Finally, The Heat/Work Relationship Study We Have Been Waiting For

The Impact of Workplace Heat and Cold on Work Time Loss

Found in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine

I was lucky enough to be a part of the group of people that was offered this article on some very important and long awaited research into the impact of heat (and cold) on work.  As mentioned in the article, it has been many decades since a thorough study was done on the amount of lost work due to the heat and the cold.  This paper took a novel approach that I hope I properly explain.

As always, if my friends and associates in my contact list on LinkedIn see that I misstated something please jump in and correct me.

Some Key Points to Remember When Reading the Research

1. The objective of this research was to investigate the impact of workplace heat and cold on work time loss.  Work time loss is very different from researching productivity loss.  This study looked at how much time is lost in a shift versus how much output is lost based off of some baseline output.

2. Field experiments were conducted across several industrial sectors (agriculture, construction and tourism) and multiple countries (Cyprus, Greece, Nicaragua, Qatar, Slovenia and Spain), through several different seasons, between 2016 and 2024.  The field testing was done with 376 workers (100 females and 276 males) in the agriculture (227), construction (95) and tourism(54) industries across 603 full shifts.  Please note that this study was based on experienced and acclimated workers unlike most studies that will use volunteers.  So, lost time was not as high as would otherwise have occurred, but was a more accurate reflection of a real life scenario.

3. The Workplace Environmental Labor Loss (WELL) functions were developed based on WBGT and ambient temperature to describe work time loss due to workplace temperature in the hope that this new data will help to better understand the impacts of Climate Change.

4. They used a term that I was not familiar with called “work time loss”. We have always discussed the impact of heat (and cold) in the workplace in terms of productivity.  For this research, work time loss refers to time allocated to non-work-related activities excluding breaks provided by management, such as lunch breaks, during a work shift.  They took this approach as they felt there are too many variables not related to heat and cold that can impact output such as consistent availability of resources needed for the output.

5. Data was collected across a wide range of thermal conditions (0-36C WBGT and 0-44C ambient temperature.

Join me next week as I attempt to summarize their findings as this new research had some very interesting outcomes and share a link to the full report.