I cancelled the office cleaning contract. You should have seen the look on everyone's faces when I told them we were doing a weekly field day.
Last week I wrote about coming in slow and how the first ninety days reward patience. This was the one thing that couldn't wait.
For the uninitiated, field day is when the whole command stops working and cleans the building. I mopped the same hallway on my ship every day for eighteen months. It's a necessity and nobody likes it, but there are bigger implications than a p-way smelling like Fabuloso.
Nobody Owned Anything
I stepped into a business full of hard-working people executing day in and day out at our headquarters in Boise, Idaho. Our real business, though, is in the field. That's where our owner operates from, meeting customers, delivering equipment, on the front lines of enabling the construction industry. It's the best thing for driving growth. It also shaped how everyone came to see the office.
In my first week I noticed a stack of boxes leaned against the wall outside my office. Invoices, a box of networking equipment, a few other odds and ends. I assumed it was staged there for a reason. A month later it hadn't moved.
When I asked around, I got almost the identical answer every time. The owner set those there and I didn't want to move them or mess them up. Not a bad answer on its own. But it didn't stop at the boxes. A pile of wiring a contractor left behind after a renovation sat in our lobby for weeks. Everyone assumed it was somebody else's.
Frustrating, but I didn't want to burden the team with minor tasks while they were executing, so I'd pick things up myself to keep everyone moving.
That worked until one day. During a local all hands I asked whether there was anything we could do to improve the office. Someone suggested a place to store boots and hard hats. I proposed building a mudroom and got back "well, we'd need to ask the owner."
That was when I realized something needed to change.
We didn't have a cleanliness problem. We had an ownership problem, and you can't fix an ownership problem with a memo about ownership.
I could have written that memo. Every new leader does. You stand up in a meeting and say you want people taking initiative, feeling empowered, speaking up when something's wrong. Everyone nods and nothing moves, because you told them a thing instead of handing them one.
Culture Isn't A Ping Pong Table
In my first interview the owner said he was looking for someone to have a presence in the office, buy the team lunch sometimes, build the in-office culture.
I told him culture isn't putting up a ping pong table or stocking good snacks. It's the things you do and how you do them. It's identifying what the business and its customers need and orbiting every behavior around that. Our customers need involved vendors. Ones who follow up, show ownership, and see things through.
So that's what we built.
I called the cleaning company and cancelled our weekly service. When they asked why, I told them it was nothing against them, it was for team building.
Everybody Cleans Somebody Else's Space
That first Friday I gathered the team in the lobby and laid out the rules.
We clean for one hour every Friday. Everybody takes a different space in the office, drawn at random from a pile of sticky notes. The catch is you can't clean your own space. It has to be someone else's. Before you start, you find the person who does own it and ask them what they'd like done.
The cleaning is almost beside the point. What you get is a forced conversation between two people who otherwise wouldn't have one, in which one of them is doing the other a favor. Cleaning your own desk is a chore. Cleaning somebody else's is a small kindness, and people show up differently for it.
Most resistance to a new thing isn't really about the thing. It's the suspicion that the cost is going to land unfairly. Drawing from a pile of sticky notes takes that off the table before anyone has to raise it.
Last rule, and maybe the most important one. Somebody has to put music on. Playing 90s and 2000s R&B every morning during cleaning became the thing our shop was known for on the ship.
A Month In
The office is cleaner than it's ever been. Turns out eight people cleaning for an hour beats two people cleaning for an hour (who knew). No boxes stacked anywhere. The parking lot has been weeded and picked up. When you consistently take care of the simple stuff, you free up the resources to go after the bigger problems you keep telling yourself you'll get to later.
Half the cleaning budget went straight to cash. The other half went to team lunches, which we now do regularly, and to dedicated office snacks. The snacks, I'm told, are the real headline. I'm more pro office snacks than your average guy, but its important to distinguish that we aren't relying on the food to substantiate the culture.
Company culture should be handled with extreme care. If you're new to a business, take it in. Absorb it. Ask people how they feel about things. Be cautious about what you change and how you deliver it.
But I knew a lack of ownership would hold back our growth and our service to customers. Our spaces are where we begin our work every day. Obsessive attention to detail about where we work will drive the same detail in how we work.
Keep attacking,
Brock