Why Your Office is Always the Wrong Temperature

it's it's pretty cold in the studio right now. It's always freezing when we walk in, and I think it's like a tradition to start the day by complaining about it. Yeah. Actually, when I think about it, I have several daily meetings that start with everybody agreeing that it's freezing cold in the room, or like way too hot, way too hot.

Doesn't happen as much in the summer, but it doesn't in the conference rooms are purposefully overcooled because lots of people are going to come into them, But when it's just you in a couple of people and you just walk in, it's not fun. Yeah. And then there's other zones in the office that are mysteriously hot and nobody can quite agree on it. Like I feel like I sit next to my coworkers and I have some version of the like is it cold right now? I'm really cold?

And then somebody else is like I feel okay. Well that's because people experience temperature differently. I think this isn't like necessarily an office problem. It's a people problem. And guess what people experience temperature the most differently. I know the answer. It's women. Yeah, I mean I've raised that question in a weird way, but uh, yeah, women are

actually colder. It's not just a stereotype. And we do suffer more in these over air conditioned offices because, as is written in some version of this story by some publication, every summer, the air conditioning in most office buildings, the temperature is set based on this like decades old formula that was based off of the metabolic rate of men, and so it's and also men wear tend to wear suits more often, so uh, the office office temperature is

calibrated for men, and that's why women are suffering with their blankets and office sweaters. Yeah, I mean, Blue America is pretty good, I think on the temperature front. Not just saying that I've worked in offices where I have pictures of my coworkers wrapped in blankets. Actually, my friend posted a picture on Instagram of her and what looked like a sleeping bag with armholes, and I think it's a sign of a joke, but specifically made for the

freezing cold office phenomenon. It's really hard to work when your body isn't at the right temperature. But offices also have to figure out how they're going to handle it when different people with different temperature requirements are sitting close to each other. So this is clearly a major problem for employees and for companies, and just keeping a sweater thrown over the back of your office chair doesn't really

cut it. Employees gripe at each other and their bosses about the air around them, and nobody can figure out exactly how to make everyone happy. But there's one company that thought they'd finally found a solution to the air conditioning wars. We took a trip to their offices to hear about what they did to solve the problem and some of the unexpected hurdles they ran into. Caddy Withers is a manager at app Nexus, a digital ad sales company housed in a twelve story office building in New

York's Flatirn neighborhood. It's her job to help keep all twenty seven of app Nexus offices running smoothly. And I'm a senior manager on Goo? What does go Global office operations? What does that mean? You do? That means we managed facilities, maintenance, cleaning, security, We designed, build, and run all of our offices internationally.

The app Nexus offices have many of the snazzy features we've come to expect from modern tech companies, a cafe stocked with free snacks, futuristic relaxation pods, and even a basketball court that doubles as a meditation room. But one thing about the office was stubbornly old. It's heating and cooling system. Some areas were consistently too warm, and others would be blasted with ice cold air. It was Caddie's

job to adjust the temperature when workers complained. My team managed the temperature in the office everywhere, all the time, and no user, no independent user, had any control. So if someone wanted to make a temperature change, they would email me or paying me, or text me or find me and asked me if I could make an adjustment, and then I would do that. What was that like? It was awful. Caddy was overwhelmed by requests from people who were too hot or too cold and wanted her

to do something about it. She was able to control the air temperature around different zones or groups of desks, but she didn't have a way to figure out how hot or cold it should be, so she just ended up giving in to the most persistent people. There was no science behind it. It was just kind of like if I got enough requests, or if it seemed like a reasonable request, I would make a change. But then sometimes I would just try to talk to the person

and give him a blanket. And Caddie wasn't the only one hearing complaints. Everyone intermittently, sporadically would come to me asking me to change the temperature. That's Heidi Delasando, who's in charge of setting up events at app Nexus. She had wrangled groups of outside clients and one of the company's spacious auditoriums and try to guess what temperatures would make them happy and keep them that way. And it

was such a pain. Yes, because you have men and women who are feeling different, you know, temperatures, who want a certain way, and You're like, I can't please everyone, so I'm just trying him do it. I'm gonna say that I did just not do it. So things have gotten pretty bad. During the summer's at app Nexus, Caddie and her team wasted tons of time trying to fix

the temperature trouble spots or help employees sort out their differences. Heidi, on the other hand, heads sometimes resorted to just lying to people and hoping the placebo effect would kick in and make them feel warmer or cooler. It was clear that something had to change, so the company installed Comfy, a system that allowed employees to adjust the air around

their desks through an app. Comfy eventually learns the employee's preferences and starts adjusting the temperature accordingly so they don't have to make as many requests. So I'm going to open the phone and the Comfy app. Okay, so I'm going to open my map, find myself on the fourth floor, and I hit cool my space, and then we'll feel some air kick on. I knew, so I can check if company is actually working if I pull up our BMS, which is our building management system, and then actually like

see the numbers tick up. Comfy gave employees more power over their environment and freed up facility staff to do other things. Here's Michael Delto, a product support team manager. Now when people talk about it, it is like action oriented. It is like I am going to comfy this room. It's just different totally. There's a different vibe to it. There's you're you are in charge of your empowered to do something. Before it's like I've already emailed this person

and what are they going to do? Like nothing changed and I'm bothering them, but I don't see any output of that. So it worked. People were actually pretty satisfied with the solution. But as time went on, new employees started and some of them weren't familiar with the ins and outs of Comfy, and just early enthusiasm for this new toy started waning. Complaints started to surface again. We were a year, we were about a year into using Comfy and we saw a usership drop and that's when

we hear about, oh I'm freezing at my desk. So to get people using Comfy again, app Nexus started what they called the Comfy Challenge. It's simple. Every month, the person who uses Comfy the most get some free swag, and people got surprisingly into it. Here's Michael Delto in May. I was like near like the last week of May, and I saw somebody winning this and I was like, there's no way that they should be winning this with the amount of votes that they had at the time.

So I put it induce my watch and I would pull up a timer and I would sit at to ten minutes and hit my comfy app and go about my day and do some stuff, and then my watch with buzz and I would hit the button again and go back to work and hit resent the timer. And so I just did that for a few for a week. But a hard as he tries, Michael is going to have a pretty hard time reaching his goal because there are lots of other employees at at Nexus working just as hard as him to get their hands on some

of that free swag. Here's Heidi again. I won one of the Comfy challenges. I have a tiara, I have a sash. I was gonna bring it forgot. Uh did you get a hoodie? I didn't. I got sunglasses. I got a gift card to bid Gay ice cream, which is ironic case I was cold all the time. Um, but It was a very fascinating campaign. How how our global offer office operations did it to just encourage people to use that instead of just you know, send them

requests and stuff. I just kept pressing it as off just as I could, and I didn't care if it went through or not. I just kind of wanted to win. So the Comfy challenge was working. People knew about Comfy more and their competitive spirit got them using the app. But still no system is perfect, and when it comes to office temperature, there's always something to complain about. Here's Peggy John Louis, who trains app Nexus customers about its products,

and the buddy mode is probably my biggest nemesis. A the buddy mode with Comfy, you need someone a buddy to back you up on your temperature request before the

system will make the adjustment you want. If you're the only woman in a group of guys and you're sitting in that area and they're all comfying it to get cool and you're trying to warm up, you don't have a buddy to confirm your desire for it to be warmer, so you just have to deal with it, or you can try to negotiate with the people in your area.

Mostly you're yelling at them and saying, please stop blowing the temperature and here I'm freezing to day have there's one person whose life Comfy has definitely changed for the better, Caddie manager who used to spend all her time answering temperature change requests. And how do you spend all your free time now that you're obviously online shopping? Just kidding,

just kidding, there's a bigger fish to fry. So I wonder how much of this experiment was the placebo effect, Like if you're sitting at a desk next to somebody who's always going to be a different temperature than you, then it might feel good to feel like you have a little bit more control over getting the temperature changed, But you and that person, like someone's still going to be unhappy. So is it really solving the problem. I think comfy does more than that. It's because you can

make it warmer, you can. I guess what I'm thinking about is that, like people think that they hate the temperature in the office, but what they're really upset about is they're feeling of a total lack of control. And like here at Bloomber, we have a system, there's somebody we send an email to. Basically we put in a

ticket through or like to getting system. And if the person next to you is sending in a ticket every time you send a ticket, then eventually they will email you back and be like, I can't keep changing the temperature because the person in this other desk has the opposite opinion of you. So like it's that feeling of helplessness. Yeah, Okay, having some agency does feel good, even the agency we have here, and I think we I see that a lot of my reporting that giving workers the idea of

autonomy makes them way happier. So we see it kind of with um flexible scheduling companies saying you can pick your when you come in and when you leave, and we trust you to get your work done. People end up working similar hours. But they just like the feeling of control over their hours. It's it's like being treated

like the adult that I think we are. Yeah, but I hate to think that we're so easily manipulated that all you have to do is make us workers think we have some control over something like the atmosphere, and that's enough to make us happy. So I'm gonna stay unhappy. I'm just going to always be physic. Okay, Frantisca's pro complaint. You're a curmudgeon. All right, that's fair. End, that's cool. Yeah, it's my generation. And now it's time for half big

takes half fake takes. If you have your own half big take you want to share with us, call our voicemail at two one two six one seven zero one six six. This week we have a listener half big take about greetings. My half bag take is people at work should not ask you how your day is going the second day walk into the office. One, I don't want to talk about it too. My day is probably not going well. Or three, I don't want to share it with you. Also, I do not want to know

what you did last night. When last night is to Tuesday, you can check in with what people did over the weekend, but you do not need to rehash every night of the week from Sunday to Friday morning. I do not want to share it with you. Okay, there's a lot going on here, so don't ask someone how their day is if they have had a day yet. That's fair. And then nobody wants to know what people did on a Tuesday. We get so many half big takes about asking small talk questions. I did one about good morning

once saying good morning. I think I'm the only solutions oriented person here where I gave a solution to ask you say the one answering but her. This listener's argument is that nothing you're going to do on a Tuesday night could possibly be interesting enough to share with your co workers. And I think that's probably fair speak for yourselves, you crazy millennials. You probably go wild on Tuesday nights. Tuesday's my big night. Actually heard millennials were killing tuesdays. Becca,

What not completely thought through idea? Do you want to share with the world today? This is work related because I think this often happens during work conversations. And it's the spoiler and I don't believe in spoilers. What do you mean you don't believe in spoiler? Are always like what if I just spoiled trading places for you? I think that most culture are all experiences. Movies, TV shows can still be enjoyed if you know what's going to happen, Like I know the ending to Romeo and Juliet, I'm

I'd still see it. There are certain movies, uh, the bos Lerman version. Yeah, it's a classic. It's a classic. Um, really great soundtrack. Um. No. There are some movies that can be spoiled really badly, like The Sixth Sense. But I think most of the time, you know, just talk about spoilers. It's not going to ruin it for me. You can talk about it. It's fine, it's true. I

think it's mostly true. I guess like thrillers, horror movies like The Sixth Sense, you don't you don't want to know, but then it's like that it's the ending is always the same, like the bad guy was a ghost or dies. Yeah. Well, I just someone the other day. I was like, I'm going to tell you about that TV show This is Us. I'm gonna I mean, have you seen it? And I was like spoilers and I was like that, there's no spoilers in that show. I don't know spoiler it's it's

Mandy Moore and an old lady makeup. Spoiler alert you will probably cry. So that's my half big take. How about you. Um, I think that hashtags have ruined the hashtag Yeah. Um. People might have all kinds of complaints about social media culture, but the hashtag now has come to mean exclusively. It's social media meaning, which is like hashtag, hashtag, later Graham, hashtag, Friday, hashtag, baby toes, hashtag, half big take, and my dream. That hashtag, also known as the pound sign,

means something. It means number, but it doesn't anymore. So we tried to use yes, and I've been like, I've like texted or messaged people like, oh, send me the number for that thing, and put in a hashtag, and it looks like I'm I'm doing like a trending top. So bring back the pound sign. Yeah, that's my half bay take. I missed the pound sign. That's cute. Thanks, and this has been in half Bake Takes half Baked Takes.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Game Plan. You can find me on Twitter at francesco Today and I'm at rs Greenfield and call into our hotline. It's two on two six one seven zero one six. We'd also love it if you would please head over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. If you like our show, subscribe, rate review us um. Every review helps new people find our show. Also, just tell people about it. Yeah, email everyone you know. The show was produced by Liz Smith

and Magnus Hendrickson. The head of podcast is Alec McCabe and we'll see you next week. We will yah and we'll see you next week. I will not me though,