Leaving the office better than you found it

Laura Cook Newman //October 24, 2013//

Leaving the office better than you found it

Laura Cook Newman //October 24, 2013//

Every dwelling has those annoying yet necessary household objects that create a lot of strife in an otherwise harmonious home.  You hear a lot about it in the busiest room in the house – the bathroom. 

Marriages have ended over commode seat placement.  Children have been grounded over blue streaks of Crest in the sink.  And everyone within earshot feigns ignorance when the accusation “Who didn’t replace the TP?!?!” is hollered.

It exists at the office, too. The sly kitchen elf who pours themselves the last cup of coffee and neglects to brew another pot. Or the tricky troll who runs 6,000 copies, depleting all the ink from the Xerox.

Pro kitchens aren’t immune either.  If you surveyed a group of chefs and asked what their biggest pet peeve about their job is, do you know what they’d say?

Long hours?  Hot kitchens?  Cuts?  Burns?  Inflating food cost?  Angry customers?

Plastic wrap.

Commercial kitchens rely on this more than business people lean on PowerPoint.

What’s the beef chefs have with plastic wrap?  In addition to being bulky and often MIA, like an office printer, it often gets jammed up.  There’s a delicate threading mechanism to dispense the clear film so that it spins freely for hours of wrapping delight.  

Due to the frequency of use, the plastic wrap often gets off track and requires a re-do.  Want to see a chef go all “Gordon Ramsey”?  Jam up the plastic wrap and leave it for the next victim.

Happy campers are familiar with the Leave No Trace guidelines and act accordingly by extinguishing their fire pits, hiking on marked trails and packing out their trash. 

Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the worldwide scouting movement took LNT one step further.  Not only is he credited for the Boy Scouts motto Be Prepared, he also said “Leave this world a little better than you found it.”

We defend ourselves with “I was in a hurry!”, “I’ll fix it later” or “I always brew more Folgers, but so-and-so never does.”  Once that attitude starts, it’s a rapidly spreading epidemic that even the CDC has never seen the likes of. 

Besides selling Thin Mints to your colleagues on behalf of your daughter, how else can we inject the Scout’s “do good” culture on the job? 

Ever seen those signs that read “50 days without an accident”?   Let’s borrow a page from the OSHA playbook and apply it to an office, pro kitchen or home bathroom.

Praise your employees and family for consistently doing the right thing. No need for an office memo to address culture change.  Just make your own “accident free” sign:

 “6 days of pristine bathroom conditions”

7 days of full coffee pots”

8 days without an abandoned paper jam”

9 days of smooth sailing plastic wrap”

It takes 21 days to form a good habit.  In just three weeks, a little positive encouragement will help create a culture of people leaving things better than they found it.  Scout’s honor.