Furthermore, on both rainy and sunny days, some participants were deliberately reminded of the outdoors. Half of the participants were asked to come to the lab on days forecast for rain, while the other half came in on sunny days. "Specifically, we carefully chose the days on which we conducted the sessions of the study to take advantage of natural variation, and then we experimentally manipulated subjects' exposure to outside options," the authors explain in the paper. The purpose of the lab study was to determine whether the distraction created by the temptation of outside activities was indeed what caused a decrease in worker productivity on sunny days. The team recruited 136 college students through the study pool at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conducting experiments in February and March-when the weather tends to be sunny one day and overcast the next. A lab study answers the question, why is this happening?" "A field study gives you the reality of the phenomenon. "I love when you combine a field study with a lab study," Gino says. The goal was to establish causality for the correlative findings. With that supporting data in hand, the team decided to test the weather/productivity connection in the controlled setting of a research lab. Clear, sunny days correlated with relatively low productivity. Low visibility and extreme temperatures also matched periods of high worker productivity. (Tokyo is a city that sees its share of sunny weather and torrential downpours, as well as significant temperature and humidity shifts.) In short, they found that an increase in rain correlated with a decrease in the time it took for workers to complete their tasks. The research team matched that data to meteorological data in Tokyo during that period. 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 which time the bank processed more than 56,000 loan applications-a process comprising about 600,000 individual data-entry tasks. To test whether this idea held true in the corporate world, the researchers looked at preexisting field data at a midsize bank in Tokyo. Staats (HBS MBA '02, DBA'09) of the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Jooa Julia Lee of the Harvard Kennedy School. "We were commenting, looking at our own experiences, that it seems to feel different to do your job, whatever that is, if you have a very sunny day outside versus a very rainy day, because your mind seems to be distracted by all the outside opportunities that you have on sunny days versus rainy ones," says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who cowrote the paper with Bradley R. The work was generated out of a discussion about the authors' own lives. A lab study answers the question, why is this happening?” For example, should managers save certain tasks for days when skies are gray? “A field study gives you the reality of the phenomenon. The paper also explores the practical implications of these findings. In "Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity," the authors show that workers are especially productive on rainy days, simply because they're not tempted by the possibilities of a sunny day-a walk in the park, for example, or an afternoon at the beach. It turns out that lousy weather is actually good for business operations.Ī new research paper reports that a decrease in sunny weather is directly related to an increase in worker efficiency. Autumn has sprung, and the cold, dreary days of winter are around the corner.
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