The weather inside is frightful in the summer
Blame physiology. Blame technology. Blame modern office culture. Blame fashion. Blame — sigh! — men.
But whatever you do, don’t blame Barbara McGinity. She’s just cold.
“Most days, I have a blanket, a sweater and a shawl,” says McGinity, who works in an office building off the West Loop. On bad days, which tend to be Mondays, she says, she uses fingerless gloves that heat up when she plugs them into her computer.
Her office mate wraps herself in an electric blanket, and on the other side of the building, she says, they’re all in fleece.
This is summer office life in Houston, where the indoor temperature can easily dip 35 degrees lower than the outdoor temperature. The War of the Thermostat takes place all over the country (the conventional wisdom says women are always cold and men are always hot, but that’s not necessarily so), but it’s probably worse in the City that Chilled Air Built.
A recent study by Maastricht University in the Netherlands showed that even at 75 degrees, women doing sedentary tasks tend to get cold. The metabolic equivalents that have been used for decades have seriously overestimated women’s metabolic rates. In other
“If it’s under 75, I get icicles off my nose, but I’m ex-Army, so I just stick it out.”
Rachel E. Bromley, director of development of Worklife Institute Texas Veterans Program
words, any thermostat setting lower than, say, 77 assumes you’re a guy.
Kate Lister, a workplace strategy consultant for Global Workplace Analytics, works in balmy San Diego, but she understands what a problem being cold in the office can be. She cites Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (hello, Psych 101), which says that if you don’t meet people’s basic needs, they can’t progress to a point of bettering themselves. The same is true in offices. “Everything stops when you’re cold,” Lister says.
Imagine the workplace even 25 or 30 years ago. More men wore suits, and women wore stockings — and never a sleeveless dress. They were warmer.
Now, says Lister, we work in open-plan offices, wear less clothing (women wearing even less than men), workers are older, the windows don’t open, and the computers give off much less heat. Workers move around less — everything is at their fingertips. On top of that, says Lister, buildings have fewer workers in them, making for less human-generated heat. “So many are working on the go that buildings are less than 40 percent occupied,” she says.
In general, though not always, women tend to feel the cold more than men. Their metabolisms run more slowly than men’s and, in many cases, they have less muscle mass.
And then there’s Rachel E. Bromley, director of development at the Worklife Institute in Houston, an organization that helps Texas veterans and their families make the transition to civilian life, offering personal and financial counseling. She swears that she alone in her office freezes day in and day out. “I’m the worst,” she says.
She wears Gore-Tex camo and drinks hot coffee all morning and hot tea all afternoon, with hot soup for lunch. “If it’s under 75, I get icicles off my nose,” she says. “But I’m ex-Army, so I just stick it out.”
The International Facilities Management Association says office temperature is the No. 1 complaint its members deal with.
Lister says that having freezing employees costs companies real money. She says heating and air conditioning costs average $333 per year per employee. Lower temperatures mean lower productivity. If an employee making $50,000 a year is even 4 percent less productive because of cold air, that costs the company $2,000. A study by Cornell University, she says, showed that in temperatures below 68 degrees, employees made 44 percent more errors.
But surely this doesn’t have to be the way our working lives go, does it?
Lister proposes some common-sense improvements. First, for workers: Make sure you have a jacket or shawl at the office.
For employers: Allow workers to move workspaces so the coldest person isn’t in the coldest spot. Make standing desks available. Have standing meetings, or walking meetings (for one thing, she says, they tend to be shorter.) Let more people work outside the office. Provide fitness classes to get the blood moving.
There are technological fixes as well. First, let’s pause with our hats over our hearts to mourn the Herman Miller C2, a small desktop device shaped like an elf’s hat that allowed the user to adjust the temperature at her desk up or down a few degrees, creating a kind of individual microclimate. It was discontinued a couple of years ago. A spokeswoman for the company says the C2, which cost $300, might have been ahead of its time.
Fortunately, it’s not the only solution out there. Brian Cartwright, the director of brand and design for Vornado, recommends two of the company’s desktop devices. The VH101, small and squat (but cute), is a space heater ($41.09 on Amazon) that diffuses the warm air to create a cloud of warmth, not a direct blast. (It has a tip-over switch and automatic shutoff, so you won’t burn the building down.) He also recommends the SRTH ($44.99 on Amazon) a small tower heater that looks like your car go-cup and can warm a small office. Both, he says, use far less electricity than conventional space heaters.
As for McGinity, she’s planning to escalate via low-tech. She’s bringing in socks.