Healthy Office Climate: What Should Workplace Air Quality Be Like?
When working calmly, you take about 12 to 15 breaths per minute. Up to 15 liters of air flow through your lungs in the process. A healthy office climate is therefore important for boosting employee well-being and productivity. Read here what office air should be like and which tips create a better office climate.
Buildings, or office spaces, and their air quality can make you sick. Fatigue, exhaustion, headaches, concentration problems, irritated mucous membranes, dizziness and nausea, and increased irritability add up to sick building syndrome. A poor indoor climate in general is considered the trigger. But pollutants, contamination, off-gassing, or an elevated noise level also promote the symptoms.
What factors determine the indoor climate at the workplace?
The indoor climate is made up of several individual components: temperature, humidity, and air quality. Good workplace air quality is crucial for good work results. However, some values like comfortable temperature are subject to subjective perception and therefore vary a lot. This often makes it hard to create optimal conditions for everyone in an open-plan office. Our figures should therefore be understood as guideline values. Monitor these guideline values with the indoor climate monitor from air-Q.
The optimal temperature at the workplace
Temperature can be determined well with a thermometer, but it's still a subjective sensation. While one colleague in a sweater feels cold, another colleague in a T-shirt finds the room temperature too warm. As the optimal temperature for a productive workday, the office should be set to 21 to a maximum of 24°C. If it's noticeably warmer or colder, concentration and performance decline. In summer, room temperature shouldn't exceed the 26°C mark.
Larger temperature swings should also be avoided, since they strain the body. So shield your workplace from heat radiation (e.g. strong sun) or counteract rooms cooling down.
Adequate humidity in the office
Office humidity should be between 40 and 60 percent. Both too high and too low humidity bring various effects. Too high humidity promotes mold growth and causes health problems especially for asthma and allergy sufferers. Too low air temperature also affects health. If room air has too little moisture, employees' mucous membranes dry out faster in the office. This makes them more susceptible to pathogens, which spread more easily through dry air. If humidity is only between 20 and 35 percent, infection risk is about three times as high as with a medium room humidity of 50 percent.
We therefore recommend monitoring humidity with an air monitor like the air-Q and, if needed, regulating it with a humidifier or dehumidifier. Placing houseplants can also help improve office humidity.
Pollutant-free air quality for good work results
Office air quality is influenced by the following factors and pollutants:
- Oxygen
- Particulate matter
- Pollutants (for example VOCs off-gassing from furniture & flooring)
- Pathogens
- Mold spores
Office furniture, wallpaper, flooring, or printers can off-gas volatile, health-harming substances (VOCs). You should reduce these and, as a preventive measure against exceeding thresholds, ventilate regularly. Another office pollutant is particulate matter, which, due to its small particle size, can directly reach and harm other human organs beyond the lungs. Smells from the shared kitchen can also affect room air. As pollution from these substances rises, office climate quality declines.
How can office indoor climate be improved?
If you're plagued by fatigue, concentration problems, or headaches, office air quality is too poor. It's high time for an air exchange. But even before you notice poor air quality, air pollutants can affect your performance. We'll now reveal what helps against bad office air.
Regular burst ventilation
A regular fresh air supply is enormously important for the room air climate, to remove CO₂, pollutants, and germ- and virus-laden aerosols and replace them with fresh outdoor air. The more fresh air in the office, the more strongly disease germs in room air are diluted. Constant CO₂ monitoring reduces the risk by warning you when the threshold is exceeded, so you can act accordingly. To detect a possible infection risk in your work environment, the air-Q Virus-Free Index helps. Learn how the index works in our article.
Of course, in winter months, energy consumption and cost are also relevant and shouldn't explode despite the need to ventilate. We recommend situational burst ventilation with widely opened windows, and ideally also open doors. Just three minutes is enough for an air exchange. So heating energy loss is fairly minimal. We strongly advise against ventilating through a permanently tilted window, though. A tilted window can't ensure sufficient air exchange. It also unnecessarily lets heat escape, cools down the walls, and, due to forming condensation, can lead to moisture damage or mold growth.
Plants at the workplace
Green plants are another effective way to improve the indoor climate. They produce oxygen, raise humidity, and can even filter pollutants from the air. We've tested various green plants and their effect on air quality — find the results for the dragon tree and snake plant in our separate articles.
Humidifiers & dehumidifiers
A dehumidifier can lower a room's humidity by removing moisture from the air. These devices are less common for practical office use, since offices tend to have the opposite problem of overly dry room air. A humidifier, on the other hand, raises room air humidity by adding water to it.
Air purifiers
Air purifiers filter harmful particles from the air in your office and business spaces. Various filters, such as activated carbon filters, particulate matter filters, ionizers, or humidifiers with filters, clean the air and thus actively influence air quality. Ideally, you complement an air-Q air monitor with an air purifier. This lets you deploy the purifier as needed, whenever the air monitor signals that action is needed.
Pollutant-free office furnishings
To prevent pollution from VOC-off-gassing furniture and equipment, look for low-emission products and materials when purchasing furnishings. Quality seals like the "Blue Angel" or the "EU Ecolabel" help here. Products awarded these seals undergo strict controls.
Air measurement
Keep an eye on how room air develops in your office and check relevant air components with an air monitor like the air-Q. If readings reach the stored thresholds, the device sends you a warning notification via the app and displays development in an easily readable LED traffic-light system. Besides up to 14 readings, the air-Q gives you information about your performance and health index as well as viral load in the room.
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