In a global first, a newly published study offers the most comprehensive and compelling data set to date quantifying the relationship between labor productivity and ambient temperature. Lost work time is lowest at 64°F/18°C, and for every degree above or below this optimal temperature, work time is lost at an increasing rate.
Researchers at the FAME Lab who conducted the study say that while it was previously believed that thermal conditions were a problem only in very hot workplaces or countries, the study findings demonstrate that significant work time loss can occur even at temperate environments.
They say that the findings suggest that billions of people are currently working in temperatures not optimal for work, but this goes unnoticed. The researchers recommend adopting WELL functions to model current and future workplace temperatures on workforce productivity — providing crucial information on the capacity of workers to effectively carry out their job duties and tasks.
The FAME Lab led this study, and La Isla Network provided crucial data contributing to the study’s findings; the researchers worked through a massive data set consisting of 16 million time points.
With millions of workers in environmentally-vulnerable sectors — farming, tourism, construction — these findings hint at solutions that protect worker health and drive efficiency. Doing nothing means risking lost revenue, health complications, and a scrambled supply chain under increasingly erratic weather patterns.
Heath Prince, LIN Senior Development Economist, said,
“As industries, globally, are coming to grips with extreme heat events, this critically important study is certainly timely. Beyond its findings regarding the extent to which both hot and cold working conditions contribute to work-time loss, we can extrapolate from these conclusions broader implications for businesses’ bottom lines as their ability to remain competitive in the face of worsening working conditions becomes less certain. More importantly, however, as worker productivity is negatively affected by extreme heat, so, too, are workers’ ability to maintain their income and provide for their and their families’ long-term well being.”
La Isla Network is an occupational health research and advisory nonprofit dedicated to ending heat-related illnesses among workers and their communities worldwide. We develop and implement data-driven worker protection and management assessment protocols to improve the resiliency of workforces and businesses to heat stress. Our work is backed by best-in-class researchers, industry leaders and government and multilateral institutions like the ILO. For more information please use our contact form.
