There are numerous Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) articles on how to increase staff cleaning up after themselves. I’ve also been in numerous presentations where the examples used involve staff cleaning their work area, cleaning the break room, etc. Why? Are people interested in behavior analysis naturally slobs?
I understand this is not a trivial concern. There might be funders, parents, or other visitors, so we want the workplace to look professional. Food on the floor might lead to bugs. Toys on the floor might be a safety hazard. Sure, no problem. We have to make sure our work areas look reasonably good.
Still, I strongly suspect another reason for the focus on cleaning. The real mission and why we come to work—to make a socially significant difference in the lives of children—takes a long time and is much harder to measure. Likewise, it is hard to measure staff performance. Sure, we can take measures of how well the staff are implementing the treatment. But the subtleties of measuring things like shaping skills and facilitating social interactions is very difficult. Getting measures of those results are even harder.
There are lots of other examples in addition to cleaning. It is not just that sloppiness bothers people so much. Many OBM studies in the literature focus on relatively trivial staff behavior changes. Often, the studies don’t even bother to measure whether it had any impact on the clients or does so in a very trivial way. It isn’t that these studies aren’t needed or important. We do need studies like this in order to effectively study complex phenomenon like management. In order to do that, it is essential that the targets selected are easy to measure and the results can be achieved in a relatively short period of time. Many of these studies don’t demonstrate any practical improvement. That’s probably OK, that’s often not the main purpose of those studies.
The trap comes for those of us who are completely focused on Poogi and want practical improvements immediately. I think that sometimes we are so focused on the measurements, that we emphasize what is easy to measure instead of what’s really important. It’s essential to first decide what’s really important. Only after that should you then start to focus on measurements.