This blogpost is a rework of my old post from medium.com. You can find the original post here

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’ toilets 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.

A story of company XYZ.ai

Let’s take a look at a small startup XYZ. Its founders just moved into a new office, and now spend 16 hours a day there 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 who they are by nature. So, of course, the toilet paper is excellent at their office, like any other part of their environment.

Later, the company grows. More people come, and tasks, even buying toilet paper, become too complex and large to be handled by one person. Our start-up (now scale-up) XYZ starts outsourcing office supplies. And, it also starts optimizing its costs, to “distribute the value cheaply to as many people as possible”. It is only a matter of time before one of the managers will be tasked with cutting the expenses. 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, boom, the toilet paper quality falls drastically.

And this is when the company is put before the stress test:

Do they revert this bad decision (of expense cutting)?

Two paths (or “why it works”)

The employees are still in the office, and this decrease in toilet paper quality annoys them. It probably bothers people enough to ask for an improvement… but surely not enough to fight for it. Bad toilet paper quality is enough to get irritated, but not enough to quit your job, right? 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. So, this change in the quality of toilet paper could 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.

This is why the “Toilet paper test” works and why the toilet paper quality 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 minor annoyances like toilet paper will accumulate because they 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 good tools (for example, fast laptops) do. And both “good toilet paper” and “good laptops” are subject to the same processes in a large enough company. From the management viewpoint, both are just expenses.

To be productive, employees 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 made a 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, become more irritated, and less focused on the product quality. But not enough to fight for. In this situation,

Will the company XYZ employees ask for better tools, or will they dismiss this idea because it would be too much hustle?

If the employees decide to keep working with what they have — the quality will slowly degrade. As a result, you won’t find great colleagues to work together in company XYZ, nor will company XYZ be a nice reliable business partner. If the employees ask for better tools but are told they can’t have them — you won’t be able to do your job well working at company XYZ, nor can you expect company XYZ to deliver quality results on time.

When employees know how to do their job autonomously and know what they need for it better than the managers, it is crucial that the company listens and reacts to the employees’ requests. If it doesn’t — you might not want to work with such a company. “Mediocrity is expensive — and autonomy can be the antidote.”

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 technical and political 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, and handy meeting rooms? And how good is the toilet paper in your office?

TL;DR

Any company will, at some moment, start buying poor-quality laptops, software, products, supplies, and raw materials, to cut the costs. The issues caused by the low quality of the supplies will damage their results. What differentiates 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 be 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 a bad feedback culture inside the company.

Photos attribution:
The first picture is by Lewis Ronald from here, license CC-SA 3.0