Do you shut down your office when it gets too hot?

overheated trains in nearly 40c temperatures in London are no fun

Today in London the freakish short heatwave will result in temperatures over 35c, and tomorrow (Thursday 25th) it is forecast to reach nearly 40c. That is 104f in “old money” for my American friends!

That is hot, but in addition over 90% of people who work in London get there by public transport, and for literally millions of them that means going into the London Underground, where temperatures are even higher still!

Oh, and very few London offices have air conditioning, so when they do get to work their is no respite.

So, knowing that temperatures will return to a more palatable 30c or less by Friday, how many employers chose to close their offices today and also tomorrow and either a) tell people to work from home, or b) simply give people two days off.

Very few indeed, yet this makes very little rational sense to me….

“Close the office because it is hot? Are you crazy, what about all the productivity we’d lose?”

Well, I prefer the word effectiveness to productivity, humans are not machines, people are not tools to use to maximise profits, plus no human can be very effective at work when they are exhausted in the heat when they get to work, then swelter and sweat through the day with overheated brains and (literally) overheated computers to work at.

Now, I spent most of my adult life in the Caribbean, where we’d occasionally get disrupted at work by tropical weather. Given the very real risk of tropical depressions turning into damaging storms, all businesses developed processes and systems that indeed resulted in shutting down work for multiple days when the weather got too bad.

Yes, in the Caribbean there was a real driver there, given that Hurricanes can be devastating so businesses had a real need for disaster plans and executing them stage by stage. London is different. Heat is temporary, so businesses tend to just “carry on regardless” with that British resolve.

Here is the thing, working in 40c heat with no air conditioning is simply not a good idea. Computers will overheat (mine did today, it is one of those lightweight ones with no built-in fan.. ooops). Heck, even the trains run slower as the rails overheat, causing delays and disruptions.

So, if your staff are going to work far less effectively and have a simply miserable time getting to and from work and being at work in a city not designed for high temperatures, what about taking a lead and closing the office entirely, or at least having them work from home?

Imagine the benefits in terms of loyalty when you show that level of care to your people.

I’d put it to you that making the step to care enough to close the office for one or two days when there is rare extreme heat will be paid back much more by loyalty and your team doing the work when they get back into the office anyway, and without overheated brains the work will be of higher quality.

Just a thought for you.

Oh, and if this has you thinking about how unconscious we are about this one idea, I encourage you to look at this past post: “What is a Paradigm?“, where I tell a story I use to anchor that a paradigm is something we keep on doing but we’ve forgotten why we do it, as well as the most dangerous words in business:

“We’ve always done it that way”

As I wrote about the other day, “it doesn’t have to be crazy at work“.

We don’t have to make our people come into work on days so bizarrely hot that the rail companies slow down and cancel trains because the rails are bending (and yes, they just announced that for tomorrow!).

As for me, I’m shifting my diary so I don’t have to go on any trains or underground tomorrow, I’m staying home, relatively cool in the shade and with a large fan!