  Indoor environmental quality has been found to impact employees' productivity
in the long run, yet it is unclear its meeting-level impact in the short term.
We studied the relationship between sensorial pleasantness of a meeting's room
and the meeting's productivity. By administering a 28-item questionnaire to 363
online participants, we indeed found that three factors captured 62% of
people's experience of meetings: (a) productivity; (b) psychological safety;
and (c) room pleasantness. To measure room pleasantness, we developed and
deployed ComFeel, an indoor environmental sensing infrastructure, which
captures light, temperature, and gas resistance readings through miniaturized
and unobtrusive devices we built and named 'Geckos'. Across 29 real-world
meetings, using ComFeel, we collected 1373 minutes of readings. For each of
these meetings, we also collected whether each participant felt the meeting to
have been productive, the setting to be psychologically safe, and the meeting
room to be pleasant. As one expects, we found that, on average, the probability
of a meeting being productive increased by 35% for each standard deviation
increase in the psychological safety participants experienced. Importantly,
that probability increased by as much as 25% for each increase in room
pleasantness, confirming the significant short-term impact of the indoor
environment on meetings' productivity.
