Does the toilet paper really matter?
I read an article the other day about ‘the weirdest problems HR professionals have been asked to deal with’. One HR Manager had written in to say ‘An employee raised a grievance about the office toilet paper. They said the cheap brand showed a “lack of consideration and respect” ‘.
Initially this made me laugh and memories of the hideous ‘tracing paper’ that we had when I was at primary school came flooding back… but then I thought about it a bit more. What does it say if there’s cheap paper in the toilets of your business?
In life we generally accept the premise that ‘you get what you pay for’. If I’m in a 5-star hotel, I have an expectation that I will get fluffy towels and good quality toilet paper in my luxury room. If I’m in a cheap and cheerful budget hotel, I accept that I may just have one small towel and toilet paper that isn’t quilted! So, if we accept that we ‘get what we pay for’, isn’t it natural that we associate poor quality goods in the workplace with a sense of low value?
I visited an office where the desks were falling apart, drawers didn’t open and the chairs were showing their age and in various stages of disrepair. It was a running joke that you were taking your life in your hands when you sat down. All of this may have been ‘ok’ if the business was an early-stage start-up, scrimping and saving to get a product or service off the ground with all the team focussed to make this new business a success. But it wasn’t. The MD and owner rocked up every day in his Tesla. He didn’t use the toilets in the office either. Instead, he went to the serviced office next door and used the ones in their reception. Admittedly the toilets in the office weren’t great (and I can testify to the toilet paper there being cheap). However, going out of the building and into another office to use their facilities was not an option for the employees of that business. Strict controls were in place in terms of breaks.
That business ‘got what they paid for’. High turnover of staff, poor morale, poor performance and output. The toilet paper wasn’t the issue, but it was a signal to me of a business owner who didn’t really care about his people. How valued did they feel?
Signals in a business send messages to our teams. The context of the toilet paper grievance at the start of this story is unknown but it perhaps gives an insight into the unnamed business and the value they placed on their employees. Does the toilet paper really matter? I actually think it does and have to put my hand-up to having insisted on better toilet paper in one of the businesses I ran. An extra 10p a roll didn’t seem too much of an investment to me in signalling that we valued our people –but maybe it really didn’t matter, and no-one gave a c**p.