Welcome to issue #23 of Pondering Leadership: A Deliberate and Thoughtful, Yet Informal Look at Leading and Managing. Last week, I wrote about ways to get some work off your plate and give your staff opportunities to grow AKA delegating. Today, I am giving you some ideas of building procedures to review for really cold, snowy weather.
We all have emergency procedure manuals. These manuals should be updated at least annually or more often if there are changes to your building or the floor plan. Your local authorities probably assisted you in writing your manual, or at least provided some guidance. If you haven’t updated your emergency manual in a while, now is a good time to do it. But, for the purpose of this newsletter, I want to highlight a few key areas to review at this time of year.
Many of us are in cold weather climates and may have had some weather-related closures recently. Last week, the picture I included with my issue on delegating was a very recent picture of my driveway… after I had to shovel… twice... on my birthday. When you have a January birthday in northern Illinois, shoveling is a usual birthday activity. But snow and sub-zero temperatures can bring a host of problems for your workplace. If you had a pipe or two freeze and burst, you would probably already know about it. But, if you have pipes in areas nobody ever goes in, you may want to check. Slow drips can do a lot of damage if they are not noticed for days or weeks.
You may want to ask your mat vendor for an extra mat for each entrance. Snowy or wet weather makes your mats ineffective fairly quickly. The last thing you want is someone stepping off a wet mat onto your flooring with their wet boots and falling down.
Make sure all areas of your building are getting heat. Sometimes offices are very cold, which could indicate an issue with a pipe or the HVAC system. In one of my previous jobs, a sprinkler pipe froze and burst because heat wasn’t getting to that area. The same pipe exploded a couple years before I started in my role. My predecessor managed the cleanup but did not look into why it happened.
Speaking of the HVAC system, someone might need to get up on the roof to check the HVAC units. I would check with your HVAC vendor to see what they recommend.
If the weather is bad, but not bad enough to close, there are a few things you can do for your staff.
If you have a business or business casual dress code, let staff dress casually in bad weather. Blue jeans are ok on a miserably cold day.
Spring for some cocoa, coffee or even lunch to warm them up during the day.
If you need to purchase some small space heaters for their work areas, it’s worth the minimal expense to keep your staff warm, or warmer, at least.
These are just a few things to keep in mind this time of year. This is not a thorough examination into the safety of your building, which is something we need to think about every day.
Your Turn
What are some emergency or weather-related building items that you check this time of year? You can comment in discussion.
Thank you for reading issue #23 of Pondering Leadership. I hope to see you next Thursday afternoon for issue #24 when I will write about recruiting staff. Thank you for reading and supporting my writing.
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