This week’s storm that hit the U.S. Northeast was milder than predicted in many areas, and work disruptions were more because of preventive mass transit suspensions. Even so, bad weather conditions like rain and storms could actually lift productivity, according to Bradley Staats a visiting professor of operations and information management at Wharton. Staats spoke of a “distraction effect,” where the lack of external distractions in bad weather conditions forces workers to focus more on the task at hand, resulting in better performance. “It’s innately human to see a distraction and want to go take part in it,” he said. “If we can find ways to limit that, then we can improve productivity.” Those observations are the result of a paper Staats co-authored with Harvard University professors Jooa Julia Lee and Francesca Gino. The paper, titled “ Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity ,” was published last year in the Journal of Applied Psychology.…