“My only assumption was that maybe someone was weary of catching COVID in the bathroom space, so they decided the kitchen space was a safer place to clean their teeth,” says Moira Chalk, who saw the sign advising her and her colleagues not to “wash your teeth in the kitchen” in the shared kitchen of her Melbourne office building. (The sign featured a toothbrush in a red circle with a cross through it.)
That didn’t bother Chalk, who works for a wine-barrel supply company, nearly as much as the dirty cups and dishes some of her colleagues continually leave on the sink.
“I blame their mothers,” she says, meaning she thinks this behaviour is the result of negligent parenting.
She’s not the only one who sees a colleague’s kitchen habits as telegraphing a whole lot more than laziness.
“I hate people taking advantage of the cleaners,” says the woman who put up the passive-aggressive note in her office kitchen. “These people are not beneath you, they have jobs to do, too, and one of them isn’t to pick up your dirty food scraps because someone was lazy.”
And this, says Reynolds, is one of the biggest problems with the kitchen etiquette breach boom we appear to be in; kitchen conflict reflects an organisation’s overall level of functionality, or lack thereof.
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“I mean, if there’s kitchen rage in an organisation, I think it tells us something, which is not just about the kitchen,” says Reynolds, adding that the more energy workers are spending on policing, or dealing with, their colleagues’ slovenliness, the less energy they have to do their job. “It’s a behavioural indicator of how people are interacting with one another.”
And it’s behaviour that might influence how our bosses see us.
“We just, in a way, gossip about them; OK, it’s clear they are not mature yet,” says Karin Saunders, a professor in management at The University of NSW, of the students who she says are often the people leaving the shared kitchen in the business school in disarray. ” They are still in their mother’s place, or their father’s place, you know?”
This is why managers need to establish clear rules – either in a meeting, or with a written agreement – about what the kitchen etiquette expectations are, she says.
“If there are no official rules, then it becomes tricky.”
Meanwhile, we should spare a thought for those who’ve still been unable to return to the office.
“Permanent work from home,” wrote one man on Twitter, responding to my callout for people dealing with office kitchen shenanigans. “Wife keeps leaving me notes about the toilet seat.”
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The kitchen etiquette tells you a lot about a workplace
Source: Philippines Alive
