双语阅读：坏天气更能激发工作热情

摘要: 研究发现，每增加一英尺的降雨量，员工的交易速度就会提高1.3%。吉诺说：“我们同时还发现能见度低和极端天气总是伴随着高效的工作周期，同时阳光普照、清空万里的天气总是与相对低的工作效相联系。”

While the polar vortex has meant many thousands struggling to work through ice and snow, researchers have discovered that the terrible weather conditions could actually make them more productive.

Researchers at Harvard Business School found that in fact bad weather days make us more focused and productive.

坏天气更能激发工作热情

They also found that on warm, sunny days, productivity dropped dramatically.

'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,' wrote Francesca Gino, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School

'Indeed, cognitive distractions and error rates were greater on nice days than on bad-weather days.'

The researchers asked 200 adults to predict the impact of weather on individuals’ work productivity.

More than 80 percent predicted good weather would increase productivity and about the same percentage predicted that bad weather would decrease productivity.

To test the prediction, the team looked at data 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.'

The team matched these figures to meteorological data in Tokyo during that period - and found that an increase in rain correlated with a decrease in the time it took for workers to complete their tasks.

A one-inch increase in rain was related to a 1.3% decrease 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.'

Gino said the 1.3% productivity loss is similar to the organization being short one worker on a given day.

She even urged firms to consult the weather forecast when planning staff levels.

'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.'