How to address the problem of careless co-workers damaging office tech?

[anchor1]

Hi,

how do you deal with co-workers that treat their work-devices carelessly? We use workstations/laptops in the office that are connected to monitors through a Thunderbolt dock, my co-workers tend to close their laptops. Having their laptop closed, some people thought it would be a good idea to store stuff (drinks, coffee, soda, food, plates, folders, books, their IP phone, and many others things) ON top of the laptop. I've seen people tape their laptop power adapters and cables onto their desks using packing tape. One time a guy cut a DP cable because he was too lazy to unplug it. I regularly have to replace various cables because people bent them too much.
Really getting tired of being ignored when trying to raise awareness of using technology sustainably..

Have you had similiar experiences at work??

 

[USAFRet]

Moved to Opinions and Experiences.

 

[faalin]

Whenever someone moves or we get a new person at work, i always setup the station. I will always ask how they would like stuff setup, but i run all the cables. I like to use these Velcro and Hold Downs when running cables. I also keep track of what is bought and charge and charge it to the department that i had to replace the part in.

I also like to pull the sorry we dont have that part in stock and will have to order it. The funniest issue i had was a sales guy came into a meeting yelling at me that his laptop would not work as he couldn't get it to turn on, kept saying how it was a piece of junk and to buy him a new one. Now i was in a meeting with all upper management, I took the laptop, grabbed my charger and plugged it in and it fired right up. I turned it off, unplugged the charger and handed it right back to him and told him to please charger your laptop.


We had another kid that had a company laptop, it was not suppose to leave the building. He ended up taking the laptop home and was having a party and left his laptop out with the lid open. He had thrown his keys on the keyboard and someone at the part slammed the lid closed. Ended up breaking the screen, keyboard and track pad. Called dell as it was still under the 3 year oops warranty, but i declined to have it warranty fixed. Since he didnt have a computer to work on, they ended up laying him off till we could send the laptop in for repair. In all i think he was off for a week and a half and when he returned his laptop was replaced with a desktop.

Before we started charging the departments and messing with their budgets i would keep track of everything that had to be replaced by careless people. I then presented it to the CFO saying look we spend X amount of dollars on just replacing miss used or abused items. Guess what, CFO's dont like spending money of stupid stuff and thats when new rules and budgets were implemented. When departments started having to put in their budgets a oops fund people started treating their things a little nicer.

 

[punkncat]

I don't work for a very big company, so prior to my coming on board there were no standards or practices in place not only for what employees were using, but also with what devices. We have a mix of Android, Apple, and PC. When I came on, I got all of the main office people on older Dell office machines using Windows 10, got them all set up with 2010 Office suite, got everyone using the same printer that uses the same supplies, fixed our cloud storage options including archiving things older than 7 years to free space.

The single biggest issue I have is people not paying attention to the option boxes when installing updates and so forth. For a while I had one user in particular set up as a 'standard' user with an Admin account that they couldn't install anything. Being that they work remotely from me I couldn't be there to install things for them, so they had the password anyway. I tried to impart to them the importance of paying attention to what you WANT to install and what the dialog WANTS to install while you install (lol). This same individual has turned on/off features we needed as a company, has mixed their personal business into ours by not paying attention to what profile they log into, and also have gotten virus. We changed the rules such that any work PC cannot be utilized for personal use at all, and alongside turning up UAC and making that individual a 'power user' it has gone quite well for the past year or so.

I think the only other really bothersome aspect we got so used to because the errors in each particular person's way of naming files is a tell.

 

[kanewolf]

Hi,

how do you deal with co-workers that treat their work-devices carelessly? We use workstations/laptops in the office that are connected to monitors through a Thunderbolt dock, my co-workers tend to close their laptops. Having their laptop closed, some people thought it would be a good idea to store stuff (drinks, coffee, soda, food, plates, folders, books, their IP phone, and many others things) ON top of the laptop. I've seen people tape their laptop power adapters and cables onto their desks using packing tape. One time a guy cut a DP cable because he was too lazy to unplug it. I regularly have to replace various cables because people bent them too much.
Really getting tired of being ignored when trying to raise awareness of using technology sustainably..

Have you had similiar experiences at work??

Is this your problem, because you are an IT manager or the owner of a small company? If so, then you have the power to act. As an IT manager, you could force the employee's manager to take responsibility for example before you issue replacement equipment. As an owner you have absolute power to have a policy that damaged company equipment will be grounds for termination.
If this is just a curiosity about a peer, then you can bring the issue to your management or the problematic employee's management. That ends your responsibility.

 

[TerryLaze]

some people thought it would be a good idea to store stuff (drinks, coffee, soda, food, plates, folders, books, their IP phone, and many others things) ON top of the laptop. I've seen people tape their laptop power adapters and cables onto their desks using packing tape. One time a guy cut a DP cable because he was too lazy to unplug it. I regularly have to replace various cables because people bent them too much.

Hey, these people are what keeps you employed, if there were no need for that then the boss person would hire a 3rd party contractor to come by once a month or once a week or whenever to do the actual server maintenance and you would be out of work.