Dirty Dish Fiasco
There are many challenges while living in a fraternity house. With eight guys having their own schedules and personal habits clashing, there are many communication issues that take place. There are not only just communication issues with those of us living in the chapter house, but with other fraternity brothers that visit as well. In our house, we have to share two bathrooms, a living area, a laundry station and a kitchen. I will focus on talking about the major source of our communication fiasco; the kitchen.
We have a medium double sink and a dish drainer with limited counter space. The worst thing is that we have to manually clean our dishes every time since we don’t have a dish washer to do the job for us. In general, when people are busy, they tend to put priorities like cleaning and washing dishes near the bottom. Most of us spend a lot of time cooking and utilizing resources in the kitchen. This means a lot of used dishes that accumulate very fast. There are two issues that arise from this: 1) People don’t always clean their dishes after using them right away and 2) The dish drainer is always full and unavailable for other dishes to wash their used dishes. The problem with the second point is that people get lazy
The beginning of the problem is when the dish drainer gets full. This usually keeps us from doing their dishes and end up putting dirty dishes in the sink or on the counter next to the sink. We will ignore the fact that the dish drainer is full and the dishes keep piling up. Even if someone unloads the dish drainer after a couple days of dishes piling up, we will forget which dishes are theirs and end up not doing any dishes all together. It is just an endless cycle until one of us steps up and just does all of the dishes to make a clean slate for everyone to mess it up again.
The whole communication fiasco is that we have little to zero communication in the first place. We do not have a house manager that acts as an authority figure to keep us in line or make sure that tasks have been completed and done sufficiently. Without someone delegating or holding us accountable, nothing will get done and we will think that we can get away with whatever we want with no consequence. Another factor for this fiasco is that we do not have a set chore list for the house in general. This means that there are even less rules and procedures for taking care of dishes and also a lack of discipline when someone does not take care of their dishes.
The resulting factors of this lack of communication leads to a tension among the brothers living in the house and adds general stress when trying to use the kitchen or other uses for the sink. What happens is that one person ends up getting so fed up that they just do all of the dishes, even if most of them aren’t theirs, and basically boast that they are the ones that finally took care of it. The same situation occurs for unloading the dish drainer so that people can continue taking care of their dishes. Although this problem has occurred multiple times, we are working on getting it resolved. The main course of action has been adding a squared off section for each person to put their dishes on the counter. This helps keep people accountable for their own dishes and limits the space in which they can attempt to pile up the dishes before having to finally do them. Providing some drying clothes at the sink has provided us the opportunity to dry dishes as we wash them when the dish drainer is full. We solved unloading the dish drainer problem by including it in our new house chores list for someone to take care of during the week. This motivates people to do their dishes more often so that we can end this cycle of miscommunication and keeping our kitchen clean and organized.
Analysis
I am going to start off with the biggest change that most of us have incurred which is the cause for the lack of communication. Four out of the eight people that currently live in the house have actually lived in the house environment before. Either the other four have come from the residence halls or from a previous home/apartment, that has a different environment. The restraining forces comes from the brothers who have little experience being in an environment in which multiple people live together. The less experienced brothers have to adapt to the base of what the experienced brothers have built on. There is also a little restraining force coming from the experienced brothers who have been used to how things should be run and have to adapt to the less experienced brothers in their common environment.
The aspect of change in an environment can be compared to Lewin’s general phases of change. Unfreezing would be the first step in breaking down the resistance to change from both sides of the party. The fear of uncertainty from the experienced brother are aimed towards the inexperienced brothers along with a fear of unpredictability. The habits that the brothers in the house like, house rules, expectations and personal habits, could be extremely different from the newer brothers coming into the house environment. They will be use to the residence halls taking care of their dishes and meals, janitors cleaning their bathrooms and just a usual lack of independence overall. The hardest part about this change was refreezing these “habits” and standard operating procedures as one unit. Although it is a work in progress, we are still tweaking some changes to our rules and procedures of how to take care of our dishes.
Along with environment changes, there are also cultural changes within the structure of the chapter house. Newer brothers introduced to the chapter house are definitely going to experience some culture shock. This is also normal for someone that studies abroad overseas and is not use to the culture or structure of that country. This goes in hand with the environmental change. Socialization is one of the key function for this example of organizational culture. The key cultural value of this fiasco would be the aspect of a people orientated culture. With the different values of the individuals in general, it is important to make decisions based on the effects on people within the chapter house. Since there are usually differences between status levels of the brothers, both young and old, it shows the power distance from the experienced brothers to the new, inexperienced brothers.
The place we are at with this is so recent and new, we are in the changing and merging phase of organizational culture. The reward that we should feel is the fact that we do not have to stress out about dishes anymore or worry about who will unload the dish drainer. The act of “training” newer brothers who move in the house on our traditions and procedures will also help with a smoother transition. This could relate to new hired employees into a business. The merging of these two levels of experienced brothers will also provide a smoother transition. These are some examples of what affected, but also helped this communication fiasco. The one topic that lacked the most was of course, communication.
Even though there was a lack of structure and culture in the chapter house environment, the lack of communication was a primary factor. The lack of visual and oral channels like a written message in an email or on a white board would have helped immensely. I know that in our activity with trying to implement a program in a corporation, memos helped a lot with gaining interest and awareness with situations. We also lacked that face-to-face interaction to really dish out our problems. We eventually had a house meeting at Applebee’s and figure out a plan of how we would fix our dishes issue since all of us have had enough of it. With the lack of communication, it also meant that the sender had a problem encoding correctly. When he would tell us that he did the dishes, he could have been meaning to say that he wants us to start doing our own dishes and he is tired of doing them all the time. Even if he meant for us to understand that, us the receivers, may have misinterpreted his message in a completely different way.
The lack of organizational structure hindered us for not having someone in charge to make sure things run smoothly in our chapter house. Having a house manager will add the single vertical structure to add some type of authority to the organization. The degree and power that the top of the structure has will be greater than the rest of the house mates below the house manager. With only a few of us in the chapter home environment, an organic structure is what is forming currently.
This analysis obviously indicates that there were a lot of factors and topics that were discuss as “lacking” of. I described the analysis of what would have been solved if the certain concepts were already implemented. Although this dishes issue is a work in progress, many of these topics are being implemented. The fact that there were topics covered in both current and non-existent adds a unique analysis of a present organizational issue.