Laundry room theories

I don’t know whether it’s common in your country for apartment buildings to have their own laundry room, but in Sweden it’s very common. Laundry rooms are either well kept or filthy – there seems to be no in-between. At the place I lived until last week, the laundry room was always in a mess: no one bothered to clean it after having done their laundry; occasionally, there were notes posted to the door, saying that it’s everybody’s duty to do so.

I used to think a lot about what could be done to change things so that people would start to clean up after themselves. For about a year, I tried to clean the room meticulously – partly because I felt it was my duty, and partly as an experiment – in the hope that the others would begin to at least wipe off the washing machines and the counter. I thought that the reason that no-one ever cleaned was because they felt that it was useless, since nobody else did. But my experiment didn’t work: I was literally the only person in my building that ever did any cleaning!

Then I thought of posting a note saying that if everybody just would do a very quick cleaning (say 3 minutes) the laundry room would always be clean. But I never got around to it, perhaps because I never believed that it would work.

A few times we’ve used the laundry room in my girlfriend’s mother’s building, which is always clean. Everyone just seems to have the habit of quickly wiping off the machines and the floor. I think that what’s needed is for everybody to truly feel that they share the responsibility with the others to keep the laundry room clean – that it is their laundry room.

Last night I went down and checked out the laundry room at our new place, and it’s spotless! All new machines and very clean. As soon as you enter the building you can sense that it’s well taken care of. It will be interesting to see how things work here.

But it is interesting to think about what would have to be done to change things at my old place. You must install a new mindset in the people using the laundry room. Currently, I think, they don’t feel that it is their laundry room. And whenever the janitor posts a note about how everybody needs to clean up after themselves, it is received as an order from above – and it simply won’t work. I think the first thing that needs to be done is to hire a professional cleaner to do a thorough cleaning up, and perhaps also to replace the old machines and repaint the room, so that it feels new. It is important with a clean start (no pun intended).

In fact, the place needs a change of culture. The difference in culture between my new place and the last place, is that here the culture is that people care about their house. It’s a problem of culture. And it’s interesting how the culture can persist even though people move in and out over the course of time. It’s as if the culture is communicated in a myriad of subtle ways: the filthy laundry room, the filthy garbage room, that few people care to say hello – or if they do, it’s out of a sense of duty – and so on.

The same kind of problem can be found in software projects where no-one feel that it is their system that is being developed. This is also a matter of culture – culture in software projects is extremely important (see this older post: Agile culture). But that’s another story.