My house is the community that I probably spend my most time in. My roommates are some of my best friends and it comes out in how we deal with living each other. Trust is important between roommates because we share everything. From food to living in the same space, trusting that your roommates will pay bills fairly, clean up after themselves, do chores, etc. is paramount to a fun and livable situation.
So consider a kind of roommate point reputation system. We’ll have a system that keeps track of how many times a person does a good roommate task. This could range from small tasks like taking out the trash to larger tasks (i.e. grosser) like cleaning the bathroom. Different tasks could have different point values associated with each. This makes it useful to keep track of what a roommate is doing and to see if he is “pulling his weight” for the rest of the house. The reward of doing this scheme is making sure tasks are not unfairly distributed across people. One could also imagine this being a good way to reward someone who does a lot for the house by allowing them to not have to do jobs they wouldn’t want to do.
There’s a few ways this system could be manipulated. People could abuse different jobs by doing them more often than need be. Taking out the trash only really needs to happen every so often. Also other jobs may never get done and there’s no motivation to actually do other jobs. Also, depending on the implementation, there’s a trust issue on even recording what tasks were done and to what extent they were done. For example, perhaps I only swept half the kitchen floor but I mark that I did the entire task. There’s no measurement of quality on completing the task.
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I think by assigning points to roomates for every good task they completed does not provide an envriroment where people are trusting; instead,it might encourage competition between members. This is especially true if you are going to reward the member who does a lot. I do agree that definition of completing a task becuase it is subjective how clean something really is. I have the same problem livign in the house I am currently in. My roomate defines cleansliness different from me, or in another words his measurements are differnt from mine.
ReplyDeleteIf you're not too concerned about housemates going above and beyond, I've actually found that assigning chores works pretty well. Before winter break, our apartment didn't have any sort of trash schedule, and it was really a pain because everytime, everyone already felt that they had taken the trash out enough to cover their shart, and it would just pile out. After break though, I got annoyed and simply assigned every housemate to a week, and now we have no problems because someone is always personally responsible. I guess it's kind of hard to apply to other chores though - they're so varied and people's preferences are so varied that it's hard to sit down and find a good assignment that people will be willing to follow.
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