A School of Continuous Improvement poster surveys 186 staff across six shared-office zones on the thermostat authority the Shared Comfort Charter grants them, and sets their answers against six months of central override logs.
A new poster finds staff believe their local setpoint governs two-thirds of the working day, while the central energy panel's logs put it closer to one hour in twelve
The Shared Comfort Charter is unambiguous on the point. Each shared-office zone holds a local setpoint, and the people who work in that zone hold the right to adjust it. A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement went to find out what that right amounts to once the building is running.
Dr Thandiwe Solberg and Associate Professor Casimir Beng surveyed 186 staff across the University’s six shared-office zones, asking each respondent to estimate how much of the working day their zone’s own thermostat setting actually governs. They then obtained six months of override events from Facilities’ central energy panel, matched zone by zone to the same occupied hours, and coded the Charter’s control language clause by clause against both records.
Estimates clustered high and tight, between two-thirds and three-quarters of occupied hours. The panel’s log, over the same zones and the same period, put the figure an order of magnitude lower. Not one respondent reported having been told an override had occurred.
Nobody in this study was misinformed. They read the document that governs their zone and they answered accordingly. The gap we found sits between that document and the plant room, and every person we surveyed was standing on the document’s side of it.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter
The University regards an entitlement it grants itself as no less answerable to the evidence than one it grants anyone else.
“The panel is doing precisely what it was commissioned to do, and doing it well,” said Associate Professor Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “The question the poster leaves with us is which of these two records a zone should be able to consult about its own afternoon. I don’t think we have put it in those terms before.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.x20kf7.