Clean yourself up: Take the quiz – How dirty ARE you… at work?

Ok already. Get your head out of the gutter.

Or… maybe stay there. That actually may help you in this case. Have you ever thought about the dirty work you do? Last month we talked about the Employee Supply Chain: the operational processes of what YOU as an employee do every day.

But what about the crappy, dirty work that you do – every day?

What is a dirty job? If you’re a Discovery Channel binge watcher, you may say it’s like jobs that host Mike Rowe does. He goes from job to job, literally getting dirty in areas of work that many of us can only imagine – and most of the “dirty” is not simple dirt.

What would be a dirty job at your workplace? Is it the task you simply hate to do because it’s no fun or boring? It’s said that Mr. Rowe tackles the “difficult, strange, disgusting or messy” duties of the job. Is it possible that some of your own job duties in the office, or elsewhere, qualify as a “dirty job”?

Let’s take a look…. Take the “Dirty Work on the Job” © Quiz and find your score.. or check out the highlights here…

Do you have a task that is difficult?

• It takes a long time or it requires many signatures or signoffs of people that never seem to be at their desk (or anywhere to be found, really)?

Do you have a task that is strange?

• You’re really not 100% sure why you’re doing it or you’ve got a good hunch that you’re only doing it so someone else can ‘check off a box’ that a task is done… only for the information to sit in a drawer or an email folder, never to be seen (or used) again?

Do you have a task that is disgusting?

• You find it annoying in some way (for example – you must work with that realllly annoying guy from the 3rd floor that has pickle breath and always turns his work in 1 hour late) or something that was not in your job description – and you’re not fully trained to do it?

Do you have a task that is messy?

• It’s a task that you can do – but you dread doing it every time or you know there must be a better way to do this task?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, then you have dirty work in your job… and you are not working at your best – at your max capacity as an employee. You are being held back by the mud and gunk in YOUR Employee Supply Chain.

Now try this. Go back and take the “Dirty Work on the Job” © Quiz again – for the people that work for you. Find any dirty work there?

Chances are – you answered YES to both paragraphs above. There’s a solution.

Dirty work is a form of waste. Operations typically define waste as “something that adds no value” – it’s something that you’re doing in 15 steps when you could do them in 5 or something your customer does not get value out of you doing.

The goal is to find the ways to eliminate this waste. By doing so – you can give yourself up to 10-15% (on average) of your week BACK. Meaning – you could have almost an hour a day to do something else.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Click here to see how.