August 14, 2006
68 Degrees or I Quit!
Too Hot or Too Cold at Work? Best Bet Is to Chill Out
Office managers are under siege. They know that if they set the temperature to 74, they hear from the woman in human resources who says it is too cold. If they turn it up to 76, they hear from the man in marketing who wants to know why it is sweltering hot.
It is summer, which means inside the supposed comfort of air-conditioned buildings, thousands of people are swearing that they are dying of heat, freezing to death or otherwise experiencing thermal discomfort.
I deal with this one daily. My boss is Egyptian, and loves about a 75-77 degree office. I’m of Eastern European descent, raised in Chicago winters, and prefer it to be in that nice cool 68-70 degree range.
But some studies say it’s all in my head:
“There is a very large mental component to feeling hot,” said the psychologist William C. Howell, who has conducted experiments about how accurate people are at telling what the temperature is and about when people feel comfortable.
The experiments do not mean people cannot tell the difference between 70 degrees and 110. Of course they can. But the experiments do indicate that for the kind of arguments people have all the time — in which the range of temperature being argued about is often less than five degrees — psychological factors play at least as large a role in determining comfort as the actual temperature.
In one experiment, Howell had two groups of volunteers describe how comfortable they were in a room. Then he called one group back a couple of days later, after he had raised the temperature by five degrees. He told the volunteers that he had lost their original answers, and quizzed them again about their perceptions of the temperature and their comfort.
With the second group, Howell held the temperature in the room steady but told the volunteers that it was warmer than on the first day. Again, he had them fill out questionnaires about perceived temperature and comfort.
Both groups reported exactly the same changes in perception of temperature and comfort; Howell’s suggestion to the second group that it was warmer seems to have had the same effect as actually making the room warmer.
Well, we all know the power of suggestion is important. And perhaps if I didn’t know the office was 74 degrees, I might not feel as hot. But it can be relative. I start drinking coffee in the morning and feeling warmer. So I crank it down to 70. My boss feels the difference, and puts it back up to 74. After lunch, when it’s warmed up, I crank it back down, and it probably gets put back to 74 by mid-afternoon…
It’s a good thing we’re both laid-back people, or that might get awkward…
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Brad, a small fan will do the trick. When Bonnie was working for the Wyndham Hotel, her office was usually cold in the winter time. She wore sweaters but was still cold. One day I had bought a little heater to put under the computer desk. Bonnie found it worked wonders on her cold feet and she took it to her office. She didn’t complain about the cold again. Luckly, those little heaters were buy one, get one free.
That little experiment didn’t explain why the women were cold.
It’s 68 degrees in my lab, and we’re all freezing. Mostly because to maintain 68 degrees, very cold air is constantly pumped into the room to counteract the thousands of computers and routers and switches that generate heat.
To those of us sitting directly underneath a vent: we wear jackets year round in here. If I could type with gloves on, I might.