Maintaining Hygiene: Ensuring Team Success & Health Safety - Essay Sample

Introduction

As you may be aware, our working environment is one of the critical factors that not only affect our performance but is also indicative of our sensitivity to aesthetics as well as health risks. As a player in the successful operations of the team, it is essential always to ensure that we do everything at the individual level to ensure that we uphold the team's reputation. Discharging this duty requires us to maintain sensitivity towards hygiene. Based on this background to which I have drawn your attention, let me now express my concern about our conduct concerning general cleanliness in our workplace.

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In the recent past, I have keenly monitored our conduct regarding the general cleanliness of the floor space, particularly the break room and utensils. It stuns me that we seem not to have embraced cleanliness as an individual responsibility resulting in the untidiness of the break room. Notably, it has become a trend where utensils used during the break are left unattended in the sink, tables with spilled coffee not wiped and refrigerator mishandled. The coffee pot, too, is not kept clean. You can only imagine the health risks that this poses to us as workers and the negative impression it sends about our team when an outsider sees the mess therein.

As much as I appreciate the excellent work that we do, it is incredibly embarrassing for the top management to find us in such a mess. I believe that none of us wish to identify with dirt and such a mess. Maybe the situation is as a result of omission or sheer refusal to be responsible. I do not want to apportion blame to any individual member of the team. Nonetheless, I unequivocally remind every person that needs to do his or her bit to ensure that we work and eat in clean space.

Follow Up on the State of the Break Room and the Way Forward

I write this email as a follow up to an initial one I had sent every member of the team concerning the state of sanitation within our working space. To remind you a bit about its content, I had pointed out that the dirt in the break room not only pose health risks to us but also cause embarrassment whenever our seniors in the management visit the working area. Despite the enormity of the issues I raised in that email, I have noted with utter disappointment that no change has so far been evident. In light of this, I am forced to take decisive and drastic measure to nurture a sense of responsibility among all of us.

We will proceed as follows in maintaining the hygiene and general aesthetics of our working space, including the break room. I will subdivide the team into five groups of four people each. The groups will take turns in reminding the other members to ensure that their activities do not dirty the break room. This will mean ensuring that everybody cleans their utensils after use and correctly handle every equipment in the break room. Here, we will use the power of sheer influence to inculcate a sense of personal responsibility. Subsequently, we will all embark on a general clean-up of the entire working space including the break room every Friday to ensure that we get first-hand interaction with the dirt which are sources of germs that may risk our health. I believe that being actively involved in cleaning the mess which we have caused will nurture in everyone a culture of responsibility as well as sensitivity to sanitation.

I hope that these measures will significantly contribute to commendable improvement in our sanitation as well as nurturing a lasting sense of hygiene in every member of the team.

Reflection

The case I have to contend with as a manager is one that significantly borders on individual habit and attitude towards sanitation in a corporate space. In such a working environment, members often have a propensity to think that someone else will clean the mess they leave behind after using any equipment therein. Therefore, my three goals in resolving the situation were to nurture a sense of individual and group responsibility, arouse the attention of all the members to the implications of eating in an untidy area and team building for proper workplace sanitation.

In framing the emails, I had to consider that every member of the team is vital in the delivery of the collective goals hence apportioning individual blames without evidence would result in unfair treatment. Once such a feeling develops among team members, the productivity is likely to drastically fall as they would tend to be anxious and suspicious in whatever they do. Therefore, I had to approach it from the perspective of imploring them to take an active role in protecting themselves and reputation through appreciating that a dirty environment reflects on their standing as workers.

I also avoided being punitive in ensuring adherence to cleaner practices within the workplace. This was informed by the fact that human resource is very sensitive to attacks. The issue at hand was concerning cleanliness and not performance on assigned roles. Therefore, my interest was to maintain high workforce performance while at the same time addressing hygiene. No wonder, I decided to allocate them to groups so that they can evoke consistently evoke the sense of responsibility among themselves. The understanding for this is that giving them the responsibility for their conduct makes them more responsive and inculcates a corporate culture of always acting in good faith for the general good.