Labor of Love?
Office
Cube farms, Teams etiquette, and the great thermostat war
Two of this week’s six questions were office-specific: “Cube Farm Traffic” only went up on HQ’s whiteboard, and “Moving Upward” only went up on RTP’s. Both offices got the remaining four questions. More on the two one-office questions below – they’re part of the decisiveness numbers like everything else, just excluded from the HQ/RTP comparison later on, since there’s no second office’s result to compare them to.
How decisive were these results?
Five of six questions were a simple either-or, so those get the usual binomial test against a 50/50 split. The sixth, “Best Email Signoff,” had four options, so it gets the chi-square goodness-of-fit test instead (see the Week Daze post for why).
TL;DR: Teams Meetings was the most one-sided call of the week – Join right on time beat Start a few minutes early 69–21 (77%). Moving Upward was the closest thing to a real debate: Stairs edged Elevator 18–16, about as close to a coin flip as this poll has ever produced (p = 0.86) – fittingly, it’s also the one question only RTP got to weigh in on.
| question | N | Leader (votes) | Trailer (votes) | Leader share | Margin (votes) | Margin (points) | p vs 50/50 | Leader 95% CI | Votes to flip |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teams Meetings | 90 | Join right on time (69) | Start a few minutes early (21) | 76.7% | 48 | 53.3% | 3.88e-07 | [0.67, 0.85] | 25 |
| Worst Office Temperature | 93 | Too Hot (68) | Too Cold (25) | 73.1% | 43 | 46.2% | 9.38e-06 | [0.63, 0.82] | 22 |
| EISD Tickets | 92 | Wait until its really a problem (56) | Submit immediately (36) | 60.9% | 20 | 21.7% | 4.70e-02 | [0.50, 0.71] | 11 |
| Cube Farm Traffic | 51 | Right (30) | Left (21) | 58.8% | 9 | 17.6% | 2.62e-01 | [0.44, 0.72] | 5 |
| Moving Upward | 34 | Stairs (18) | Elevator (16) | 52.9% | 2 | 5.9% | 8.64e-01 | [0.35, 0.70] | 2 |
| Note: | |||||||||
| Sorted by margin (points), largest to smallest. |
Best Email Signoff
The one four-way question of the week: “Thanks” narrowly took it with 49% of the vote, nowhere near the landslide some of the two-option questions produced – four options makes for a much harder plurality to run away with.
| question | N | # options | Top pick (votes) | Top share | Zero-vote options | Chi-sq (df) | p vs uniform | p: top vs chance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best Email Signoff | 118 | 4 | Thanks (58) | 49.2% | 0 | 51.0 (3) | 4.85e-11 | 2.35e-08 |
Does HQ agree with RTP?
“Cube Farm Traffic” and “Moving Upward” only ran in one office each, so there’s no second office’s result to compare them to – they’re dropped from everything in this section.
| question | Leader (overall) | HQ share | RTP share | Gap (pts) | p-value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EISD Tickets | Wait until its really a problem | 66% (39/59) | 52% (17/33) | 15% | 0.249 |
| Teams Meetings | Join right on time | 72% (41/57) | 85% (28/33) | 13% | 0.255 |
| Worst Office Temperature | Too Hot | 76% (45/59) | 68% (23/34) | 9% | 0.509 |
| question | Options tested | Options dropped (0 votes both offices) | Chi-sq (df) | p-value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best Email Signoff | 4 | 0 | 3.1 (3) | 0.376 |
HQ and RTP picked the exact same winner on all four shared questions this week – no flips, and the running flip tally holds at 11.
The Alignment Index for this poll alone comes out to 0.9, and the cumulative index sits at 0.89. With total agreement on every winner and reasonably similar enthusiasm across the board, this was a quiet week for office tension.
Do the procrastinators run hot?
“Wait until it’s really a problem” swept EISD Tickets, and “Too Hot” swept Worst Office Temperature – both landslides, and both questions drew almost identical crowds. Let’s bound how much the “let it boil over” types overlap.
Of the 92 overlapping voters, the ticket-procrastinating, thermostat-blaming crowd could be as small as 31 or as large as 56 people (34%–61%), versus about 41 (45%) expected if the two opinions were unrelated. Both landslides are large enough that the floor sits well above zero – there’s a real, forced overlap here, not just a coincidence of two big majorities.