In this whole sub-thread, I see quite a lot of signals along the lines of: - that's someone else's job, I shouldn't be bothered - I'm doing valuable work, others should make it easy for me - (all sorts of) managers are to make some problems inexistent for me
I'm not saying that's all in the original thread, but I read such sentiment.
So here's something that we do that may be unusual.
We respect everyone's roles and work. As much as Kasia wouldn't jump on a project as a developer, none of our developers would take her seat and handle all the stuff she deals with daily. Heck, she routinely helps people dealing with all sorts of paperwork that, especially for foreigners, are major pain in the butt. Which is "funny" because it's just "simple paperwork anyone could do."
And before someone throws at me that anyone can order milk online, that's like a hundredth priority or something like that.
Anyway, starting from a place where we all respect each other and everyone's work, dropping an index card on someone's desk on the way to one's own is a non-issue.
I acknowledge, though, that in an environment where people don't respect others' work because whatever (they have a less prestigious role, they're paid less, etc.), folks may totally perceive that a problem.
And yes, establishing such respect is so much harder than making sure that milk is in a frigging cupboard.
> it becomes a pain to check the cupboard with milk reserves every now and then
If freaking glancing into the shelf once a day (or more like once a week, because this milk has months of shelf life) in scope of full time office manager job is "a pain", maybe that office manager should rethink their employment there.
A near-universal feature of office managers is that they are continually rethinking their employment.
It is guaranteed to happen that as I grab the paper and walk to the person's desk, something more important comes up as somebody sees me, and then I have a meeting, and the piece of paper simply isn't important enough to remember next to my other responsibilities.
Employees are paid to do the work they're best at. It's a bad use of resources to have them tracking office supplies, emptying their wastebins, vacuuming their floor area, restocking toilet paper, or alerting the office manager when milk is low.
For a tiny, cash-strapped startup they might have to do all those things, but generally it's not optimal.
Edit: just to be clear and in response to downvotes, this isn't an ego or self-importance thing. It's just the fact that when in conflict, it is genuinely more important for the company for me to address an urgent technical issue, and show up to an important meeting on time, than to finish running across the office to drop off a post-it note about milk. I already never have enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done for my job, and everything is a question of prioritization. I'm just trying to give a realistic perspective here, that we separate out job responsibilities for a good reason.
There's no milk.
Also, anecdotally, my dad worked at a place where, if you needed something to be plugged into an electrical outlet, there was a person whose job was do do that. And if that person needed tools, there was another person whose job was to carry his tools.
One of their many rules was that nothing could be plugged into any electrical outlet on site unless the device had been inspected and signed off by a union electrician.
In a hurry to diagnose a problem with a printer I furtively plugged my non-approved oscilloscope in to a wall outlet. But then I inadvertently grounded a power line with the scope probe and caused a circuit breaker to trip somewhere on the main board. Shit!
A pompous electrician appeared and told me they would be shutting down the entire mill (10K+ workers) while the union decided how to punish me for my rule breaking.
It took much begging and pleading before he relented. My only leverage was that the printer was also used to print pay slips and he would not have got paid that week unless I fixed the printer.
- managing your own calendar, meetings, memos
- organizing transport and stay on business trips
- tracking and later correctly filling in forms to expense the above
- and yes, tracking supply of office consumables
This and many, many more things have been dumped on everyone by short-sighted beancounting. Salaries of secretaries, graphics departments, finance people, etc. are legible, therefore cutting them is a "big efficiency win". But their work does not disappear - it gets spread out, distributed in tiny pieces to everyone else. Then you have specialists with 10x the salaries of aforementioned departments getting constantly distracted by work that is not the reason they were hired. And people are surprised that productivity doesn't track promised economic improvements, and that everything gets slow to build and expensive for "unknown reasons".
As long as you’re holding the slip of paper in your hand, you won’t forget about it.
Nobody really took guard duty seriously when it was just the platoon spending the night in the woods and between the three squads plus 'radio watch' there was always bound to be someone awake the penalty for falling asleep was usually just being assigned to the next shit detail so this system worked quite well.
I suspect this system is quite similar, if you want milk and the sticky note is on someone's desk because they can't be bothered to walk it over to correct person's desk because they are 'too important' then maybe people will start to question that person's true importance to the organization.
[0] during our time in Saudi Arabia/Iraq everyone took guard duty seriously and the leaders would make sure people were doing their jobs up to and including punishing people for petty infractions.
I'm saying that tracking milk shouldn't be part of your job, because it's not a good use of people's time. None of it has anything to do with "importance". It's about what is best for the business.
Would the business fail if the milk supply ran out?
And you understand that a lot of people don't drink their coffee black?
It seems pretty obvious to me that yes -- having coffee with milk available is very much best for the business. Kind of like having restrooms, chairs, and air conditioning are also best for the business.
The issue is with creating random bespoke processes, that save maybe 60 seconds of work for that office manager per week, but now involve literaly every person in organization.
Bringing the card takes 5 minutes, 10 if you include time to a joke like "We are drinking too much milk, we should buy a cow next year."
Buying the milk includes going to the shop or calling the correct provider. Not the provider you used until two month ago because they usually deliver the requests too late at 5:05 when everyone is going home. Are you paying with the company card or your card and get reimbursed or they have to send an invoice and get paid later? Does the invoice need a magic tax number? Ensure they security guy and the payments department know about this so there are no surprise. [1] [2] This looks like half on hour at least.
When someone ask me to implement a trivial feature in software, I estimate "4 hours". Open the editor, find the correct file, take a look, make the obvious change, run the automated test, fix the obvious bug, cross the fingers, run the test again, [does it need new tests?,] write a nice commit message, google how "thoughtfully" is spelled, commit the change, close the editor, and it's done. Probably 2 hours, but I prefer to say for 4 hour in case there is a surprise.
[1] How many milks? 1%? 2%? 3%? Which brand? This may be included in the instructions, but in the second week of December you may want to buy less, and if there is a discount you may want more.
[2] Do you piggy back cookies or soap?
If the milk needed replenishing more often, maybe polling the shelf makes more sense - hey the rate of consumption is higher today, I’ll re-order early. That high throughput optimisation doesn’t really shake out if you’re always just waiting for the replenishment event to fire.