How can you stop cutlery disappearing from the workplace?

Question

The workplace I work in provides a lunch room, fridges and cutlery for people to use.

The problem is that people keep taking the cutlery home. It gets replaced periodically but within about 3 months the forks are gone again.

Has anyone managed to solve the problem of keeping the cutlery in the office, if so how was it solved?

I don't really know why people take the cutlery home, most people in the office would earn enough to not need to supplement their own cutlery with cutlery from the office.

It's possible that they eat at their desks and then take it home.

We have not tried anything and I imagine possible issues, so I'd rather know what works, and is cheaper than periodically replacing the forks.

Answer 1

TLDR: There are other reasons than stealing. Don't assume the worst in people.

I've noticed this happening with tea spoons as well as forks in different companies. It turned out that they were in fact rarely stolen. More often, people would take them from the lunch area to their offices to eat something, then either leave them and build a collection of slowly moulding cutlery on or near their desks, or accidentally throw them away. Pizza boxes are great for knifes going missing.

If there are several floors and tea kitchens in your office, people from different floors coming to meet with someone who grab a coffee from your lunch area might take a mug and spoon, then just without thinking take it with them to their floor. Go and check there. We'd regularly even out the spoons and mugs between floors as things kept disappearing from ours.

Answer 2

One option is to use the most hideous cutlery you can find in the workplace.

Another option is disposable cutlery, but that tends to be more effort than it's worth and can sometimes be annoying to use.

If the cutlery is so ugly that only old ladies would steal it, then you've already narrowed down your suspect pool while still having usable cutlery that doesn't bend and break while in use.

Answer 3

If people think you are not aware of their actions they wont stop because of lack of consequences.

Write an office-wide mail and make people aware, that stealing cutlery is not okay. This will be the cheapest form of action. By not addressing anyone specifically, you can ensure, that the fork-thief stops without the need of blaming someone in particular. You can write that you noticed forks gone missing. With this, you give them the benefit of doubt.

If this does not help, you need to consider other options as the answers before mine suggests. At the end of the day, it is your (your management) decision which measures will be taken, but there must be consequences if the fork thief does not stop.

Answer 4

I would chose one of two options.

1. Announce that it won't be replaced in the future and leave it at that. If there are no forks because someone has taken them home, tough luck. Let people sort that out among themselves. I bet, everyone will have their personal fork real soon. In a variant of this, you could provide everyone a fork with their name engraved.

2. Keep replacing it regularly and consider it a cost of benefits.

But I wouldn't put any more of my time into this issue. It's a never-ending battle that is simply not worth fighting.

Answer 5

Did you try using disposable cutlery? Small items like cutlery are prone to be lost in an office environment. Also it is not very sane to reuse the same cutlery across the office unless you have a dish washing machine or staff responsible for it. In that case, why bother with the costs while some plastic fork does the job just as well?

Answer 6

From sad experience, there is only one way to stop it: Find someone in the process of stealing, get him fired, and make sure that everyone with access to the cutlery is told about it.

Your chances achieving this are low.

Answer 7

You could engrave the cutlery to identify it as the company's property. Perhaps that would embarrass people sufficiently. It should help if somebody accidentally takes some parts home and doesn't realize s/he took it from the company. I'm not sure that this is cost-efficient, though. Engraving could cost more than cheap generic cutlery, but maybe you can get a better price when ordering a lot.

Also, if there is a dishwasher in the lunch room that might encourage people to leave the cutlery there. (You didn't specify if there is a dishwasher.)