ComFeel: Productivity is a Matter of the Senses Too

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that sensor-measured room pleasantness significantly influences meeting productivity and psychological safety, highlighting the importance of indoor environmental quality for short-term workplace effectiveness.

Contribution

Introduces ComFeel, a novel unobtrusive sensing infrastructure, to quantify indoor environmental factors and links sensor data to meeting productivity and safety perceptions.

Findings

Room pleasantness increases meeting productivity by up to 25%.

Psychological safety boosts productivity by 35%.

Sensor data effectively captures environmental impact on meetings.

Abstract

Indoor environmental quality has been found to impact employees' productivity in the long run, yet it is unclear its meeting-level impact in the short term. We studied the relationship between sensorial pleasantness of a meeting's room and the meeting's productivity. By administering a 28-item questionnaire to 363 online participants, we indeed found that three factors captured 62% of people's experience of meetings: (a) productivity; (b) psychological safety; and (c) room pleasantness. To measure room pleasantness, we developed and deployed ComFeel, an indoor environmental sensing infrastructure, which captures light, temperature, and gas resistance readings through miniaturized and unobtrusive devices we built and named 'Geckos'. Across 29 real-world meetings, using ComFeel, we collected 1373 minutes of readings. For each of these meetings, we also collected whether each participant felt the meeting to have been productive, the setting to be psychologically safe, and the meeting room to be pleasant. As one expects, we found that, on average, the probability of a meeting being productive increased by 35% for each standard deviation increase in the psychological safety participants experienced. Importantly, that probability increased by as much as 25% for each increase in room pleasantness, confirming the significant short-term impact of the indoor environment on meetings' productivity.