How to Motivate Employees to Clean Up
Get your workgroup to create a system that encourages cleaning common areas.
Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it turns out most of us don’t aspire to be Godly. We’re happy just to be human. And messy. In fact, Eden wrote in saying, “Every few weeks, my co-workers and I decide we’ll clean up after ourselves and keep our public space tidy. Nothing changes. We leave mugs in the break room, and we just walk past, leaving them there. How can we start picking up after ourselves?”
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How to Motivate Employees to Clean Up
You know what the irony is, here? I’ll bet your co-workers have kids at home. I’ll bet those kids have messy rooms, and I’ll bet the parents yell and scream at the kids to clean their room. Actually, that makes a lot of sense. Their kids mess up their home, and they retaliate subconsciously by messing up the office. The human brain is a wonderful thing for spreading misery far and wide.
Use Peer Pressure to Motivate Employees to Clean Up
It sounds like your whole office likes the idea of cleaning up. That makes things easier. You can use your creativity to come up with several different ways to make that happen, and then have the group choose which way(s) to adopt.
This being the workplace, and most workplaces being ruled by fear, terror, and shame, those are probably the first tools that we would reach for. Agree to throw away any mug left uncleaned for more than a day. Or label everyone’s mugs so you know who the culprits are, and have a big wall of shame where you pin a picture of people who leave dirty dishes. Call it “The Wall of Ninnies Who Need a Mommy to Pick Up After Them.”
Try Humiliation…or Money
Each time you see someone who’s listed on the wall, ridicule them and insult their ancestry, their children, their taste in clothes, and their sexual prowess. When your boss or office visitors come by, make sure to walk by the poster and sweetly mention how much you admire your co-workers, who are brave enough to wallow in their own filth and display it publicly. Once you reduce them to tears once or twice, they’ll stop.
Instead of emotion, you could fine people money. If your mug gets discovered, it goes into the Cupboard of Doom. In order to get a mug out of the cupboard, the culprit must pay $5. Then you can use the money to buy cotton candy and unicorn treats for everyone in the office who has been good enough to keep the kitchen clean.
Use Positive Reinforcement, Positively!
We love to use shame and punishment (I know I do). But as animal trainer Karen Pryor writes in “Don’t Shoot the Dog,” her book about training pets, rewards work better for changing behavior. Put a bunch of tasty marshmallow Rice Krispie treats in a transparent bowl in the break room. Lock the bowl and give the key to someone who can see the kitchen from their desk. Every time the all-seeing monitor notices someone cleaning their own mug, they can reward that person with a treat. If they notice someone cleaning other people’s mugs, they can give a reward of two treats. Soon, everyone will be fighting over who gets to clean up.
Keep Co-Workers Clean by Making It a Game
[[AdMiddle]Whether you use punishment or rewards, however, you’re still treating cleanliness as a serious matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also bring fun into it by combining the carrot and the stick and creating a game. The business world is pretty much the only place in the world that hasn’t noticed that people are motivated to do stuff that’s fun. Games are fun. Make cleaning the break room into a game.
Get a bunch of poker chips to use as points. Everyone buys five chips for a dollar apiece, or five dollars. The money goes into a fund for the winner. Put a can of chips in the break room to be the bank. When you don’t feel like washing your cup, that’s fine. Leave it. But you have to pay a chip into the bank. If you wash your cup, you get to take a chip out of the bank. If you wash someone else’s cup, you get to take two chips out of the bank. At the end of each month, the team goes out to lunch at a restaurant of the winner’s choice. The winner doesn’t have to pay, however. The money in the winner’s fund pays for the winner’s meal, drinks, cab fare home, and time in detox.
Make sure to have a leaderboard! That’s the opposite of the Wall of Shame. Each month, record the winner of the pot and how many points he or she had. Keep a big, public display of the top five winners. Label the board “Winners!” For reasons lost in the mists of time, people will want to compete for a spot on that board, even if it means cleaning up after themselves!
Use Eyes
The one problem with games, however, is that people sometimes cheat. You can get around this by putting pictures of eyes in the kitchen. Yes, eyes. Research has shown that a picture of someone looking directly at you prompts you to be more socially responsible than you would be otherwise, even though you know it’s just a picture. Weird, huh? But it works. So grab that poster of Big Brother and display it prominently above the bank of poker chips.
We’ve discussed using carrots, using sticks, and making a game out of carrots and sticks. This episode’s transcript includes links to Karen Pryor’s book, a marshmallow Rice Krispie treat recipe, and an article about the science of eyes. If all else fails, give up. Embrace your inner teenage boy, and enjoy making a mess. Make it gross; make it /really/ gross. Leave half-eaten sandwiches around, alongside moldy pieces of unidentifiable chicken parts, and slime. Lots of slime. It may get so bad that even your current batch of slobs gets grossed out, and starts to clean up. But if not, you get to be a teenager again! And how fun is that? Grab yourself a rock ‘n roll T-shirt, a rainbow-colored Mohawk, pierce your tongue, and revel in your recaptured youth. It’s either that or get upset about dirty coffee mugs. The choice is obvious.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
RESOURCES
- Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor
- recipes the original treats – Marshmallow Rice Krispie Treats
- how the illusion of being observed can make you better person – Eyes make you behave
Wastpaper Basket image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
