Lighting in the workplace
Introduction:
The working landscape today is more competitive than ever before, with so much
expected of employees’ health and well being in the workplace remains in the
spotlight. it is considered as an essential component of any workplace setting.
Electrical lighting has been a pivotal feature of everyday life for more than 100
years. Our modern lifestyle is not viable without artificial lighting.
Good workplace lighting plays an important role in the creation and maintenance
of a safe and healthy workplace by permitting employees to work efficiently and
comfortably. It is used for many different purposes to ensure visual work can be
done accurately, safely and in comfort to increase timely production and to
ensure security and well being of workers, to make the place better and effective
environment.
Several studies have been conducted have been conducted on study on lighting
with the well being on performance at work with interested findings that it
increased the productivity. In the early 1920s researchers were in broad
agreement that physical conditions in the workplace such as illumination,
temperature, noise and humidity had a significant impact on worker productivity.
They believed that if workers were provided with optimum environmental
conditions, their work rate and performance would inevitably improve. Elton
Mayo – an Australian researcher from Harvard Business School – was the first
researcher to test these ideas. He pioneered a series of now classic studies that
examined the impact of a series of environmental factors like lighting,
temperature and humidity on employee productivity by manipulating levels and
recording employee output.
The Hawthorne Studies ran for more than 15 years and involved the observation,
interviewing and counseling of more than 20,000 workers in factories and other
workplaces of the time. The most significant finding of this research - and what is
now referred to as ‘the Hawthorne Effect’ – was that regardless of the nature of
