The Importance of Respectful Work Environments

Ugh, standing on the ledge. New chapter. New day.

One of the things I realized I miss the most right now, with regard to work, is the sense of accomplishment. Taking floors that look like they’ve been through a war and making them look shiny again. As stressful as it was, there’s something deeply satisfying about walking out at the end of the night and thinking: Yeah. We did that.

And it wasn’t easy. We’d clean an entire store to the best of our abilities in one night with a two-man crew, even though it should have been a three-man crew at all times. The budget just wasn’t there. Even when I asked for budget increases. Even when the math was obvious.

This Is the Part Where I’m Going to Rant

To all you big corporations out there who contract out your cleaning work: stop the bleed. Start treating people with respect.

To all you shareholders out there who want more money: guess what? The bottom end needs money too. Stop being so damn cheap. Pay your people accordingly. Pay your people a living wage. Get off your high horses.

And yeah, I’m going to name names because I’m tired of pretending this is polite: Walmart, Home Depot, No Frills — and honestly, any company running major contracts while squeezing the people who make their buildings functional. Get your heads out of your ass and pay people enough to live. Our economy wouldn’t be in the state it’s in if you did.

And to the “Elon Musk types” who think they deserve all the money while everyone else fights for scraps: to heck with that. Everybody needs to be able to live.

What I Miss (and What This Says About Work)

I miss the challenges. I do. I miss the social interaction too, even though some managers out there are real frickin’ jerks.

But the biggest thing I miss is the clean, visible, measurable win: a job that starts messy and ends done. That’s not a small thing, psychologically.

There’s a whole line of research that basically says: people do better when their work has clear meaning, clear feedback, and a clear sense of “I finished something.” That’s part of why a shiny floor hits different than a thousand emails. When the work is real and the result is visible, it feeds motivation.¹

Same idea from another angle: self-determination theory says humans run better when we get some combination of competence (I’m good at this), autonomy (I have some control), and relatedness (I’m part of something / I matter to people).²

Cleaning work, especially floor work, can actually deliver all three when it’s staffed and resourced properly. But when it’s chronically understaffed, underfunded, and treated like an afterthought, it flips: you still have the effort, but you don’t get the respect, the support, or the reward. That mismatch is a known stress pattern: high effort, low reward.³

And that’s where people burn out. Not because they’re weak, but because the system is designed to extract and discard. Burnout research has been pointing at that “exhaustion + cynicism + reduced accomplishment” pattern for decades.⁴

The Sociological Piece: Outsourcing Turns People into a Cost-Target

Here’s the bigger, uglier truth: when big companies outsource cleaning, they often “win” on paper by pushing risk and wage pressure down the chain. The work still has to get done, but the people doing it get squeezed harder because contractors compete on price. It becomes a race to the bottom.

There’s a name for this in modern labor policy: the fissured workplace. Big brands control the standards, but they offload the responsibility, and the result tends to be lower wages, weaker protections, and constant churn.⁵

And the worldview behind a lot of that squeeze is the old shareholder-first logic: the only “responsibility” is profit.⁶

But there’s another way to run a business: stakeholder thinking says you don’t just answer to shareholders, you answer to workers, customers, communities — the people who make the system run.⁷

To Local Managers and Regional Managers

For you local managers out there — and local area managers — for these cleaning companies: start treating your contractors with respect.

They’re your frontline. They’re your public face. Not you. Not your regional directors. Not the head office. It’s the contractors and subcontractors doing the work at 2:00 a.m. They are the face of your service. They are your bread and butter. Treat them like it.

Living Wage: Not a Buzzword, a Baseline

When I say “living wage,” I mean the simple definition: pay that lets a worker and their family afford a decent standard of living under normal working hours.⁸

This shouldn’t be controversial. If your business model requires poverty wages to function, then your business model is broken. Not the worker.

That’s My Frustration Today

I guess that’s all I really have to say at this moment. That’s my rant. That’s my frustration as I am right now.

But underneath the rant is something simple: I miss doing work that mattered, with people I could count on, under conditions that didn’t feel like a slow grind into the ground.

Godspeed.

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Footnotes

1. Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250–279. ↩
2. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. ↩
3. Siegrist, J. (1996). Adverse health effects of high-effort/low-reward conditions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 1(1), 27–41. ↩
4. Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Occupational Behaviour, 2(2), 99–113. ↩
5. Weil, D. (2014). The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. Harvard University Press. ↩
6. Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. The New York Times Magazine. ↩
7. Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Pitman. ↩
8. International Labour Organization. (n.d.). Living wages / living wage definition (ILO guidance). ↩