Temperature Complaints May Not Be Frivolous

Did you hear the one about the employee who noticed an ant on a raisin on the floor and instead of picking it up and throwing it away, left a note for the facility manager, who happened to be out of the office for three days? Guess how many ants he found when he got back?

Of course you've heard these, and you probably have a stack of stories just like them. Maybe funnier. Maybe worse.

Recently Building Operating Management surveyed readers on complaints, asking you to share some of your stories and your best tricks. The single biggest complaint or request made to respondents of the Building Operating Management survey was temperature, with 68 percent of respondents saying this was their No. 1 issue, with restrooms coming in at a distant second at 10 percent. Temperature is also the largest daily source of complaints, with 16 percent of respondents say they field a hot/cold call every day.

Facility managers are often more than a bit jaded in the temperature department. Iain Schlenkermann, director, Manassas facilities, with American Public University System, says he remembers one cold call that started out normally enough, with a technician going down to the space armed with an IR gun, ready to educate the local occupants. But the temp calls started rolling in every half hour and cranking the thermostat was having no effect. By the time the HVAC tech could diagnose the problem, it was 52 degrees in the space.

"A lot of times we thought they were crying wolf," Schlenkermann says of hot/cold calls in the past, "but we've gotten better at investigating temperature reports. And we refer to them as employees 'reporting information' rather than 'complaints.'"

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