Hi, Pablo here
The ROI of toilets
Years ago I worked under the organizational umbrella of this COO. He was my boss' boss. Sometimes we bumped into each other for big meetings and presentations.
The COO had a background in finance and audit, which gave him certain management quirks that coupled in rather funny ways with the nature of our data and analytics departments. There was this specific one that was always itchy to me. At the time I was still a very junior and inexperienced professional, and my default stance on things was to humble out, shut the fuck up and listen. But I always had my opinions locked in my brain, and in cases like this one, I couldn't hold them back.
The quirk this gentleman had was to try to measure the ROI of every little thing. He would ask for the ROI of projects, the ROI of developments, the ROI of acquiring licenses, the ROI of going out for a smoke. It was an understandable quirk for a financier who had never actually built or serviced anything, but rather always looked, judged and measured from the outside. He wasn't that interested in the things themselves, but rather in measuring them in units that would fit in his Excel sheets.
I generally thought (and still think) that assessing ROI is a good thing to aim for. But intuitively, I found his obsession with it misplaced and counterproductive. I now have much better words to critique and argue against his stance, but at the time I lacked those and only had a gut feeling of "this is stupid".
One day we were in one of those meetings where he would start asking about the ROI of something while I thought to myself: "We just need this thing and it's obviously more valuable that the money it will cost, why are we having this conversation uuuugh". As I spiritually (not physically) rolled my eyes, I couldn't hold it in anymore and just shot: "What's the ROI of the office toilets?"
The COO and my boss suddenly stared at me, mouths open, eyebrows pressed down as they squinted their eyes: "What?"
"We have toilets. We have to pay for them. We could use them for desk space, but instead we put toilets. Then we have to do plumbing and stuff. We need to pay people to clean them. it's a nuisance. How can we know that they are the best use of shareholder funds? Who has measured the ROI of those toilets?". It all came out naturally out of the blue. I had a great relationship with these people, but I still was clenching my but, wondering if I had gone a bit too hard. Oh how nice it is to be young.
They chuckled and got my point. The COO stopped insisting on specific figures for the cost element we had at hand, although he didn't surrender a good old "write a business case for this so we can refer to it later", which probably was a wise thing to do.
I've faced similar situations a few times since then, and I've found myself in many others where it was up to me if and how precisely should the ROI of something be measured. I now have a much clear mental model and opinion of when it should and shouldn't be done. But that's for another day.
Nobody ever told me what was the ROI of the toilets, though. Perhaps we should remove them?