The top workplace etiquette complaint among office workers? Raiders of the lost lunch. A recent study found that a whopping 97.8 percent of office dwellers believed fridge thieves to be the worst offenders.
The Lean Cuisine has left the building. The takeout has taken off. So what, you say? Shame on you, manager above the food fray.
You know the old adage (thanks, Napoleon) about an army marching on its stomach? Same goes for your team — rumbling tummies due to missing meals aren’t going to inspire them to great efforts. And grumbling, gossip and water-cooler CSI efforts will distract from real work. Even worse, how can your team function as a unit when they’re worrying about a thief in their midst?
And thus it falls to you to come up with some solutions. Luckily, we’ve assembled five foolproof ways to keep the refrigerator bandits at bay.
- Padlock the fridge and assign a keymaster.
- Install surveillance cameras. Anyone nabbed lifting someone else’s lunch gets assigned fridge-cleaning duty.
- Issue every employee an insulated lunch bag fitted with a combination lock.
- Set a trap with decoy food. Replace key ingredients ingredients (cat food in place of tuna, for instance) or add a surprise like jalapenos, cayenne pepper or insane amounts of salt.
- Finally, when you catch a lunch thief, announce the name and the offense in a company-wide memo. Nothing prevents recidivism like a healthy dose of public humiliation.
(Image by Jason Rogers via Flickr, CC 2.0)
