Hoarder in the office

[Bobajobs]

AIBU that the manager should be being more firm with him?

We’re

We had one of these, kept reams and reams of paperwork in folders stacked on his desk from year ago 'in case I get pulled up on something and then I can prove I was doing the right thing cause it was briefed out in 1992' :/.
Your right op, management need to be firm with him. my colleague was made to throw everything out upon us moving from one side of the office to the other. He was not at all pleased.

Google GDPR. It’s coming in may and requires you to keep only data that is absolutely necessary (& not nice to have).

The manager needs to deal with this though.

He is a hoarder, it's a genuine syndrome,& not something he can control. having said that, I would remove anything that comes to your side & bin it. (daily)
Anything blocking floor space is a fire hazard

We hotdesk and have confidential stuff. We all have individual lockable mobile cupboards (we call them trundlies) which are kept in a separate room. You just grab your trundlie move it to a desk and start work. No personal or work stuff is left on desks. We do have 1 lady who likes to hoard stationery but we just get her to empty out every now and then. You can guess what she gets for Secret Santa - a multitude of sparkly pens. Not sure what you can do. I should think there is a psychological problem going on. I think I would try and get him to understand the impact his hoarding as on you in the working environment. Perhaps come to a compromise.

Has your colleague been in the organisation a long time, and maybe seen lots of change within that time? I used to work with someone very similar - piles of books and boxes and leaflets and many many copies of out of date material that we 'might need to refer to'. Absolutely frustrating, it drove me mad. But if you dug a little deeper, it was obvious that she was deeply worried about any kind of change in the organisation, she didn't understand it, couldn't keep up and was desperately clinging to the 'good old' way of doing things. She needed lots of hand holding through periods of change, and she needed us to listen to her, understand her concerns, and help her find a way to keep hold of her safety blankets whilst reducing the impact of the rest of the office team. It might not be the case with your colleague, but worth considering.

Your manager is the problem, but you know that. And you co-worker might benefit from a mental health review, hoarding often has deep psychological roots. Got an HR department? Can you go further up the line from your manager?

You need to get this sorted before the move (though you're aware of this already).

Can he not scan in what he feels is necessary to keep, so if it's a pamphlet from 2001, he scans in one copy and if he needs it again, it can be printed as many times as he likes. He gets a to keep what he wants but it is on the network and not on his desk?

As for polypockets that he has boxes of, can you not have a centralised stationery cupboard where you move to and any of the excess stationery (including the ink stamps etc) get stored centrally. He doesn't get to keep any of the items specifically for himself. He is allowed to keep a few pens and notebooks and whatever can fit into 2 magazine files on his desk (perhaps make that a general rule set out by your Facilities or HR or Local Manager).

When you move, get your local manager to have a tidy desk competition and the winner gets a decent prize of a £50 voucher for a local restaurant or something that he might be interested in wining.

Do you have an archive division that would be interested in the nostalgia aspect of whatever he has held on to? Perhaps he could feature in the company newsletter.

HRTFT. Not sure what line of business you are in but the new data protection act coming out in May is really strict about what is retained. We are having to do a major clear out - it's a wake up call for hoarders! Maybe you could point this out to your boss and use as an excuse?

Go back to HR. Hoarding is a mental illness and your colleague will need support (this may be why your manager is not putting pressure on this person and has pretty much told you to back off.)

Do not throw his stuff away when he isn't there. Hoarders get hugely distressed when people attack their hoards; it needs careful management by someone who knows what they are doing, and for you to take it upon yourself to clear his desk is verging on workplace bullying.

Based on what you've said about the catalogues, office stamps, the state of his house and other things, it sounds as though he may suffer from hoarding disorder. This has been around for ages obviously, but was officially recognised as a mental health condition in 2015.

If so, no amount of fire regulations, data protection laws, taking things away a bit at a time will work. His condition means he can't, not won't, throw things away and trying to force him to do it will cause enormous and genuine distress to him.

The other thing you need to be aware of is that if does fit the clinical diagnostic criteria, hoarding disorder is classed as a disability. This means that he is entitled to 'reasonable adjustments' to his work from the company. He may not have a formal diagnosis, but the company still needs to tread carefully.

X post with Reanimated

Could tell him rules have changed and you’re only allowed to have necessary stationary on your desk and excess has to go in stationary cupboard to fit in with the clean desk policy.

I agree with a pp it hugely disrespectful to touch his stuff. This needs to be a work rule and something you all participate in so he doesn’t feel isolated

it’s

Bit harsh to say the manager is incompetant. There are so many threads about people unable to deal with hoarding with family members.

His email inbox makes me cry over 10000 emails which he “can’t” delete

I work with someone who had 28,000 at one point. They're down to around 21,000 now. And that was my concern because Outlook had slowed to a crawl, and we were switching to Gmail and they wanted everything transferred. Which was my job.

We moved offices a while back and despite years of setting aside two days a year to clear out stuff we had so much junk left, going back to the mid-90s.

I see several people have brought up GDPR - this is not just an excuse to get him to get rid of things, it's a genuine reason! As you say you're with a very large employer, they'll be working on how to implement GDPR so this is a good time to bring up his hoarding of data...

Why are you so overly involved in your colleagues desk and email inbox? Do you not have enough to do yourself? I agree, you sound like an intolerant bully and want everything your own way.

Get on with your own job and let your colleague do his, however he wants to.

When my company moved offices the cost of removals was based on volume.

We were all given a reasonable size plastic box to fill with our stuff (which we unpacked and returned to the removal company post move).

If you needed a 2nd box you had to justify it - because each box had a charge.

Is there any way you could use the cost of moving all this "crap" to get him to reduce it?

To all of you saying "throw it away when he isn't there" etc, this man clearly has a mental illness (probably the hoarding form of OCD). He can NOT help what he is doing, and he needs proper, specialist help, not some uncaring asshole just ripping through like a tornado with a "Just deal with it" attitude.

Antagonsing someone with a mental health condition by doing something that you know will cause them significant distress, would be no different than tipping a paralysed person out of a wheel chair or taking an oxygen tank off someone with breathing difficulties. Now, would ANY of you spouting this "Just throw it away on a day he's off/on his lunch break" etc, do either of those things? Of course you wouldn't, because you know that person relies on those things because of an illness. A mental illness is often harder for people to be sympathetic of because you cannot see a physical representation like a wheelchair, oxygen tank etc, but they are just as hard to live with.

Workplace clutter makes people unproductive. Google 5's.

I'd recommend a 'red tag' approach. Place everything in a designated area and if you don't touch it or have a need for it in three months, it gets thrown.

I've had to implement this in my workplace. We had documents going back to 1994!!!

Ha, ha. This could be me. I know I'm a hoarder, but I'm now the corporate memory in my department and people expect to be able to come to me and find old documents. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to GDPR, as it will be telling me what to keep and what to throw away.

Don't let your colleague wind you up with the way he works; you're probably doing the same to him.

It's not right for one person to be keeping old papers when there isn't enough storage space (and storage space costs money), nor for their storage to impact on other people. But to go from that to saying "he obviously has MH issues", that he can't be doing the rest of his job properly, and that he must be dirty in his food disposal habits is a step too far.

It's also a first step on the slippery slope to "anyone who doesn't adhere to society's norms is mentally ill".

Ask logistics/HR to provide you with a desk that has a divider. Just high enough to see colleague's face. They are very common in open plan settings.

You keep your side neat, and he can do whatever he wishes the other side.

No encroachment of his hoard onto your side.

I feel your pain. Our manager controls the stationery cupboard with a rod of iron. No one is allowed unsupervised access. The problem is its full of old envelopes that have lost their stick, labels that don't fit our templates and lots of other junk. We are surreptitiously ditching the crap and so far she hasn't noticed. She also has a 1,000 email inbox, can't find anything but says she hasn't time to create folders to file her emails in.