During the study, Hedge placed miniature temperature recorders at nine individual workstations at the Insurance Office of America's corporate headquarters in Orlando, Fla. The dataloggers, which are commonly used to validate comfort complaints in the workplace, sampled air temperature every 15 minutes for an entire working month. This data was then correlated with a month's worth of ergonomic data to show how typing performance worsened as temperatures fell.
As employees typed, Hedge made note of the amount of time they were keying and the amount of time they were making error corrections. At 77 degrees F, employees were keying 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate, while at 68 degrees F, keying rate went down to 54 percent of the time with a 25 percent error rate, he reported.
Hedge estimates that the decreased productivity resulted in a 10 percent increase in labor costs per worker, per hour.
