There is a petty squabble in my office causing unnecessary friction among the staff. We are a small enterprise with only 20 employees and we work in a relatively new building in an office that has two rooms. While one of the rooms is next to a window and is therefore warmer, the other has no window and is therefore cooler. With the same AC unit cooling both rooms, it means staff members working in the different rooms also have very different attitudes towards its use. Those in the more chilled office regularly want to turn it off, while those in the warmer room want to keep it on. It often causes minor arguments. What can I, the senior manager, do to resolve this issue? PM, Sharjah
Isn’t it funny how often it’s the apparently petty stuff that rules our lives? If you are the one trying to keep warm or keep cool, then this stuff figures pretty high on your scale of importance. Personal comfort in the workplace is quite rightly important, maybe never more so than when we are trying to keep cool or keep warm. So what options can we see? There is only one AC unit, and I am guessing that the obvious answer (get another AC unit so each room has a dedicated unit) won’t work. If, by some bizarre freak of chance, this hasn’t occurred to you, then that’s a solution worth exploring.
There are ways to warm or chill a room other than an AC unit. Small oil-filled radiators can take a chill off (although they may be hard to get in Sharjah – not much need, generally speaking), while electric fans, desk or standing variety, should be reasonably easy to obtain. But if you are a senior manager then you will presumably have the insight to know all this. So I wonder if your question isn’t really about something else. You talk about this issue as a “petty squabble”. You suggest that it is part of your role and responsibility to resolve this issue, so I imagine you are some sort of a team leader. I wonder, therefore, if your issue is a little broader than fans versus radiators, and is in fact about how to create an atmosphere of constructive collaboration, rather than one of armed enmity.
A team that is divided over issues like this is probably one which has not been formed properly in the first place. I wonder if you are a start-up which has sprung to life, inhabited office space and started straight in to doing whatever it is you do, without thinking that there is some team-building to do first? There are some well-known models of team building, including Tuckman’s Forming/Storming/Norming/Performing model, and Drexler and Sibbert’s Bouncing Ball model. Both these models emphasise the need to have a stage early in the development of the team where everything is questioned and challenged, including how we work and why we are here. Drexler and Sibbert’s first two phases are Orientation and Trust Building, followed by Goal Clarity and Commitment. I can quite see that if a new start-up tries to go straight to Implementation, then the team will not have generated trust between themselves, and individuals will be inclined to see others as self-interested in their decision making. The ABCD Trust model identifies four aspects of Trust: Able (a demonstration of competence); Believable (a demonstration of integrity); Connected (a demonstration of care for others) and Dependable (a demonstration of maintained reliability). Do your team trust each other? Do they share goals and objectives to which they are committed?
Your responsibility is to build a culture that will help the team to thrive. This culture must have mutual trust at its heart. Trust is different to affection. You can’t make people like each other. But you can insist that they behave towards one another with respect, that they are competent and reliable, that they care about others and that they act with integrity.
Doctor’s prescription:
These squabbles may be no more than symptoms of an underlying issue which is related to how well your 20 individuals function as a team.
Roger Delves is the director of the Ashridge Executive Masters in Management and an adjunct professor at the Hult International Business School. He is the co-author of The Top 50 Management Dilemmas: Fast Solutions to Everyday Challenges. Email him at business@thenational.ae for advice on any work issues.
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