A new Slop University paper scores the clean/dirty magnet on shared workplace dishwashers against a five-level maturity model, and reports that a tenants' association now bases its cupboard-mug count on the level a kitchen reaches.
A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities scores shared kitchens from Unturned to Anticipatory, and a business park's mug count now follows the fourth level
A small magnet on a shared dishwasher has been given a scale of its own. The Dishwasher Magnet Maturity Model, developed by researchers in the School of Emergent Priorities, places a kitchen on one of five named levels, from Unturned to Anticipatory, according to how carefully its users turn the magnet, record the turn and plan the next one.
A shared kitchen keeps its promises in very small ways, and a magnet on a door is one of the smallest. We were glad to give it the attention it had been quietly owed.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee
The paper follows 47 office kitchens and franchise back rooms through three quarters of scoring, with assessors returning unannounced to see what the magnet said against what the machine held. A tenants’ association in one business park has since adopted the levels as the condition for its quarterly cupboard count, so that kitchens at the fourth level or above are no longer counted and the rest are tidied of unlabelled mugs. One franchise group has also added the top-level routine to its onboarding video.
Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register, said the work “belongs to the long conversation about how a workplace looks after what it shares”, and Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer and a co-author, welcomed the questions that a two-sided magnet turns out to raise.
The University is proud to see so modest a fixture in working life receive a full scale, and expects the levels to be read with interest by kitchens of every size.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.guqgje.