Bundling up for winter while working indoors
As much of the United States muddled through bitter weather in recent weeks, office dwellers found they still had to brave the cold even when indoors. Many relied on winter parkas, gloves, blankets and space heaters just to keep working.
“Today I’ve got two sweaters, a scarf, ear coverings, gloves and a blanket over my lap,” Rebecca Miller, a 27-year-old academic adviser at Tennessee State University in Nashville, said last week as temperatures barely ticked above 10 C in her office while outside it was -7 C or lower in the daytime. “But I’m still having a hard time working. I’m shaking cold, and it’s hard to focus. The gloves make it hard to type and the bulky layers make it difficult to move around.”
Like many other chilly Americans, she took selfies at her desk in attire usually reserved for the ski slopes and shared them on social media.
Office developments are built with centralized heating systems that make the buildings suitable for a range of uses over many years. The downside is that they provide little climate control to individual tenants — sometimes purposely, said Khee Poh Lam, architecture professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Thermostats are often tucked into hard-to-reach spaces such as false ceilings and air ducts so office ten- ants can’t mess with them, Lam said. Other buildings have dummy units out in the open that don’t actually do anything except give desperate workers the illusion of control.
Finding the right temperature to please everyone has been an elusive goal for office designers and builders, said Stefano Schiavon, architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-wrote a 2012 study that found roughly 40 per cent of U.S. workers were satisfied with their office’s temperature. Design standards call for an acceptability rate closer to 80 per cent, he said.
The challenge isn’t just confined to the winter, of course. Chilly offices have long been the bane of women who complain air conditioning is cranked up in the summer to appease their male, suit-wearing counterparts. And there are certainly many offices with overzealous furnaces that prompt workers to crack open windows even on the coldest days. Optimal temperature for office work is 22 C to 26 C — or nearly 6 C higher than where many buildings typically set their thermostats, said Alan Hedge, a design professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who has researched how temperature affects productivity.
“The bottom line is that central heating won’t work for everyone, even if designed right,” Schiavon said. “We’re very different people and need some sort of personalization of our environment.”