Total War Attila Keeps Freezing
Patrizia Leones
I am a manager and wonder if this problem should be dealt with or left alone. I have three staff members in the office, including myself. I keep the thermostat set at 74 degrees during the scorching summer months. The side of the office with all staff offices has reasonable ventilation, but the vents on the other side where the conference rooms are do not work as well, so that side gets warmer. I feel that the setting of 74 degrees is the best setting that makes the whole office comfortable at the same time, even though the conference rooms in the afternoon can get too warm. Some days 74 feels chilly to me at my desk, so I bring a cardigan or blazer to keep warm on those days. Another staff member gets hot flashes and keeps a fan on at her desk while wearing a sleeveless dress. However, the third employee freezes to death and keeps her space heater on all the time during the summer.
How much of this should I let go and write off as her just keeping herself comfortable, and how much of this is inconsiderate enough that I should address it more directly with her? And if I should address it, should I implement strict rules regarding space heaters? If I do that, must I also implement strict rules regarding desk fans when it gets to be winter?
2. The letter-writer should not be giving unsolicited medical advice to her coworker anyway (and reading it here may just make her more aggravated by reinforcing the idea that the coworker could be doing something differently but chooses not to).
Yes, 100%! I have both Bad Blood and Billion Dollar Loser on my Kindle. This is great reading, book club or no, and I get chills from reading Bad Blood and thinking of all my friends who bullet-dodged that place.
One of my teams with elevated documentation requirements read it as a group book club when they were launching a standardization and improvement project with a new project management tool. They found it really helpful.
My BFF has a PhD in it. He loves the example of how pilots for a certain plane used to tape a paper cup over one of the switches, since the engineers had inexplicably put the (something like) fuel eject switch right next to the intercom switch, and they looked/felt identical.
I just love the overlap of readers of this site and podcasts in the Michael Hobbes extended universe. I also really love If Books Could Kill because they cover books I never had any intention of reading but come up in conversations all the time.
I recomment Bare Knuckle People Management for tips on how to recognize the types of people you have on your team and how to best support them (or push them out as necessary) and How to Talk to Anyone, a general communication skills handbook with many tips applicable to a professional environment.
Strictly speaking, not a work centered book. But I found Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzalez surprisingly relevant. It has a lot of moderately deep discussions about why people make terrible miscalculations or how small mistakes compound into preventable disasters or how people think they understand things they do not, and I have found it coloring my thoughts on workplace decision-making for years since I first read it.
The Guy Fox how the world really works for kids are great! They explain white collar work accurately, introducing kids to jobs they may not otherwise aspire to. None of my elementary school classmates wanted to be an underwriter or investment banker.
That said, I truly do empathize with the LW. I have a really bad gag reaction to anything that remotely makes me think of things that come out of your nose, and I grew up with a sibling who was allergic to everything so I heard constant sniffling and coughing. It really is infuriating!!
Agree Outliers is a great book!
As someone who works in the industry, I found the Sackler book Empire of Pain fascinating and have ended up in discussions about it at work quite a bit.
Our work book club was an Inclusion and Diversity ERG run one and a couple of the books we did: Guilty Feminist, Beekeeper of Aleppo.
Someone mentioned If Books Could Kill in another thread because that podcast did a breakdown about why Freakonomics is bad, and they also did two episodes dedicated to Nudge and one dedicated to Outliers.
Probably not a good pick for the office book club, but if anyone is interested in horror (in this case, weird/cosmic horror in the workplace), I highly recommend My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror by Thomas Ligotti.
He has a follow up called Leadership is Language which attempts a theoretical assessment of what he did which is pretty helpful about explaining more modern work methodologies and why we have been moving away from the manager/worker model that obtained during the industrial age.
The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson is an excellent read covering thinking about innovation, and the intersection between different fields around breakthrough ideas. It has lots of stories and is written in a very accessible way.
SF commentary on corporatism v. flattened hierarchical societies in space, all told from the POV of a cyborg construct gone rogue: The Murderbot series by Martha Wells. The audio books narrated by Brian Free are fantastic. Spoiler alert- lots of swearing. New book out in November too!
I had a professor who required we all read a leadership book and report on it. He provided the books for us to choose from and this is the one I ended up with. I actually really enjoyed the book. It was an easy read, which was nice with all the other workload I had. It is the book that convinced me not all leadership books were equivalent to something you read to fall asleep.
Adding my +1 to Radical Candor too! I learned so much from it, and we had a good book club discussion at work. I will note that it is written from the perspective of a manger, but the advice is totally appropriate for non-managers.
More than Ready: Be Strong and Be You . . . and Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise by Cecilia Muoz. This book resonated with my experiences in male-dominated spaces and encouraged me to focus more intentionally on being a better ally for the next generation competing for space at the table.
I really like them, but I like them because they facilitate conversation and peer support. Nothing in the books is groundbreaking (to me!) but the writing style is great, there is liberal use of New Yorker cartoons, and Trauma Stewardship has some incredible interviews with folks in all sorts of professions throughout the book.
Everyone recommends The Body Keeps the Score, but as someone with PTSD, I found it hugely traumatic to hear all the history of how people with mental illness were mistreated. I skipped to the chapter on treatments for PTSD, and got great ideas including EMDR that worked for me.
The first one uses lots of examples from the work world, and shows how both the most and least successful people tend to be giving-oriented, and explains how to be the successful kind of giving person (leaning into your strengths, saying no strategically, leveraging your network).
How To Win Friends And Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. Wait, before you get out your pitchforks, hear me out! It should be read as a classic in the self-improvement genre with a mind to critically examining how it has influenced management books and business in general. It also does have some timeless tidbits mixed in with things that seem silly these days.
I quote from it often, even.
It was an enjoyable read, and he talks about risk, failure, success, etc. His business was the restaurant business, but he really emphasizes the power of excellent and flexibility.
3. 7 Habits of Highly Productive People by Stephen R. Covey. I know this book is kind of divisive, BUT, I personally took a lot from it that has helped me at work. I also think there is a lot of good stuff in it about building trusting relationships with people that could help a lot of people.
I ask all of this to lead to my suggestion to use articles, TedTalks, white papers, and other short-form content to frame the conversations. It allows people to do the reading/watching quickly and allows for deeper conversations about the content and how to apply it to the job. Plus, most of these are free so no additional costs to anyone.
My library had a voluntary book club that discussed The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude by Pm. M. Forni. Our library director picked it after hearing the author speak and thought it would be useful in dealing with rude patrons. It has chapters specifically about rudeness at work.
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.
Because it convinced me that we (my organization) need to go through the basics each time. Yes, it feels silly some days, but it also catches problems early.
Workplace Neurodiversity Rising by Lyric Rivera. It deals with neurodivergence and neurodiversity in the workplace, as well as ways to accommodate people with varying needs. The author is actually Autistic/ADHD, and brings that perspective to the subject, which is both rare and refreshing to see!
On topic of the size of fans, what size space heater does the worker have that causes it to change the temp in the whole office. My WFH office is in my basement and gets a quite chilly at times. I keep a tiny space heater to knock the chill off and not make the rest of the house miserable by turning up the thermostat. It hardly affects my whole office., let alone the whole house.
Yes! I had to spell this out for my partner, but it was normal because in his home country nobody has heating, only air-conditioning. I told him we should only turn the thermostat up if we had at least three layers of clothing including a thick sweater.
yes! i have worked in places that were so cold, people were literally wearing their down jackets from winter, and they were still too cold to think clearly. And as ClaireW points out, their hands got stiff and since they worked on the keyboard all day, it was really uncomfortable.
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