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97

Productivity and the environment

Dr. Robert Wilkinson

Medical ResearchCouncil, Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge

This article discusses the problem of how management can improve productivity by
exerting a closer control over the working environment, so that people suffer less from
stresses, for example, as noise, loss of sleep, heat or cold. Laboratory tests alone cannot
hope to predict quantitatively the impact of such stresses on the shop floor and in the
office; they may, however, be able to indicate in more general terms the kind of shop
floor or office which would most benefit from a field study.

Problem to uncharacteristic attitudes and atypical output levels

This article is addressed primarily to industrial management.
It is concerned with whether there are any grounds for
thinking that productivity can be raised significantly by
exerting a closer control upon the working environment.
Obviously it is going to cost money to keep the
temperature within narrow limits, for example, or to
control the level of noise, or to arrange shift systems so that
there is less risk of sleep being lost. Managers cannot be
expected to initiate such schemes without some prior
indication of whether the cost will be justified in terms of
increased production. How are they to get this information?
Field studies
An obvious answer seems to be to make the proposed
change on a small scale in one small part of the factory or
office and be guided by how productivity varies there. This
is fine, provided those concerned are aware of influences
which may distort the results of the test. To start with let
us dispose of two which may not be the immediate concern
of the ergonomist, although if he does not solve them or get
someone to do so he might as well give up. They are, first,
reluctance on the part of individuals to have their output
recorded, and, second, the existence of voluntary schemes
to limit output, for reasons quite unconnected with any
manipulation of environmental conditions. Where these
conditions prevail, records of output will be misleading and
of no use in assessing optimal environmental conditions.
What is said from now on is based on the assumption that
there do exist shop floors and offices where it is practical to
take measures of individual performance and where,
broadly speaking, there is no deliberate attempt to curtail
output.
There are three further difficulties of measurement
whose influence can and must be minimised if the effects
of adverse conditions on performance are to be assessed in
the right way:
1. In the short term, at least, the knowledge that conditions
are being changed and performance measured will lead
on the part of those concerned. The usual example of
this is what happened at the Western Electric Company's
Hawthorne Works in Chicago. A working-space was set
aside in which normal production could be carried on
whilst improvements in temperature, lighting, rest
periods, and shift times were assessed. Production duly
improved, but so did production in the rest of the plant.
Moreover, the improvement was sustained when the
environmental modifications were withdrawn.
Presumably the change was due to an improvement in
the attitude of the workers towards the firm, because
they saw signs of concern for their conditions of work.
2. Output may well be a function not only of individual
efficiency but of the ebb and flow of materials and even
tools.
3. There are incidental factors, such as the weather, the
daily news, a local football match, or the vicissitudes of
factory politics, which may exert a more profound
effect on a week's work than is often suspected.
All these are sources of error which can be reduced, but
only by spending enough time, in other words money, on
the process of measurement. For an accurate assessment to
be made of the effect of changing one of the environmental
factors, say temperature, it will probably be essential to
take records of individual output for months (rather than
weeks or days) before and after the change. It would be
desirable to take similar records from a comparison group
of people doing the same work under the same conditions
but with no environmental changes made. In this way three
sources of error are reduced:
1. Inaccuracies due to short-term variation of irrelevant
factors may average out so that the effect of the
environmental change can emerge more clearly.
2. The presence of long-term changes, whose influence
could be confused with that of the environmental
variable over a short period, will be more easily detected.
3. The people concerned will become used to their output
being studied and their environmental well-being

194 AppliedErgonomics September 1970

 considered. They will accept the situation as normal and
cease to respond to it with atypical attitudes and
performance.
The catch, of course, from management's point of view
is that, even if they spend enough money to safeguard
accurate measurement, how can they be sure the study will
reveal anything worth changing? It is this thought which so
often saps morale and counsels inertia. What is really needed
is some guidance on the kind of working situation worth
examining from the environmental stress point of view.
Perhaps some of the information coming recently from the
ergonomics laboratory can be of help here? But before we
consider it let us look at the problems of assessing
environmental conditions on the laboratory front.
Laboratory studies
Most of the things that are difficult to control in the
field can be readily controlled in the ergonomics laboratory:
the number of chance variables can be reduced; irrelevant
conditions can be kept constant; and there are no politics.
Subjects adapt more readily and less suspiciously to the
experience of being tested, although again it is wise to
prolong testing over a number of days or even weeks to
make sure that measurements are taken over a steady
baseline. Laboratory-type tasks can be used, which are
easily scored and which throw light on more aspects of
performance than can the study of one particular operation
in the factory. In short, accurate measurements can be
taken at a fraction of the cost of similar measurements in
real life.
But the problem of the laboratory worker is no less
serious: he cannot know how far his findings generalise to
conditions in the field. Are his subjects, his form of stress,
his task, sufficiently similar to those found in real life for
him to be able to predict quantitatively the percentage
gain in productivity due to a given environmental change,
say a temperature of 18°C (65°F) instead of 27°C (80°F)?
Almost certainly such predictions would be inaccurate.
We can be confident in saying this because of recent
laboratory work concerned with a second order question:
given that we know a certain test is impaired by a stress,
how far and in what direction will this effect vary as other
factors in the working situation are changed? The sort of
factors I am referring to are duration of the work, nature of
the task, level of incentive, amount of practice and
familiarity with the stress and the job, and the presence of
other stresses. It has become clear that the effect may
change very considerably in response to such influences,
and of course these factors cannot be expected to remain
constant in the transition from the laboratory to the field
situation.
Fortunately this work has its constructive as well as its
destructive implications. Although it warns against rash
quantitative generalization from laboratory to the factory
floor, it may provide qualitative data which can be
expected to hold good in both places. An influence which
increases the impact of a stress in the laboratory would
seem likely to do so in the field also, and similarly with one
which has a cancelling effect. Paradoxically, then, as we
move from the straightforward quantative matter of
predicting the effect of a given amount of stress upon a
given job, to the second order problem of saying whether a
known effect of stress will be increased or decreased by a
certain change in the working situation, we may fired that
laboratory results can be translated more directly into
savings on the factory floor.
The stress-prone job
A fair proportion of the relevant laboratory work has
been carried out in the last 12 years at the Medical Research
Council's Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge. I have
reviewed it recently, together with a number of
contributions from other sources, in an article entitled
'Some factors influencing the effect of environmental
stressors on performance' (Wilkinson, 1969). This is the
source for those requiring a wider range of references than
is given here. I shall now summarise the conclusions to
provide some answer to the question posed earlier, 'How
can managers tell where it will pay them to control the
environment?'
To begin with let me make clear the stresses I am talking
about, which are: loss of sleep, noise of a continuous
unstructured nature, heat of quite high intensity ie an
effective temperature of 30°-32°C (850-90°F), and, if
you can call it a stress, alcohol. Other areas from which
evidence has been gathered in a less systematic and
therefore less influential form are: vibration, cold, low
atmospheric pressure (with and without a normal amount
of oxygen in the air), acceleration or rotating environments,
and environments,which impose some form of sensory
impoverishment (eg being in the same room, seeing
no-one, for days on end). This list, which is not exhaustive,
will give some idea of the variety of ways in which an
environment can become hostile. Sleepiness (usually due to
shift work), noise and temperature are probably the most
common threats in practice, and it is fortunate that these
are the ones we have been able to cover best in the
laboratory.
Prolonged, repetitive work
So far as one can generalise, it seems reasonable to say
that these threestresses, sleepiness, noise, and at least
moderate heat, will impair efficiency most when the work
is repetitive and prolonged. Thus, in the laboratory it is rare
for a test to be affected by either noise or loss of sleep
during the first few minutes. Only when the work has been
going on for some time do these stresses appear to hamper
performance. Furthermore, the kind of jobs which are
impaired most are, in general, those which require people to
make a long succession of the same or relatively similar
responses to the same or similar stimuli. (Fig 1).
With moderately raised environmental temperatures the
same seems to be true, although as temperatures become
higher it may well be that effects are seen more quickly
and in a wider range of tasks, including some which are not
so obviously of a repetitive nature. It seems reasonable to
generalise in the following way: when people have to do the
same thing over and over again, they seem to be particularly
vulnerable to these three forms of stress, and quite possibly
to others too. Unfortunately, one of the features of
'efficient' automated production is that the human link in
the mechanical chain is often required to work in just this
way.
Applied Ergonomics September 1970 195

Fig 1 Repetitive work: inspection of coins.
It is perhaps relevant, at this point, to speak of a study
we carried out recently for the Navy, comparing two shift
systems for 24-hour manning of a post (Wilkinson and
Edwards, 1968). In the event an experimental two-man
system outperformed an existing three-man one. There
were two things new about the two-man system. First, the
times of the shifts were arranged so that a given man always
worked the same hours of the day or night. What is more
relevant to our present discussion, however, is that the men
rotated at one-hour intervals about three jobs, whereas in
the less satisfactory system each man carried out one of the
jobs for the whole of each shift. Two of the jobs were of a
repetitive nature, one particularly so. It was in these
activities that the job rotation was particularly valuable in
preventing lowered efficiency.
The reason for emphasizing this is that, so far as I am
aware, job rotation is not considered as a deliberate policy
to avoid the weeks, months, even years on the same process
which modern production lines can inflict on a man, while
still expecting him to remain eagerly at work, impervious to
any effects of noise, heat, or sleeplessness. Our laboratory
work suggests above all that this kind of prolonged
repetitive job breeds an inability to withstand the effects of
everyday environmental stresses. Somehow the repetition
has to be removed; where job rotation is impracticable
other means must be found. Even some measure of reduced
automation may result in a more efficient production line,
if by these means the human link in the chain is made more
efficient and less vulnerable to stress and frustration. In
machine engineering terms it may be the height of
inefficiency to train and work a man alternately on two
jobs when he could do one all the time. In human
engineering terms it may be the height of inefficiency not
to do so, in some situations at least.
196 Applied Ergonomics September 1970
There is a further point: we have been considering
environmental stress as it affects output directly, through
its influence upon performance. It may affect output
indirectly to an even greater extent, through its effect upon
interpersonal relations within a factory. It is well known
both inside and outside the laboratory that excessive heat,
noise and sleeplessness can lead to irritability and intolerant
attitudes. Do these symptoms multiply when the
environmental stress impinges upon the repetitive,
prolonged job? I know of no experimental data, but it
sounds a reasonable extension from the performance
findings.
I ncent ives
There are other features of a man's job which, according
to our laboratory studies, may make it more (or less)
vulnerable to stresses of various kinds. It is significant
however that, unlike the duration and repetitive nature of
the job, their effects are not so uniform either from stress
to stress or in terms of whether they increase or reduce the
adverse effects of stresses. Incentives in the work, for
example, have reduced the ill effects of loss of sleep
(Wilkinson, 1961)while increasing those of noise
(Wilkinson, 1963). The impact of incentives on the effects
of heat seems to depend rather upon the situation and the
amount of heat, and the same seems to be true for
relatively low doses of alcohol.
Stresses in combination
Finally, there is much misapprehension about the effects
of stresses in combination. In a way, as we have seen, many
stresses seem to have one thing in common - their effects
are greatest when a long time has to be spent continuously
at the same kind of work. But in other ways they must have
different effects on the brain and body. Evidence for this
comes from work at the Applied Psychology Unit and
elsewhere, showing that when two stresses are combined
the effect on performance is not necessarily the simple sum
of their individual effects.
In some cases the resulting impairment may indeed be
simply additive, as reported by Pepler (1959; 1963) for
combinations of heat and loss of sleep. In some cases it may
be less than the sum, as when noise becomes less
troublesome when sleep has been lost (Wilkinson, 1963).
More seriously, however, in some cases the combined effect
may be considerably more than the sum of the individual
effects of two stresses. This has been found, for example,
when loss of sleep is combined with a sizeable dose of
alcohol (say two double whiskies) (Wilkinson and
Colquhoun, 1968), and when alcohol is taken with
anti-motion-sickness drugs (Colquhoun, 1962) the
combined effect of which is surprisingly unpleasant, as some
some festive day-trippers from Dover to Calais will testify.
The practical implications of this are ominous. We
know of one or two cases of combined effects being
disproportionately great, but are these only the tip of an
iceberg? How many more combinations of stress are
potentially harmful? As I write, World Cup Football is in
progress in the heat and the altitude of Mexico (Fig 2).
When you read this we may have more idea than we have
now of the combined effects of heat and lack of oxygen,
but the laboratory as well as the football field should be the
scene of such studies.
Information on the interaction of stresses exists and
should be used by managers, but more laboratory and field
work is needed to tabulate how the effects of combined
stresses differ from their individual reactions.
Fig 2 Interaction of heat, altitude, and perhaps loss of
sleep in the stadium at Guadalajara, Mexico.
! Effects of hyoscine and meclozine on vigilance and
| short-term memory.
| Pepler, R. D.
| 1959 Journal of Comparative Physiological Psychology, 52,
11111
|fin
Fig 3 Vertical take-off would improve transport but
might introduce noise problems. Who are more affected in
those offices, executives making decisions or typists
checking scripts?
Conclusions
I have outlined some of the snags in trying to assess
human response to environmental stress both in the field
and in the laboratory. I have also mentioned certain
features which, when present in a working situation, seem
to make the job particularly vulnerable to the effects of
adverse environmental conditions. Where do we go from
here?
The message to management is this: look to your shop
floors, to your offices, and, where you find the features I
have mentioned, consider controlling the environment more
rigidly. You may feel you have a combination ominous
enough to warrant going ahead with alterations on the basis
of laboratory evidence alone. On the other hand you may
prefer a preliminary study of the effect of controlling the
environment in a small test area, or even repeating the
laboratory tests in the factory environment and on the men
concerned. Whichever course you adopt please, if you can,
invite ergonomists to advise on the changes you make or
the experiments you try. Failing this at least let them know
your results and whether they bear out laboratory-based
predictions. In this journal you have the shop window for
such case histories.
References
Coiquhoun, W. P.
1962 British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 19, 287-296
446-450. Warmth and lack of sleep: accuracy or
activity reduced.
Pepler, R. D.
1963 Performance and well-being in heat. In:
'Temperature - its measurement and control in
science and industry.' Reinhold, New York,
pp 319-336.
Poulton, E. C.
1970 'Environment and efficiency,' Thomas: Springfield, Ill.
Wilkinson, R. T.
1961 Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 263-271
Interaction of lack of sleep with knowledge of results,
repeated testing and individual differences.
Wilkinson, R. T.
1963 Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 332-337.
Interaction of noise with knowledge of results and
sleep deprivation.
Wilkinson, R. T. and Colquhoun, W. P.
1968 Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76, 623-629.
Interaction of alcohol with incentive and with sleep
deprivation.
Wilkinson, R. T. and Edwards, R. S.
1968 Psychonomic Science, 13,205-206. Stable hours and
varied work as aids to efficiency.
Wilkinson, R. T.
1969 Psychological Bulletin, 72, 260-272. Some factors
influencing the effect of environmental stressors
upon performance.
Applied Ergonomics September 1970 197