RESEARCH & IDEAS
Blue Skies, Distractions Arise:
How Weather Affects
Productivity
Published: September 17, 2012
Author:
Carmen Nobel
New studies show that workers are more
productive on rainy days than on sunny ones.
Does your office take advantage? Research by
Francesca Gino and colleagues.
Autumn has sprung, and the cold, dreary
days of winter are around the corner. But take
heart, wistful sun lovers. It turns out that lousy
weather is actually good for business
operations.
A new research paper reports that a decrease
in sunny weather is directly related to an
increase in worker efficiency. 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.
The paper also explores the practical
implications of these findings. For example,
should managers save certain tasks for days
when skies are gray?
"A field study gives you the
reality of the phenomenon.
A lab study answers the
question, why is this
happening?"
The work was generated out of a discussion
about the authors' own lives. "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. 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.
To test whether this idea held true in the
corporate world, the researchers looked at
preexisting field data at 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 which time the
bank processed more than 56,000 loan
applications—a process comprising about
600,000 individual data-entry tasks.
The research team matched that data to
meteorological data in Tokyo during that
period. (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. Low
visibility and extreme temperatures also
matched periods of high worker productivity.
Clear, sunny days correlated with relatively low
productivity.
From the field to the lab
With that supporting data in hand, the team
decided to test the weather/productivity
connection in the controlled setting of a
research lab. The goal was to establish causality
for the correlative findings.
"I love when you combine a field study with
a lab study," Gino says. "A field study gives
you the reality of the phenomenon. A lab study
answers the question, why is this happening?"
COPYRIGHT 2012 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE
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. 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.
"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.
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. Furthermore,
on both rainy and sunny days, some participants
were deliberately reminded of the outdoors. The
researchers asked these participants to look at
photographs of activities that they could do
outside, such as sailing or walking in the
woods, and describe in detail which one they
liked the best. (The photographs all had been
taken on sunny days.) Control group
participants, meanwhile, were not shown the
sunny-day photos; rather, they were asked only
to describe their typical daily routines.
In total there were four groups of
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participants: rainy-day participants who were
induced to daydream about sunny-day
activities; sunny-day participants who were
induced to daydream about sunny-day
activities; rainy-day control group participants;
and sunny-day control group participants.
All participants were asked to enter several
sets of written questionnaire responses into a
spreadsheet, with the incentivizing knowledge
that they would be compensated financially
according to how quickly they completed the
task. The researchers deliberately used
questionnaire responses written in Italian to
increase the difficulty of the task for the
English-speaking participants. "One way in
which you can capture whether people are
cognitively distracted is to actually look at the
errors they make when they are entering data,"
says Gino, who, as a native of Italy, was in a
good position to detect transcription errors.
"People tend to be more
productive on a bad weather
day than on a good weather
day."
The researchers found that the top
performers (those who completed the task the
fastest and the most accurately) were the
rainy-day control group participants, who had
seen neither the actual sun nor pictures of the
sun before doing the task. "What we found was
consistent with the field data," Gino says.
"Once again we see that people tend to be more
productive on a bad weather day than on a good
weather day."
Meanwhile, exposure to the sunny-day
photographs significantly decreased the
performance of participants who came to the lab
on rainy days. For those who came in on sunny
days, the added distraction of the sunny-day
photographs had little effect on performance.
The findings indicate that workers are
indeed most productive when the weather is
lousy—but only if nothing artificially reminds
them of good weather.
"On good weather days, making outside
options salient doesn't matter because we're
already distracted by the sun," Gino explains.
"But on bad weather days, people tend to make
more errors and perform more slowly when you
just make them think about outside options."
Managerial implications
The researchers believe that the findings
have practical implications for managers,
especially those in charge of employees whose
jobs require repetitive tasks. At the most basic
level, they can avoid peppering the office with,
say, posters of distracting beach scenes. But
they also can be mindful of the positive and
COPYRIGHT 2012 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE
negative effects of the weather outside.
"Although
weather
conditions
are
exogenous and uncontrollable, organizations
could assign more clerical work on rainy days
than sunny days to tap into the effects of bad
weather on productivity, assigning work [on
sunny days] that does not require sustained
attention but does allow for more flexibility in
thinking," the researchers write.
For Gino, the findings match up with her
professorial career. In fact, she says, academics
often joke that they seek out positions in harsh
climates on purpose, so that they won't feel like
they're missing anything when they're hunched
over their desks for weeks on end. Thus, she
feels fortunate for the time she spent in a
windowless office at the University of North
Carolina, where she held an assistant
professorship for two years before landing at
HBS in 2010. One student, feeling sorry for
Gino, gifted her with a window from an old
farmhouse to prop up against the wall of the
office. But Gino attributes some of her
productivity at UNC to the lack of an actual
view to the outside.
"After all, it is sunny very often in North
Carolina," she smiles.
About the author
Carmen Nobel is senior editor of Harvard
Business School Working Knowledge.
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