If you work in an office environment, chances are you've had at least a few team meetings holed up in a conference room with your boss and colleagues. And once you emerge hours later, you wonder if it was much warmer in there than the rest of the office.
Well, not only are you right about that, but it might also be affecting your mental health.
You see, when you're stuck in a small room with no ventilation (because it's air conditioned) with a number of people, the carbon dioxide and heat tends to build up. According to the New York Times, at least eight studies in the last few years have looked at what changes occur in the atmosphere in a room packed with people for a long time. We already know that pollution in the air can cause asthma, lung conditions, and cancer. But it turns out, poor air quality indoors can also affect you, they just target the mind instead of your body.
Because companies want to save on cooling office buildings, insulation has progressed over the past few decades. But while it's gotten easier to seal in the AC cooling and keep the heat out, that also means we're sealing in all the buildup of gases and toxins released by office workers. That's why, if one person on your office floor has a bad cold, there's a higher likelihood you'll catch it than if you encountered them on say public transport.
Unfortunately, indoor air quality isn't monitored as often as outdoors, so scientists don't have a lot of data to go on. They do say however, that a CO2 buildup of over 1,200 parts per million (Pppm) can be very worrisome. And that's not even considering particulate matter from things like cheap furniture, office supplies, or badly cleaned carpets.
When you're inhaling more carbon dioxide than is good for you, your blood vessels dilate, to try and absorb more oxygen from your blood into your organs. This, researchers say, can reduce neural activity between brain regions. Effectively, that translates to your decision-making processes being impaired. Unfortunately, they just can't be sure to what extent that is.
Dr Joseph Allen, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, also carried out a similar study in 2016. He suggests that, in order to ensure you have enough ventilation to offset the buildup of CO2, a conference room should have a bare minimum of 6 cubic feet of air flow per minute per person. And even that may not be enough.
Better then would be to equip conference rooms with CO2 sensors, or perhaps just design them adjacent to the building's windows instead of in the centre of the floor or against a wall. That way meetings can take place with fresh air flow from an open window, without compromising the temperature on the rest of the floor.
Who knows, maybe the fresh air flow will even give employees better ideas to handle the situation you're having a meeting for in the first place.