The “Toilet paper test”
How to tell if your potential employer or business partner is great before signing a contract
Imagine you came for a job interview, negotiations, or an introduction to a company. You want to know whether the people in front of you are great to work with. So how do you do it? Here’s my suggestion:
Go to their employees’ toilet and check the quality of the toilet paper there
If the toilet paper is soft — it’s a green light. If it is as sharp as sandpaper — run away (remember to put your pants on).
This test began as a joke from a few anecdotal observations. But as time passed, it seemed to work every single time for me, so I want to share it with you.
I’m not saying you should decide on an offer or a strategic partnership based on the toilet paper quality. But there is a cultural difference between companies that this little test allows me to talk about. And, the “Toilet paper test” actually works for me almost every single time.
A story of company X
Let’s take a look at a small startup X. Founders spend 16 hours a day in the office to succeed. Of course, they care about making their work environment comfortable. Also, as founders, they will speak up if they are bothered by something and fix it. This is just who they are. So, the toilet paper is excellent at their office.
Later, the company grows. More people come, and tasks, even buying toilet paper, become too complex and large. Our start-up (now scale-up) X starts outsourcing office supplies, and it is just a matter of time before one of the managers will be tasked with cutting the expenses. Ok, they look for cheaper suppliers of everything, toilet paper included. Unfortunately, there are only two types of toilet paper — a. expensive soft paper, or b. cheap sandpaper. As a result, the toilet paper quality falls drastically.
And this is when the company is put before the stress test:
Will they revert this expense cutting?
Here is why it works
The employees are still in the office, and this decrease in toilet paper quality will annoy them. It bothers people enough to ask for an improvement but not enough to fight for it. Enough to get irritated, but not enough to quit their job. You, as an employee, are not some special snowflake who can’t tolerate toilet paper that everybody else is supposedly okay with? So it is not a big deal, right? So, this change in the quality of toilet paper could only be reverted if and only if:
a. the employees feel comfortable speaking up, and
b. the management has feedback loops that allow employees to complain productively and achieve changes.
And this is why the “Toilet paper test” works and why toilet paper serves as an early symptom of cultural problems. If there are problems in communication, if the employees are not heard or do not feel empowered to speak up, then the minor annoyances like toilet paper will never be fixed.
And what does it have to do with the quality of work?
Jokes aside, obviously, I’m not saying that low-quality toilet paper makes the results people produce (although it might, who knows?). But fast laptops and good tools do. And good toilet paper and fast laptops are subject to the same processes in a large enough company. Both are just utilities that the company has to spend money on.
To be productive, employees from time to time have to ask for better laptops, tools, software, and so on. Just apply the same logic as described above for these supplies. Some manager has decided that they will buy cheaper laptops, less professional instruments, or stop paying for some expensive software. This decision will be inevitably made million times during the company’s lifetime. But a somewhat slower laptop or a not-so-fancy screwdriver is not a real problem. It’s an annoyance. Enough to be bothered, slightly lose productivity (or so it feels — it may be a huge difference!), become more irritated, and less focused on the product quality. Just not enough to fight for. In this situation,
Will the company X employees ask for better tools, or will they just dismiss this idea because it would be too much hustle?
If the employees decide to keep working with what they have — you won’t find great colleagues to work together in company X, nor will company X be a nice reliable business partner. If the employees ask for better computers and are told they can’t have them — you won’t be able to do your job well working at company X, nor can’t you expect company X to deliver the quality results you want from them in time. In a company where the professional employees know their job and what they need to do better than the managers, it is essential that the company listens and reacts to the employees' asks. If it doesn't — you might not want to work with such a company.
Conclusion
Don’t take this test too seriously. I merely used it to talk about the culture of speaking up by and listening to employees. Some companies have more of it, and some have less. Some fix the things that inevitably break, while some struggle with it. Naturally, you want to work with the former ones. So let me finish this article with a provocative question:
Does your workplace pass the “Toilet paper test”?
Do you have a fast laptop, good instruments, and anything else you might need to do your job 200% more efficiently? Or have you been left alone with mediocre tools, struggling to do your job, wasting your time fixing problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place? And don’t you feel that having these tools correlates with having a comfortable chair, a spacious desk, a convenient office, handy meeting rooms, and the summit of all office supplies — soft toilet paper?
And also, how good is the toilet paper in your office?
Let me know in the comments.
TL;DR
Any company will, at some moment, start buying poor-quality laptops, software, products, supplies, and raw materials. The issues caused by the low quality of the supplies will damage their results. What differentiates the companies with great cultures is that they have working feedback loops that allow and empower employees to push back and fix these issues. Only in these companies will the supplies be great (and so will the results).
Toilet paper, of course, does not affect the quality of the results. But it is subject to the same processes as the rest of the supplies. So its quality will also degrade, but it is more unlikely to be fixed. Thus it serves as an early symptom of bad feedback culture inside the company.
Photos attribution:
The first picture is by Lewis Ronald from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Half_a_white_toilet_paper_roll.jpg, license CC-SA 3.0
