Could your office air be behind the 3pm slump?

The afternoon energy crash is usually blamed on a heavy lunch, too little sleep or the body’s natural circadian rhythm. Logitech for Business ANZ is suggesting another factor businesses may want to consider: the air inside their offices.

According to Logitech, carbon dioxide can build up in enclosed meeting rooms and shared spaces as people occupy them throughout the day, while volatile organic compounds (VOCs), temperature, humidity and ventilation can also affect indoor environmental quality.

That matters because elevated CO₂ levels are often used as an indicator of inadequate ventilation, and research has linked poorer indoor air quality with reduced cognitive performance.

Sean Byrne, Head of Logitech for Business ANZ, says the difficulty for organisations is that many of these environmental factors are effectively invisible to the people working inside the space.

“Everyone’s hit that 3pm slump before, but I’d argue that it’s not laziness – it could just be the air we’re all breathing,” Byrne said.

“Though it’s easier to blame a larger lunch, staying up late to binge-watch new series, or even a sugar crash, the real problem is in the air we’re breathing.

“If you’ve got groups of people taking in the same air in a concealed space, VOCs are being recirculated and carbon dioxide levels are slowly rising. It’s hard to manage what you can’t see, so the impact of air quality can be overlooked.”

Enclosed does not automatically mean bad air

There is an interesting comparison with aircraft cabins. They are tightly enclosed spaces filled with people for hours at a time, yet modern commercial aircraft are designed around continuous ventilation, bringing in outside air while recirculating part of the cabin air through high-efficiency filtration.

Having spent time working around aircraft earlier in my career, it is a useful reminder that the problem is not simply putting a lot of people into an enclosed space. It is how that environment is managed.

A meeting room can be a very different proposition. Close the door, fill it with people and leave the ventilation struggling to keep up, and CO₂ levels can rise steadily without anyone necessarily noticing. What feels like a stuffy room is therefore something that can be measured rather than simply endured.

Making the invisible visible

Logitech’s argument is naturally tied to its own workplace technology.

The company’s Logitech Spot is a wall-mounted presence and environmental sensor designed for offices and meeting spaces. It can monitor carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, temperature and humidity, while also detecting whether a space is occupied.

Environmental data can be brought into Logitech Sync, where facilities and IT teams can view room health information alongside other workplace data. Logitech says this can help organisations identify spaces where ventilation or environmental conditions may require attention.

Spot uses a non-dispersive infrared sensor to measure CO₂ across a range of 400 to 10,000 ppm, while separate sensors monitor VOCs, temperature and humidity.

The device can also track room occupancy using radar-based presence detection, giving organisations another source of information when trying to understand how heavily particular meeting rooms or shared areas are being used.

“A sensor that sits quietly on the wall may be taken for granted, but it’s actually a major productivity lever office managers can pull without upending everyone’s working day,” Byrne said.

“We need the right air if we’re to think clearly, and avoid the post-3pm slump. As the old saying goes, if you can measure it, you can fix it, and devices such as our own Logitech Spot sensing device are key to making it happen.”

Sometimes it really is the sugar

Of course, not every afternoon slump needs a building-management explanation.

I once worked at a Cadbury site where there was no shortage of chocolate sitting around the office. And yes, Cadbury chocolate fresh off the factory line hits different. After a while, the body seemed to know exactly what time it was: by mid-afternoon it was conditioned to expect the next sugar hit.

So Logitech probably should not get the lunch, sleep and sugar excuses completely off the hook.

The broader point is that there can be several contributors to that familiar afternoon fade, and air quality is one of the less obvious ones because there is no easy way for a person sitting in a meeting room to tell how much CO₂ has accumulated around them.

More than just CO₂

An afternoon decline in alertness can have numerous causes, including sleep, diet and normal circadian changes, and a CO₂ reading alone does not directly measure how productive someone will be.

What workplace sensors can provide is data that previously required specialised monitoring equipment or was simply ignored.

Logitech Sync can use Spot data to show environmental conditions including CO₂, VOCs, particulate matter, temperature and humidity, as well as provide room-health and energy insights.

For businesses bringing more employees back into shared offices, that could make indoor air quality another metric worth watching alongside meeting-room utilisation, energy use and occupancy.

“We’re now able to integrate Spot with more partners than ever before, significantly broadening the data it gathers into more workplaces,” Byrne said.

“With this data, office managers can design poor air quality right out of the building, keeping energy levels up.”

More information about the Logitech Spot presence and environmental sensor is available from Logitech.