A tale of two snowstorms, 22 years apart
The President’s Day snowstorm of 2003 was a record-breaking whopper. Our snowfall in DC was measured in feet, not inches.
It was also not enough to close our office the next day.
We were a fast-paced advocacy nonprofit, founded and run by someone who believed every minute we weren’t working was a minute we were failing to advance the cause.
Remember, this was 2003. We had no smartphones, no work-issued laptops, blissfully not even off-site access to email.
So, the official policy on weather emergencies was: if the Red Line is running, the office is open. If the office is open, employees are expected to show up for work.
I lived two city miles from the nearest Red Line station, and usually took the bus there on work days before catching the Metro to work. But the streets were so piled and packed with snow that the buses weren’t even running the day after the snowstorm. With an in-office mandate and no PTO to spare, I did what any sensible transplanted Midwesterner would do. I laced up my boots, walked down the middle of the street to the subway and showed up a sweaty mess about two hours late for work. (I passed a few others on cross-country skis, and may have seen a penguin or two.) I reversed the process at the end of the work day and somehow made it home.
I always assumed this policy came about because the boss had an easy Red Line commute to the office. I knew he didn’t have any kids, so a school closure wouldn’t have had any impact on his thinking. We didn’t have a lot of parents in the office to begin with, and I definitely didn’t see any of them that day.
The message I received, loud and clear, was this: as a human being, your convenience and possibly your physical safety are secondary concerns compared to your ability to sit your butt in a chair and do a job.
I left that job more than 20 years ago, but I never forgot my snowstorm commute day. In fact, I was just thinking about it a few days ago.
Snowstorm revisited
It was February 2025, midmorning on a weekday. I was staring out the window at the bare pavement of our Maryland street and the sidewalk I had proudly shoveled a couple of hours earlier. Despite a big snowfall the day and night before, our neighborhood was passable. Yet school had been canceled for the entire day. The kids were home, and the closure would mean an extra day of classes in June.
I work from home, and my daughter is plenty old enough to keep herself busy during a weekday. So the superintendent’s decision to shut down had no impact on me at all. I would make no angry phone calls and do no grumbling with my neighbors. But I did think about the contrast with my boss’s decision all of those years earlier.
What if the superintendent had simply looked out his window as I looked out mine, and based his decision on what he saw? Or if he decided based on how easily he could get to his office?
Ours is a huge county, with more than a million residents and more than 500 square miles of land ranging from high-density urban areas to multi-acre swaths of undeveloped farm land. We have more than 200 schools and more than 1,300 buses that serve them.
Those buses have to travel on roads that don’t always get plowed as often or as quickly as mine does. They need clear access to driveways and parking lots at school when they arrive. Kids who walk to school need clear sidewalks. Employees, who may live in different counties with different weather patterns, need clear roads to get to school and clear parking spaces when they get there.
A school system has a lot more moving parts than our little 50-person nonprofit with a single office had in the early aughts. But in both cases, the overwhelming majority of those variables have nothing to do with the leader’s personal experience.
Lessons learned
Your experience is not necessarily other people’s experience
What’s convenient for you may not be convenient for others
Others may face obstacles that you do not face, or may not even be aware of
The thoughtful leader surrounds themselves with multiple points of view, representing a diverse set of stakeholders
A policy that is thoughtful and transparent builds trust with the team
Balancing employee well-being with productivity is key to retention