My office has two doors.
One is relatively normal. You need a code to open it, which is a little ludicrous because you already badge through multiple entry points in order to reach it. But whatever, it’s a functioning door. We slapped a sweet poster about our internal culture on the outside, one of our favorite flags on the inside, and it’s great.
The other, on the opposite end of the office, we just don’t know how to open from the hallway—nobody seems to know the code.
We can open it from inside the office, which makes it a sometimes useful point of exit—it’s close to the stairwell and helps avoid disrupting others when they’re meeting.
But (there’s always a but), this door has two handles, that must be turned simultaneously.
TWO HANDLES!!!
Inevitably, one of our teammates, running late for a meeting, will rush toward that door with a laptop, notebook and hot cup of coffee—only to lace the office with profanities about the two-handed door as they find a surface to drop their items so they can unlatch the thing, or simply give up and walk back around to the other exit.
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We had a water bottle filler installed in our hallway. It took about a year, but we did it. And man oh man, it’s glorious. You should get one, for sure. A hydrated PAO is an effective PAO.
Anyway, we bought the thing and sent the facilities team a work order to install it. Those dudes were super nice, they had to mess around with the pipes and build a funny makeshift wall out of plywood in order to mount it correctly. Success! We were drinking some sweet sweet water, 2017-style.
Except – nobody painted the new plywood wall. It was mismatched against the hallway’s white walls. Seemed like a natural next step, but our facilities folks are busy so I hit them up with a reminder.
Response: “That’s a different one of our sections that paints. You’ll have to fill out a new work order for that.”
A NEW WORK ORDER!!!
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I mentioned our posters, which we design in-house. Another section we work with has a printer that can make huge, super high quality prints on nice paper; and since the dudes in that section understand our organization’s culture, they are happy to print our products.
Now: when great posters are needed and appropriate, we make sure the message is right, the graphic designer on our team makes it looks awesome, AND we make sure the printer dudes have what they need (sizes, numbers) to print them out.
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Are you creating or demolishing two-handed doors in your organization?
