Alignment of the "Saltshaker"

Alignment is “a state of agreement or cooperation among persons, groups, nations, etc., with a common cause or viewpoint” according to dictionary dot com. I immediately thought of the house where I live on campus, endearingly referred to as the “Saltshaker”. Eight young men from my church live there including me, and we generally are supposed to function as a unit in order to maintain a pleasant “home away from home”. In addition to this main purpose, objectives outlined include such things as: keeping the house clean, cooking dinner four nights a week, and providing a healthy atmosphere physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Formal management of the house is responsibility of a “house dad”, but because of the small size of the group, personal accountability to each other is a significant part of how the house of managed informally. Because we each come from different families and different hometowns (albeit all in central Illinois), we will each naturally deviate to operating according to our own ideas of “how things should be” if not aligned.

The largest practical means of aligning the group to focus on our objectives is the semesterly house meeting, where we evenly divide up all jobs (from cooking to cleaning bathrooms) based on a point basis. All jobs have rules which are written down in a list of job descriptions, and additionally include motivations like: “if dishes are not done, party responsible will acquire all subsequent dirty dishes until job is completed.” And because we know each other well enough, we can feel free to refer each other to the job description if someone is neglecting their duties. On the other hand, the reward system for doing jobs is weak in my opinion, as it consists only of a sticker chart for each person’s job each week. Although everyone is pretty honest in withholding their sticker if they failed to do their job, the chart seems to hold little importance in terms of shame or pride in completing duties.

What management (the house dad) might do to maintain alignment in doing jobs correctly and completely is to institute a better reward system by peer evaluation- perhaps a system like a rent surcharge to poor job performance as indicated by a simple survey of the house residents each month.

Another part of alignment that has become evident at the Saltshaker is difference of opinions in procedural and organizational matters. Two examples are whether the shopper can buy groceries at a more expensive store if the food quality is slightly higher or the store is easier to shop at, and the arrangement of parking to get eight vehicles in a single driveway without creating the environment for fender benders or trapping others’ vehicles. What management can do to align us in these matters is to consider the options in light of the overall house objectives and write down the procedures to give concrete direction to us all. Also, it helps that we each are thankful to have such a nice place to stay with cheap rent, and thus are somewhat internally motivated to maintain the house. “For the good of the ‘Shake’” is a popular slogan we say occasionally (when someone needs to “take one for the team”) to remind us that personal sacrifices must sometimes be made to keep the good thing we have. Thus the most effective way to maintain alignment in the situation of the Saltshaker is to well define our objectives and tasks, and then promote each resident to take a personal stake in this home of ours.