Rubbish Raiders

How we hacked our office culture

The printer lacks paper, the kitchen is messy and there is no milk in the coffee machine. Again. Sounds familiar? Such small tasks affect each office. Each company. Each day — at least almost. They are an important indicator of office culture. But often, they’re done by one half of the team. While the other half does not feel responsible at all.

Your hell is my paradise

In a messy office, we spend pretty much of our working time searching for materials or feel uncomfortable. And this leads to resentments. An employee’s individual ideals of order and cleanliness can become another’s personal hell. We know these conflicts from our private lives. You’ll probably agree that they should not interfere with daily business in the office. But how to reconcile the different concepts and motivations in order to achieve productive working conditions?

Annoyed by chaotic situations and unclear responsibilities as described above, our Head of Well-being Anika seeked for an instrument in order to end it. So she came up with the idea for “Rubbish Raiders”. And instead of writing a Powerpoint or Confluence entry that no one would even care about she approached our developer Sascha and they built a game.

Turning bad office habits into good ones

The approach is quite simple: Rubbish Raiders allows every team member to collect points for tasks they perform in the office. That way, it creates awareness for the importance of office culture, makes tasks an integral part of everyday work and people even feel good about it.

In fact, Rubbish Raiders is not just about cleaning to ensure physical order. It’s about creating a completely new office culture.

When employees complete a task, they briefly pick up their smartphones, open the tool, click on the task and collect points. One task brings them 5 to 25 points, depending on the scope. In addition, there are achievements which bring further points and are unlocked as soon as an activity has been carried out often enough. To heat up the competition even more, there is a “leaderboard” which ranks the participants according to their level of engagement. It gets reset after each season, which lasts for half a year. Additionally, there are teams of two, if individual progress is not motivating enough for some.

The various tasks are classified into different categories. Some refer to rooms such as the kitchen (biggest pool of tasks) or the terrace. Others focus on task bundles, travel and special activities. The employees get rewarded for booking times punctually, taking part in team activities or taking the train instead of the aircraft. This also gives colleagues working outside the office many opportunities to score. And we reward team spirit and social responsibility.

Not to forget: The category “team tasks long not done” on the landing page. Thus, really everyone sees what needs to be done urgently. Given that nobody has done it before without booking it.

Rewards beat directives

Rubbish Raiders is not supposed to be a controlling instrument for the superiors or our Back Office Manager. Instead, the control lies with the employees as they look very closely at the ranking list and notice when someone is lazy or cheats — even if that someone is a partner or director.

We’ve found that top down guidelines are less effective than appealing to each person’s intrinsic motivation. Where this motivation comes from and how it is triggered, differs from type to type. Some are in it for the instant gratification. Some for the competition. And others are keen on activities related to team spirit. Rubbish Raiders appeals to all of those motivations — and turns them into action. Since its launch, the unloved office tasks are performed better, more frequently and more carefully.

Rubbish Raiders combines different kinds of motivation to create a better office culture. Colleagues now take care of tasks they were not aware of. And more and more are added based on suggestions from employees.

What started out as a little side project to remove tiny hurdles in everyday working life and encourage people to do unpleasant tasks has become an effective tool to keep our studios clean and — most importantly — a fun team building experience.