Ask a Manager: Mess At Work

[minoanmiss]

Brief but disgusting descriptions.

I manage a terrible slob — how can I convince her upset coworker that I’m handling it?

I supervise a team of seven, split between two offices. Sally is an employee in her early 20s working in the opposite office as myself.

Sally is a slob. This is not typical workplace clutter. She leaves work and personal items all over the office — moldy food containers, piles of work items, boxes, etc. Her messes have taken up to an hour to clean up. Her own office is such a mess that she spreads her work out to all of the common areas in the office, and then leaves the common areas a mess. She has not responded to typical feedback or formal warnings, and the issue has been escalated to HR. Sally will be placed on a PIP next week.

The other team members in that office, especially Susie, are understandably frustrated. The other two people on the team feel like they are stuck cleaning up Sally’s messes because they want the office to be presentable when clients visit. I have asked them several times to please not clean up after Sally. Instead, I have asked them to notify me, and I will drive in from the other office (a 15-minute drive) and address it with Sally directly. If Sally is out that day, I have told them that I will drive to the office and clean it myself. This has rarely happened — often, Susie will clean up the mess, and then call me frustrated.

The HR process has been extremely slow, but the PIP is finally in progress and will be shared with Sally next week.

I’m stuck on how I address this with Susie. She calls me almost daily, often in tears, to complain about Sally’s messes. Susie is rightfully frustrated that Sally’s mess impacts her own work. I always reiterate that I could be there within 15 minutes to have it cleaned up so it wasn’t Susie’s problem, but she always cleans it herself regardless. I always repeat to Susie that I am aware of the situation and it is being addressed. I am not willing to share much more than “it has been addressed” to protect Sally’s privacy.

Susie has questioned me on if I have even talked to Sally about the issue. Because she isn’t seeing any changes in Sally’s behavior, she doesn’t believe it’s been addressed at all. I keep repeating “it has been addressed” or “I am working with my supervisor on a solution” hoping she will get the idea that HR has gotten involved. Furthermore, she continues to clean up Sally’s messes instead of calling me, which is making it hard for me to hold Sally accountable.

How do I convince Susie that I am addressing the issue? I get the feeling she thinks I am ignoring the issue and losing trust in me, which is obviously not the case. She is becoming resentful of doing all of the cleaning, even though I have asked her outright multiple times to not.

Aside from outright telling Susie that Sally is being put on a PIP (which I obviously wouldn’t do), how do I get her to trust me that this is being addressed? I’m at my wits’ end here.

Well, first, I wouldn’t recommend using a PIP for something like this that’s so black and white. This isn’t a situation where Sally needs to build her skills or get better at follow-through on projects, or needs time to demonstrate that her work has changed. This is a very clear, “You cannot leave messes all over the office, period.” It’s closer to a conduct issue than a performance issue, and PIPs aren’t well-suited for those. Instead, you’re better off making your expectations clear, laying out the consequences if they’re not met, and then sticking to that.

But it sounds like you’re being stymied by your organization’s HR, which is requiring a PIP, so here we are.

The language you need to use with Susie is: “Every time you clean up Sally’s mess, it makes it harder for me to address the problem. The way to help get this resolved as quickly as possible is to alert me that it has happened and then leave it alone. Your cleaning it up is actively interfering with my ability to resolve it, so I need you to stop — that’s not negotiable. You cannot clean on Sally’s behalf anymore.”

But you really, really need to pair that with something like, “I can promise you that I’m only asking this of you for a month and no longer.” Because if you’re asking Susie to work in messy chaos for months on end and not do anything about it herself, that’s unreasonable.

Frankly, I might also pair it with, “I know it must seem like this should have been fixed by now. Our organization has policies that managers have to follow when there are issues like this. The only way I can take the action necessary is by allowing the messes to stay long enough that I personally can document them.” Because that’s the truth, and by trying to avoid spelling it out, you’re letting her think you’re just not taking any real action. It is not a violation of Sally’s privacy to spell this out for Susie.

That said … Susie’s reaction to Sally’s messes sounds really intense. Calling you daily in tears? Unless there’s some missing context that makes that make sense (like that Sally’s mess is literally preventing Susie from being able to do her own job), that makes me wonder what more is going on, either with Susie personally or with the broader situation.

I’m also curious how long this has been happening! If it’s dragged out for a year and Susie has been hearing “it has been addressed” for a year when it clearly hasn’t been addressed in a sufficient way, it’s understandable that she’s frustrated.

Can you just move Sally to the office you’re in? Or work out of the office she’s in yourself for a while? Given the way HR seems to be tying your hands, you’re going to be able to deal with this a lot more effectively if you’re regularly in the same space that she is.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

1) a significant plurality but fortunately minority of commenters think Susie is the WORST because she cries over being stuck in this hideous situation. If she were a guy throwing staplers and cursing I suspect she'd get more sympathy.

2) I tagged this "mental illness" because it seems likely Sally is hoarding, but that does not justify letting her do this to a shared workspace. IMHO.

[conuly]

LW seems pretty clear that this isn't normal, everyday untidiness. Maybe it's reasonable to cry about it.

[topaz_eyes]

Yeah, unfortunately Susie is not helping things improve by getting rid of the evidence of Sally's messes. But Susie is also correct about the main office needing to be presentable to clients. Perhaps LW should ask Susie to photograph the mess first if it needs to be cleaned up immediately.

This is a case where LW should either work in Sally's office for awhile, or transfer Sally to their office. Sally imho needs direct managerial supervision and immediate intervention with her messes, since Sally has not responded to either feedback or formal warnings to improve. (If she hasn't responded to those, I'm not sure a PIP will help either.)

[nineveh_uk]

Photographing sounds a good idea. But I agree that really LWneeds to be there, or someone else who is authorised, as part of the whole process, to get Sally to clear up right now. I suspect that LW is only counting those 15 mins in the carand not the real time involved for Susie, who gets to sit while things get bad enough for her to feel she can call, and then to get hold of LW, who goes to the loo/finishes an email/her meeting and to her car, enters the building, assesses the situation, and only then starts cleaning. Meanwhile the client arrived half an hour ago. Also, I suspect that through not being onsite, LW has not fully grasped that this is an issue that is awful for Susie and colleagues all the time, not simply when it has reached the worst point, but as a constant stress. Because for LW, it isn't!

But Alison is right. This is a conduct case, not a PIP case. It's not a problem with Sally's work, but with Sally's behaviour.

[ashbet]

I think photographing it is a good idea, and I don’t know whether the LW suggested it, but this whole thing is definitely a conduct problem as opposed to something that can be addressed by a PIP.

I feel terrible for Susie, I particularly could not work under conditions that involved moldy stuff and bad odors!!

[frenzy]

I wonder if Susie could just wfh for a month or whatever. I don't think I could handle Sally's messes either. Hell, make Sally wfh if she can and problem solved? kind of?

[purlewe]

I have been hit in the feels about this one. I had a boss who had an empty office. Who insisted on all her employees having the same, even tho that wasn't possible with our type of work. I honestly think she had a obsessive cleaning issue. Which is not to say I believe in moldy dishes or excessive clutter being acceptable. But I can see if a person has a clutter problem, and an obsessive neat person were working closely it might become a bigger issue than it could be in other places. Especially if the boss is in a different building to gauge how much of an issue it really is since she cleans everything before he arrives. I think the person doing the clutter/mess should be working in the same building as the boss who can gauge how much of this is really a problem. And deal with it more appropriately than asking coworkers to tell him the situation (essentially being tattletales). Everyone has different levels of what they think is acceptable and this might be more about incompatibility than he thinks (minus the mold. That is never acceptable)

[melannen]

Yeah, what Sally is doing here is clearly unacceptable! It would be one thing if Sally's office was a pigsty (still not great once rotting food is involved, but ehhh) but even the most slovenly people can understand "leave the common areas usable for other people".

But I also absolutely get the frustration of working with someone who will immediately clean up other people's messes, without even saying anything to the person, despite being explicitly asked to leave it for the person who made it, and then complain that they are being forced to clean up other people's messes. We had someone at work for awhile who constantly complained that nobody was pulling their own dishes out of the dishdrainer or wiping down the breakroom tables, and they had to do it themselves every day, until someone pointed out to them there was a monthly rota and the rota person was supposed to do it last thing before closing. That was a pretty open-and-shut one but lesser version of that happened around that person constantly.

And if LW is never actually there I do kind of wonder how much of this is "Sally leaves rotting food smeared all over the areas customers see on the daily" vs. "Sally occasionally clocks out having forgotten she left a takeout coffee cup on the reception desk and Susie wildly overreacts and thinks she has to disinfect everything and LW only gets Susie's side of the story." tbh I kind of suspect it's somewhere in the middle, because I'm really struggling to understand how someone could feasibly leave an hour's worth of disgusting mess in a common area on the regular. (...an hour's worth of filing, sure, but again, that's a "leave the filing on the person's desk", not a "spend an hour doing their filing for them and then complain about it".)

[minoanmiss]

I know exactly how Sally can be leaving disgusting moldy messes every day

In Sally’s office is a pile of moldy disposable dishes from her last 3 months lunches. Wrappers. Noodle cups. Uneaten moldy bread crusts. Etc

Every day sally picks up a handful of moldy crap and brings it out of her office intending to throw it in the office trash but Something Distracts Her and she puts the moldy trash on Susie’s desk. Lather rinse repeat

Ask me how I can envision this

[melannen]

Sure, that's more or less what I envision happening. I have the desk nearest the office door/announcements board, "Whose drink is this?" is a daily question for me at closing some weeks (and half the reason my desk is always covered in piles of paper and books is that if it's not covered in my stuff it fills up with other people's as they get distracted walking by.)

But I have trouble imagining that this truly takes an hour to clean up every time, unless Susie is the kind of person where "this item touched my desk, so now I need to clear the whole desk and wipe everything down" sort of person. (It seems more likely it's a "I'm telling the manager it's taking an hour because I'm rounding up by a lot" sort of situation.)

I mean we've had messes at work that took an hour but they either involved somebody getting really creative with body fluids in the public restrooms or a drink getting spilled on important paperwork that needed to be immediately salvaged, 99% of messes (including most of the feces-related ones) are "Augh why" and then five-fifteen minutes with rubber gloves and paper towels and disinfectant and the portable vacuum. Even when it's "the high school football team brought in takeout KFC, threw the bones everywhere, smeared grease on the tables and chairs and left all the trash sitting out" it's not going to be anywhere near an hour. In my experience as a specialist in mess, to get a truly hour-long-cleanup mess you have to have at least a couple days to let it set and develop layers - and if that's still happening here that's 100% on the manager for not dealing with it quickly.

(Admittedly I can see you getting to the "must disassemble and disinfect everything because there was a hamburger wrapper" stage pretty quickly if you work with this person, even if you weren't there before.)

[minoanmiss]

I wasn't going to reply but this has been bugging me. I don't see why we need to prove Susie is inherently mendacious or overreacting. LW also seems to believe, regardless of Susie, that Sally is unacceptably messy.

Also, I do think one person can force another to do a task by reliably neglecting it. I had a friend who told me why she divorced her husband. He was unemployed when she had their baby, so when she went back to work she asked him to do two things: take care of the baby during the day and make some dinner for her to eat when she got home. Every day, or near as to it as to count, she got home to find 1) her husband playing video games 2) no dinner 3) the baby crying in his crib, with a full diaper and having not been fed. Husband would claim he couldn't hear the baby crying over the video games.

Now, was she supposed to say to him, "You were supposed to feed and clean the baby, I'm going to the bedroom until you do" when he'd already proven himself completely capable of ignoring the baby? The baby diddn't deserve to be held hostage like that. So every day she had to clean the baby, feed the baby, make her own dinner, etc, after a long day at work and a long commute. After enough months of this she kicked the husband out and he found a job in two months.

I don't think she was being a martyr to be displeased by that situation. I don't think if someone does X task because the person assigned to it reliably refuses to do it and it needs to be done that they're necessarily being a martyr about it. And I don't think Sally is necessarily blowing up a single piece of trash into an unusably messy office, no matter how much she cries.

[melannen]

I don't think we need to prove anything? I am arguing if anything for what I think a lot of people agree on, that LW needs to be present in the space if they want this to be solved by any method other than immediately firing people. Because as the situation stands, Susie cannot with Sally even a little and second-hand reports are not going to be reliable enough to reply on.

The situation you're describing with the friend's husband is horrific and she definitely did the right thing getting the husband out of there! Sometimes leaving the work undone is just not an option, and neglecting a baby like that is beyond the pale in every way. And you're certainly not making yourself a martyr to be upset and angry when someone isn't doing what they said they'd do.

But... note that even in your story, once the ex-husband didn't have his wife "handling" the rent and so on, he suddenly managed to step up and get a job (and, presumably, feed at least himself). The only thing that was going to get him to do anything was for nobody else to be doing it first (And clearly "crying baby" didn't hit his threshhold of "needs fixed NOW" -- which is a whole different problem).

In the situation in the letter, Susie has been specifically asked, repeatedly, not to clean up after Sally, and is still complaining about the fact that she has to clean up after Sally. Complaining about the mess is totally justified! Complaining that she has to do something that she's been repeatedly told not to do isn't.... unless it really is at the truly dangerous "smears body fluids all over the furniture, one-hour cleanup" level. But either way LW needs to be there to know which it is and factor in her response. If these messes are the one-hour-cleanup-actually-required kind, Sally needs to be fired yesterday. If they're the "left takeout wrappers on the shared worktable for a couple of hours, would probably have noticed on her way out that evening" level, other responses are options.

Like I said from the letter it's probably in between, and it might be far enough down the squalor end that Sally just needs fired, but the letter makes it pretty clear LW doesn't know for sure (and Susie rushing to clean up immediately every time is part of why LW can't manage it, so it's an actual problem too.) And I've been the person who's aware I need to work on breaking a bad pattern and have specifically asked people not to "fix" whatever it was without giving me the chance first, because that makes it harder for me to break the pattern, and it's extremely frustrating when they won't and easy to get in a cycle where the more they do it, the harder it is for me to get better.