It’s time for the annual co-worker battle for office thermostat control. If you are among the chronically cold, there is a new study that will warm the frozen cockles of your heart.
Research on the effect of temperature on cognitive performance by gender found that when the office is warm, women perform better in math and verbal tasks, while the reverse effect was observed for their male co-workers. When looking at cognitive reflection tasks, researchers found temperature caused no measurable difference between the genders.
Perhaps most interesting to those who want to increase the office temperature, the increase in female performance in response to higher temperature was significantly larger and more precisely estimated than the corresponding decrease in male performance.
What does this mean? It’s time to turn up the thermostat because gender-mixed workplaces may be able to increase productivity by keeping the temperature higher than current standards.
Need proof for your co-workers? Check out the study here.