Business Hygiene as a Core Strategic Theme
Hygiene. Easily one of the least sexy words in business.
It isn’t glamorous, it doesn’t get keynote slots at conferences, nor is an article about it likely to go viral (prove me wrong, universe!), but it might just be the most important concept missing from your company’s strategy themes.
“Hygiene” is generally defined as the science of health and the practice of maintaining cleanliness to preserve health and prevent the spread of disease. In the workplace, this might not seem like a big deal. As long as your workforce isn’t dying of Ebola, things are peachy, right? Well, congrats on not harbouring a viral epidemic, but it’s not that simple.
This line of thinking focuses only on physical health and ignores the many other forms of hygiene that quietly shape how people think, feel, and perform at work. Since my other writing focuses on business performance, personal excellence, and leadership, that will be the scope here too.
We don’t talk about hygiene enough because it isn’t directly tangible when it’s good. You only notice it when it’s bad. Good hygiene is the absence of resistance. Poor workplace hygiene kills productivity by bogging down forward momentum and can even make leadership efforts counterproductive.
One of the simplest, most powerful, and most overlooked ideas in business excellence is Herzberg’s Dual Factor Theory of Motivation–Hygiene.
The tl;dr version goes like this:
Things that cause dissatisfaction at work are not the same things that create motivation. Low pay, opaque policies, job insecurity, and poor working conditions can make people unhappy, but improving them only removes dissatisfaction—it doesn’t make people engaged. Real motivation comes from the work itself: meaningful challenges, clear responsibility, and opportunity for achievement, recognition, and growth. Fixing hygiene problems stops frustration; designing purposeful work creates motivation. Most importantly, motivational factors can’t overcome poor hygiene as trying to motivate people in unhygienic circumstances is wasteful and often counterproductive. Addressing poor hygiene factors is the necessary first step towards improving company performance.
If you want to go deeper, read Herzberg’s original paper, One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?, or my article on the topic, “[article title]”.
Even within the workplace alone, there are many distinct catagories of hygiene. Understanding them will help you see some of the most powerful forces working for (or against!) you in your professional ambitions, and your organisation in its pursuit of stability, progress, or outright market dominance.
Below are the major categories of workplace hygiene this series will explore:
Compensation hygiene: whether pay and benefits are fair, transparent, and predictable
Policy and process hygiene: how clear, consistent, and humane the rules of the game are
Managerial hygiene: the competence, trustworthiness, and behaviour of leaders
Job security hygiene: the degree of stability and psychological safety people feel
Environmental hygiene: the physical and digital conditions people work in
Information hygiene: how decisions, context, and expectations are communicated
Role clarity hygiene: whether people understand what is expected of them and why
In the coming weeks I will create an focused article for each of these categories. Sign up here is be notified when they are published and learn how hidden hygiene failures may already be undermining your performance, spoiling your team’s motivation, and quietly eroding business outcomes.