The Polar Vortex Has Made You More Productive

As a native of Italy who has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for many years now, I am accustomed to the wonderful perks the city offers: the parks along the Charles River, the ease of walking from square to square, and the possibility of having an authentic Italian experience just a few miles away in the Boston’s North End. But the winter’s arctic temperatures have been a bit tougher for me to get used to – especially this year’s snowfalls and cold spells. Extreme winter weather, after all, does not seem to bring many benefits, unless you’re a fan of sledding and ice skating.

Or so I thought, until I recently conducted research that looked at weather and work productivity.

Organizations employ a variety of strategies to boost worker productivity: designing workflow to avoid system bottlenecks, setting incentives, and varying task assignments to increase workers’ motivation and capitalize on their abilities. However, these strategies often fail to account for powerful outside factors, such as weather conditions on a given day, that might influence worker productivity.

My colleagues and I asked about 200 adults to predict the impact of weather on individuals’ work productivity. Among our respondents, more than 80 percent predicted that nice weather would increase productivity and about the same percentage predicted that bad weather would decrease productivity.

Does this intuition hold up in the real world? To examine the actual relationship between weather conditions and work productivity, we began by looking at preexisting field data we had from a midsize bank in Tokyo. The bank had tracked employee productivity for two-and-a-half years following the launch of a new mortgage-processing system in June 2007. During this period, the bank processed more than 56,000 loan applications, a process comprising about 600,000 individual data-entry tasks. Such tasks require high levels of attention and focus, which allow workers to complete their work faster and more productively. Thus, we expected higher productivity to be associated with fewer cognitive distractions.

We matched these figures to meteorological data in Tokyo during that period. (Tokyo is a city that experiences sunny weather and torrential downpours, as well as significant temperature and humidity shifts.) We found that an increase in rain correlated with a decrease in the time it took for workers to complete their tasks. To be precise, a one-inch increase in rain was related to a 1.3% descrease in worker completion time for each transaction. We also found that low visibility and extreme temperatures also matched periods of high worker productivity. Meanwhile, clear, sunny days correlated with relatively low productivity.

With about 100 workers in the operation, a 1.3% productivity loss is similar to the organization being short one worker on a given day. Based on the average yearly salary of the associate-level employees at this bank and the average frequency of precipitation, this loss could cost this particular operation approximately $18,750 annually. When accumulated over time for the entire bank of nearly 5,000 employees, a 1.3% productivity loss could be judged to be a significant revenue loss for the bank: at least $937,500 a year.

In follow-up studies, we examined why this is the case. We found that, on a bad-weather day, people are better at focusing on their work not because the weather makes them grumpy but because they have fewer distracting thoughts about what they might otherwise be doing outside. Indeed, cognitive distractions and error rates were greater on nice days than on bad-weather days.

Given that the weather is beyond their control, how can managers leverage this information? The Campbell’s Soup Company provides a good example of how businesses may benefit from paying close attention to the weather. The company knew that, not surprisingly, consumers buy more soup when the weather is cold, damp, or windy. Based on this information, Campbell’s decided to link the frequency of their radio ad purchases to the weather in various markets. Specifically, they developed an algorithm called the “Misery Index” that uses meteorological data to play radio buys. To this day, if you’re hearing an ad for soup on the radio, there’s a good chance you’re either carrying an umbrella or wearing a coat.

Similarly, organizations could assign more clerical work of the type that does not require sustained attention but does allow for more flexible thinking on sunny days than on rainy days. Organizations might also give productivity feedback to each employee and allow flexible task assignments that could maximize productivity. If an organization wishes to maintain a consistent work output, the weather forecast might be a valuable factor in a staffing model. Finally, given that weather depends on location, our research suggests that, holding all other factors constant, locating operations in places with worse weather may be preferable.That may be good news for companies in Boston.

And maybe, instead of taking the next snowy, cold, miserable day off, you can make the case to your head of HR for a free “low productivity day” when it warms up.

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