Businesses spend a lot of time and money on treatments that promise to boost worker productivity through on-the-job training, new protocols, expert guidance, and so on. According to new research, there is a surprise input into productivity that no one ever considers: clean air.

We are all aware that air pollution is harmful to human health, and studies continue to uncover evidence of pollution’s harmful impacts. However, current study has gone a step further, beginning to chronicle how pollution may impair human productivity. Several studies have shown that pollution decreases the production of farm workers as well as manufacturing workers. Physical laborers must slow down when pollution levels rise, specifically outdoor ozone and indoor particulate matter.

Productivity of Indoor

But what about the productivity of indoor employees who spend all day in front of a computer? We wanted to determine if pollution was also harming those employees. We researched the impact of air pollution on call-center workers at Ctrip, China’s largest travel agency, to find out. Workers at Ctrip are knowledge workers; they spend their days managing client phone calls rather than in a factory or on a farm. If they are harmed by pollution, we may all be at risk.

We were able to convincingly separate the influence of pollution on productivity due to many features of the firm’s operations. First, the company keeps precise information on each employee’s productivity: number of calls completed each day, duration of breaks, and time logged in. Ctrip has various call centers, and all calls are routed through a central system, so local pollution does not affect overall workflow. And, because Ctrip’s customers call from all across China, we were able to isolate the impacts of pollution on worker productivity from the effects of local pollution on demand for travel services.

Productivity

We discovered an unexpectedly strong association between daily air pollution levels and worker productivity after reviewing Ctrip’s personnel data. A 10-unit rise in the Air Quality Index (AQI) resulted in a 0.35% decrease in the number of calls handled by a Ctrip employee. This result reveals that when air pollution levels are designated as excellent by the Environmental Protection Agency (AQI of 0-50), employees are 5%-6% more productive than when they are categorized as unhealthy (AQI of 150–200). Our study is the first to document the impact of air pollution on white-collar jobs, to the best of our knowledge.

Pollution

Furthermore, we discovered that pollution reduced Ctrip employees’ productivity even when pollution levels were low. At pollution levels prevalent in major urban areas across the United States, we discovered significant productivity consequences (100–150 AQI). In 2014, for example, Los Angeles had 13 days with an AQI more than 150, whereas Phoenix had 33 such days, with over half of those days reaching an AQI of 200. These levels are much more prevalent in Europe, where air quality rules are often more lax.

While further research is needed to pinpoint the mechanism at action here, we do know something about how pollution reduces cognitive function. Particulate matter is tiny enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream and can even go into the central nervous system (CNS) via the axons of the olfactory and trigeminal neurons, where it can get buried deep inside the brain stem. This, in turn, can result in CNS inflammation, cortical stress, and cerebrovascular injury.

Performance

Greater exposure to fine particles is linked to decreased IQ and performance across a variety of cognitive areas. If the negative impact on productivity that we discovered in our research is due to impaired cognitive function, it might imply that the negative impact of pollution on productivity is highest in higher-skilled employment.

All of this might have a significant impact on the economy as a whole. The findings modifies the cost-benefit analysis of environmental regulation for policymakers, implying that favoring industrial expansion above environmental preservation may actually harm economic growth. Indeed, a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate reveals that air pollution costs Shanghai’s service industry billions of dollars in lost productivity each year.

This means that putting air filters in workplaces may provide unexpected benefits; Best furnace filter may remove most of the pollution that, as we’ve demonstrated, reduces productivity. However, it is unclear if air filters can entirely remove these contaminants. Furthermore, while businesses can invest in a strong air filtering system, they cannot reduce the pollution levels that their employees confront when they return home. It should come as no surprise that an individual corporation can only accomplish so much. Air pollution knows no corporate or national boundaries, and it is the essence of a shared resource. As a result, only legislation that reaches beyond the bounds of a particular corporation can effectively manage air pollution.

For everyone else, our findings serve as a reminder that we don’t have complete control over our own productivity. Instead, it is influenced by complex environmental factors such as pollution. If your productivity seems off one day, the answer could be partly in the air.

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