As employees return to the office, it appears the office cutlery is disappearing at shockingly high rates
No matter how resimercial you make your office, though, it won’t change the one constant you can rely on: your coworkers driving you nuts ― including that despised, loathed, despicable character, the cutlery thief.
“As people return to workplaces all over the world, they’re discovering something else has disappeared — the office cutlery,” reads a recent report in the hallowed pages of the Wall Street Journal. “Of course, communal items have gone missing from offices since the dawn of the cubicle. But these days another trend is merging with the back-to-the-office movement: the eco-conscious workspace.”
That’s been a boon for cutlery thieves. With no more single-use plastics, offices are now commonly filled with prized metal cutlery, just sitting there, waiting to be surreptitiously stashed in one’s lunchpail. In Australia, a documentary producer even made a radio segment probing the question.
Ben Stiller of National Truck League here in London was featured in the article, as he has deputized himself as the fork police. An initial crackdown ― a stern email and a sign posted in the kitchen ― seemed to work. Briefly. “Two weeks later, they were all gone again,” he told the WSJ. “We never solved the problem.”
Many have tried to figure out why the problem of stolen office cutlery is so pervasive. A 2005 study even went deep down this rabbit hole in an attempt to understand how cutlery theft was affecting modern workplaces. In “The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute” (try saying that five times fast) researchers looked at both what was going missing, and the impact it was having on the workplace. Which was, apparently, significant.
“Teaspoons are an essential part of office life. Simultaneously, the rapid rate of teaspoon loss shows that their availability (and therefore office life) is under constant assault,” they wrote.
“Teaspoon displacement and loss leads to the use of forks, knives and staplers to measure out coffee and sugar, inevitably causing a reduction in employee satisfaction; in addition, large amounts of time may be wasted searching for teaspoons, both factors leading to decreased employee efficiency.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.