When I first started working at my current job the kitchen wall above the sink was bare. But then people started leaving dirty dishes by the sink and soon after a small square of laminated paper was placed above the sink. It was white text on a blue background and it said something along the lines of please clean up dirty dishes after yourself.
It worked for a while. People stopped leaving dirty dishes about the kitchen and started cleaning up after themselves. But then a few months passed and the dirty dishes came back.
Immediately two identical signs were made, black text on a white background saying pretty much the same thing (please clean up your dirty dishes) and were placed on either side of the first dirty dishes sign.
So currently there is three signs, two of them identical, above the sink saying clean up your dirty dishes.
The three signs worked for a while but the complacency has crept back in and the dirty dishes have returned.
Prepare the signs!
What I reckon happened is that the signs worked initially because they were new, but failed to have a long lasting effect because pretty soon they became wallpaper to everyone.
The addition of two identical signs right next to the first one is hilarious to me and probably hints that someone in the office is getting very aggravated.
If shouting is the norm, shouting louder isn’t going to help. We see this often with advertising and people are very good today at filtering their attention.
So Mr. sign maker, I don’t think more signs is the answer. You clearly like signs so I’ll go with it. If you made one sign per week. Keep the message the same but do it differently every week. This would be interesting and prevent the wallpaper effect. If you think one a week is too much work for you, you can always open up the submissions to your colleagues and get their buy in. (Google do it with their doodle and it works a treat).
You wouldn’t have to announce the change because people notice change and they talk about change. If more people are talking about the dirty dishes it’s more likely they are going to change clean up after themselves. Especially when small talk at work is at a premium.
That’s my two cents anyway.
By the way, it wasn’t me leaving the dirty dishes (well not all the time anyway :P)
Thomas Duggan 