Ground Hog Day

Despite the bright pink walls and white lattice work trim, the office reeked of chaos and despair. It was small and windowless. Over the years, it had been used as a storage space, and then a dental exam room (hence the color) and finally the housekeeping office.

The room was filled with a metal desk, two small filing cabinets stacked on top of one other and a guest chair. The room was so small that if more than two people came into the office at once, claustrophobia would set in quickly. There was an office chair behind the desk that no longer had wheels; its sharp edges gouged thick grooves into the tile floor.

Perhaps the most menacing thing about the room was the red light on the phone that constantly blinked, day in and day out with complaints, questions and call outs. Lots and lots of call outs. It didn’t seem to matter what I did, every morning, when I came into the office that red light would be blinking.

“Managing a housekeeping department is a lot tougher than you’d think,” he said when it was obvious that the chip on my shoulder wasn’t just for looks-

One of my all-time favorite movies is Ground Hog Day starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott (Columbia, 1993). I watch it every time it is on. The movie is about Phil Connors (Bill Murray) a weatherman for Channel 9 News, out of Pittsburg who gets stuck repeating the same day, over and over again; February 2nd, Ground Hog Day.

Watching Phil Connors (Bill Murray) repeat the same day over and over again reminds me of what it was like when I first took the position as an Executive Housekeeper; when every day seemed just like the other.

I remember pulling the office chair out, seeing what it was doing to the floor, and not quite understanding how someone could let that go on. The desk was littered with scraps of paper, old coffee cups, and call out slips, work order requests, and random employee phone numbers. I dug around looking for the work schedule.

I found it on top of a stack of paper. A Styrofoam cup, half filled with old coffee, was holding it down against a fan that hung in the corner of the room. The schedule had been reworked so many times that it had the weight and feel of two pieces of construction paper glued together, due to all the white out that had been used. The light on the phone blinked and blinked, but I didn’t know the passcode and settled for stacking some papers over the base of the phone, covering the light. I studied the schedule.

This was the first of more than 600 days I would spend in that office. I had just graduated with my second Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (my first is in US History) and took the position as an Executive Housekeeper in a 168-bed nursing home as my way of getting my proverbial “foot in the door” I told my myself. Ultimately, I wanted to work in health care administration.

This wasn’t my first management job. In fact, if you would have asked me at the time I probably would have boasted about all the leadership positions that I have held over the years. “I was born to be in charge” I would have said.

I vaguely remember the interviewer, Joe, telling me about the job, the staff, the call outs and all the problems they were having in the nursing home.

“Managing a housekeeping department is a lot tougher than you’d think,” he said when it was obvious that the chip on my shoulder wasn’t just for looks.

To say that I was naive would have been an understatement. But besides the large chip on my shoulder, I was a hard worker and I truly believed managing a housekeeping department was going to be easy.

After all, I had received my first management job when I was just 16 years old. I had served in the Marine Corps, and I had managed in a ton of different settings. The thought of having trouble running a housekeeping department, despite Joe’s warning, seemed ridiculous.

I had two call outs and one “no call / no show” (a term I had never heard before) on my very first day as an Executive Housekeeper. I left the pink office bewildered. How was I supposed to get the building clean without staff? And who doesn’t just show up for work without calling in first? Where they running late? Did they quit?

The housekeeping office was located at the back end of the building near the service entrance. To get to the elevators that brought you to the nursing units I had to pass a bunch of other offices. As I walked down the hall everyone in those offices looked out and greeted me. They were extremely nice as they introduced themselves and wished me “good luck!” I feigned a smile but misery had found a home in my stomach and was settling in. I felt nauseous.

At first (in the movie) Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is both bemused and astounded, waking up to learn that nothing from the previous day had changed. It was as if someone was playing a trick on him. But when it became clear that it wasn’t a trick his bemused wonderment turned into carelessness.

“What would you do if you were stuck in the same place and nothing you did mattered,” he says in the movie right before he decides to go joy riding, running into mail boxes, driving down railroad tracks and throwing caution to the wind.

Repeating the same day over and over again takes its toll, however, and Phil is soon in a state of depression so strong that he attempts suicide over and over and over again. It doesn’t work, of course. “…every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender,” he says.

I didn’t know what to expect those first few days. I knew I had a lot of work to do. I knew that the housekeeping department had gone through three Executive Housekeepers in as many months and no one was expecting much from me. But when a few weeks had turned into a few months and I was still having trouble getting people to show up for work; and worse, getting those that did show up to stay on task, take some pride in their work and stop sneaking out for 50 cigarette breaks a day. My patients quickly ran out and I started to get desperate.

“Hello.” I had to call three times before she finally answered the phone and when she did she sounded horse. I knew I woke her up but I didn’t care.

“Are you coming to work today,” I said trying to sound all nonchalant and sweet. I couldn’t believe I had to call people, just to wake them up and beg them to come into work. And that was on days they were scheduled to work. Calling someone in to cover a shift on their day off was impossible. Soon I was so sick of everything and everyone (and repeating the same day over and over again) that I quickly fell into what I now recognize as “Management Suicide”.

Politeness was the first thing to go. I snapped at everyone. I stopped attending morning meetings. I even stopped walking the floors, and I started to spend an unhealthy amount of time in that pink closet. I was so overwhelmed and exacerbated by the blatant disregard my employees had toward their job that I started to develop that same attitude toward them. “If they’re not going to do anything, then neither was I,” I thought.

How I was not fired during those first few months is a wonder to me. If nothing else, I (at the very least) kept showing up, something the other Executive Housekeepers had all failed to do. Besides, I didn’t think my boss wanted to come back any time soon. He hated it here too.

Toward the end of the movie Phil Connors sees a boy fall out of a tree and it dawns on him that, because he is repeating the same day over and over again, he could be at that same tree the next day and instead of the kid falling to the ground and breaking his arm, Phil could catch him just in time; rescuing him. Fast forward to the next day and Phil is seen racing to the tree where the boy is just moments away from falling; he catches him just in time.

For the first time, in a very long time Phil feels good about himself. Soon he has a sense of purpose. He starts noticing all the problems everyone around him is having that day. In addition to the kid falling out of the tree, a car full of older ladies gets a flat tire, a man is chocking on a piece of meat, a young couple is having second thoughts on marriage, and an old homeless man is freezing to death in an ally.

Instead of all the self-serving antics that have made this movie a hilarious hit, Phil is now focused on serving the needs of everyone around him. He shows up just as the tire goes flat, spare in hand. He walks into a restaurant and performs the Heimlich maneuver, just in time. He gives marital advice to the young couple, saving their nuptials and of course races to catch the falling kid. It takes a few days, a few attempts, a lot of paying attention and some adjustments to his schedule but before long Phil becomes so focused on helping everyone around him that before he knows it, “Poof” it is February 3rd.

What Phil Connors learns in 101 minutes of movie magic is something that Zig Ziggler (noted author and speaker) is famous for saying: “If you help enough people get everything they want, you will get everything you want.”

For me it was cubicle curtains. In the nursing home I ran, every room had two cubicle curtains in them (privacy curtains that separate the beds from one another). We were supposed to change the cubicle curtains every time there was a discharge or when they were dirty, whichever came first.

There were a few problems however, with cubicle curtains. First, they are a huge pain in the ass to change, (pardon my language, but it is true) requiring both a step ladder and the ability to hold both your arms above your head, while you painstakingly unhook and then re-hook up a ten-pound curtain to a frame on the ceiling. Second, the curtains came in multiple colors. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I got called to a unit because one of my housekeepers replaced a blue cubicle curtain with a pink one or a yellow one with a green one.

Perhaps the biggest problem I had with cubicle curtains was that they were stored in a large linen closet in the basement of the building. And my housekeepers loved to either use that as an excuse as to why they didn’t change a dirty cubicle curtain (“I didn’t have time to go all the way down to the basement to get one…”) or as the reason I was constantly catching them walking around outside, (“I needed to come downstairs to get a cubicle curtain and decided to have a quick smoke…”).

It seems silly now, but the day I decided that I was going to be the one to check to see which cubicle curtains needed to be changed, what colors they needed to be, and that I was going to be the one to make sure the housekeepers had them (before they needed them) was the day I started to serve my staff and become a successful manager.

What I learned was this: Housekeeping management is like guerrilla warfare, it is controlled by the whims and habits of others and the only way to fight back is to make sure that your staff has all the time, tools and training to do their jobs.

Soon I was checking all the rooms, seeing if there was anything that I could get my housekeepers that would help them get their job done. If the room had a lot of Knick knacks that needed to be moved, I’d get them an empty box. If there were a lot of stains or build up, I get them a stronger chemical. I moved dresser away from walls, pretreated baseboards and resolved to make sure my housekeepers had everything they needed to get the job done.

It took a few attempts, a lot of paying attention and some adjustments to job routines and schedules but before long I became so focused on ensuring my staff had everything that they needed, that before I knew it, “Poof” it was February 3rd.

POSTSCRIPT:

About a year after I started working at this facility I hired a girl named Lindsey who, after sitting in my office filling out paperwork for twenty minutes asked me if I had ever read about the effects “Pink” painted rooms had on people. I hadn’t.

It turns out that the color pink, especially when the whole room is painted that color, makes people feel hostile and agitated. To this day I laugh in complete disbelief at my luck. What a year I had sitting in that office. I told Rick, the maintenance guy, about the color dilemma and the following weekend we painted the office a nice, soft green.

-Ralph Peterson is the CEO of Ralph Peterson Consulting, [a management training and development firm that specializes in Long-Term Care], an Efficiency Expert, a syndicated columnist and author of the book, "Managing When No One Wants To Work," (Four-Nineteen Press, 2014). Contact him at [email protected]