Workplace productivity: Fatigue and satisfaction

This chapter focuses on fatigue and individual thermal satisfaction to explain the relationship between thermal environment and worker performance. Although the conservation of energy is an important issue, the indoor environmental quality has to be maintained concurrently to maintain the comfort and performance levels of the workers in an office. The chapter reviews the experiments regarding the effect of moderately high temperature on productivity. Shin-ichi Tanabe and Naoe Nishihara reported the effects of a moderately warm environment on work performance corresponding to a COOL BIZ office. For both male and female subjects, there was no significant difference in the performance of the addition test under the environmental conditions. A subjective experiment was conducted to study the effect of a moderately hot environment on cerebral blood flow. Thermal satisfaction is important for achieving optimal performance in offices with moderately high temperatures. A subjective experiment was conducted in a climate chamber to objectively evaluate the effect of improving the thermal environment.