses small problems before they turn into large repairs, and ensures that the system works according to its designated features, without the need to overstress it.
Managers of facilities that consider air conditioning a regular maintenance task, as opposed to a device you install and leave alone, are the ones whose employees won’t notice the temperature. Because this is the real purpose: having a climate that doesn’t require any specific attention because it’s always optimal.
Proper air conditioning must remain unnoticed. When it is not done right, everyone will start complaining and none of them will understand that it’s actually influencing the productivity figures, as shown in the HR report located two floors above.
