my coworkers leave dirty dishes in the sink and expect me to clean them up

A reader writes:

I work at a creative company with 50+ people on staff, about 30 of whom come into the office regularly. It’s a great place to work overall, but I’ll be honest, I’m in a bit of a humbling professional moment. After being laid off from my more senior role earlier this year, I took on a junior position here because, well, times are hard and you do what you have to do.

Part of my current role involves managing the studio space, which includes keeping our small kitchenette tidy and running the dishwasher. I actually don’t mind this, I run the washer every night before I leave and empty it in the morning so there’s always space for dishes. What I do mind is that a subset of my colleagues continue to leave their dirty dishes and cups piled up in the sink despite the fact that a perfectly functional dishwasher is right there.

I’ve already sent a group message asking people to put their dishes directly in the dishwasher instead of leaving them in the sink, and for a while it helped, but old habits are creeping back. I’m now regularly cleaning up after adults who absolutely know better.

Truthfully, I know that cleaning the kitchen is technically part of my job. But having spent years in more senior roles, there’s something that stings about feeling like the office maid for people who can’t be bothered with basic courtesy. I’m aware that might be an ego thing on my part, and I’m trying to keep that in mind, but it’s hard.

My question is: how do I communicate, clearly and professionally, that this behavior needs to stop, without coming across as either a pushover or someone who’s overstepping? Is there a way to escalate this that doesn’t make me look like I’m making a big deal out of dishes? And is there anything I can do to manage my own frustration in the meantime?

This hinges on whether cleaning up other people’s dishes is supposed to be part of your job. In some offices it might be, with the idea that they want other people to be able to get back to their own jobs more quickly or not have to take time out between back-to-back meetings and/or they’ve accepted the reality that if they don’t specifically make it part of someone’s job, the kitchen quickly becomes chaos.

If it’s an intentional part of your job … well, then it’s the job, even if stings. If that’s the case, you have a few options: you can work on seeing it as perfectly dignified work, even though it’s different from the work you’re used to, or you can pitch your boss on making it not part of the job (although that may be challenging if they specifically want someone charged with it so that other people can back to their own jobs more quickly), or you can decide you’re not interested in a job that includes this element and look elsewhere. But if it’s genuinely part of the role and not your colleagues just being thoughtless, you’ve got to accept that as the reality of this position and try not to stew over it.

On the other hand, if it’s not supposed to be part of your job — if people are supposed to deal with their own dishes and you just run the dishwasher at the end of the day and keep the rest of the space clean — that’s different. If that’s the situation … well, you have a battle ahead of you. That’s frequently the case with office kitchens, which often suffer from the tragedy of the commons (where no one feels like it’s really their responsibility to take care of a shared resource). You’re looking for a way to tell people “cut this out” that will actually get through to them and doesn’t involve you melting down in a fit of rage, but as generations of people annoyed by messy office kitchens will tell you, there is no such magic string of words. Instead, realistically, your choices are:

* Continue the cycle where you remind people, they get better for a while, and then they backslide.

* Enlist someone who has the power to lay down the law with your coworkers about this (which they may or may not be willing to do in a way that really has teeth — and in practice, they might not be inclined to hassle a top performer who left a mug in the sink while running between meetings).

* Convince someone above you that the only way to solve this is with more extreme measures, like letting you throw out any dishes that are left in the sink at the end of the day, moving all the dishes left at the end of the day to a “dirty dishes box” where they will eventually get thrown out if not reclaimed, or switching the kitchen to only disposable dishes and utensils (possible, but they’d need to agree the problem is bad enough to warrant that, and there’s an environmental cost to doing that).

* Find a way to make peace with it (even if that’s just deciding that annoying as it is, you like the money you get for dealing with it).

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