Toilet Tales

 




With the end of ‘Working from Home’ announced, I reckon it will mark the return of one of the biggest hidden sources of work-based stress – staff toilets.

Homeworkers have had months, sometimes years, being able to go when they want, in the comfort of their own surroundings. And now they’ll have to readjust to fitting in with the patterns of their management and colleagues in an alien environment.

There are three main Toilet problems: engineering, intrapersonal and managerial.

Engineering: Architects and engineers always underestimate the demands of the great British public. Think of the magnificent art galleries and museums you’ve visited. The toilets never match up. They used to be just scruffy and inadequate, but since the millennium they’ve been ‘cool’ and inadequate (e.g. wash basins shaped like a clam shell that spray water all over you as soon as you trigger the high powered faucet).

HMRC used to have a large estate made up of a hodgepodge of buildings, built in different eras for different purposes. Visiting another HMRC office was always a voyage of discovery (thanks to the Building Our Future programme of office closures, many of these properties will now be on offer to the lucky private sector). You always knew you were in for a treat if you walked into a toilet with three small windows set high into the ceiling and a collection of air fresheners on a ledge with a hand-written note saying, “PLEASE USE!!!”

Ventilation, and trying to squeeze too many cubicles into too small a space, are the biggest toilet design problems. When it comes to engineering there are only two problems: flushing and refilling. You’d think they’d be pretty high on the list when constructing a toilet but judging by the frequency we had to call a maintenance man out, maybe not. Obviously, all the Facilities Management was outsourced to a private company, so we couldn’t actually call the odd-job man ourselves. We had to go through a call centre and do some haggling, estimating the number of staff impacted by the out-of-service toilet. The call centre would then give us a priority rating, and an estimate of when the engineer would respond (he usually turned up the same day, but the call centre always built in a bit of slack, which added to the tension).

The same applied to the cleaners. They were all outsourced to provide an agreed standard of cleaning. So, when they came across a toilet that had been left in an inhumane state, they would find one of the HMRC line managers and get them to have a look at the offence. The line manager would then phone the FM company. Presumably they would then haggle and extra fee with whichever firm the cleaning was outsourced too that week, because half an hour later you’d see the cleaner grimly pulling on air pair of heavy-duty rubber gloves. 

Intrapersonal: As the above paragraph shows, people have different standards. Sometimes, when I’ve been called into a toilet by a cleaner, my poor widdle brain has been stunned trying to imagine the physical position people would have to get into to produce such a mess. Some colleagues argued that it was done on purpose as a protest against management. I could never quite believe that, although a couple of years ago, I heard that someone at one of the big city offices had made their protest unambiguous, by leaving it on an office desk (again the mind boggles. Was it a solo act or did they have someone keep watch on the office door?) 

But, on a more general level, there’s just the understated preferences, bubbling under the surface. Again, relating to ventilation and refilling-times, staff anticipated Covid procedures by decades developing unspoken “one-in, one-out” standards with built-in “clearing-times.” 

Managerial: These antics all take time out of the working day. For decades, toilet problems have been raised by staff in team meetings (“can’t you get them to DO something about the toilets”) or for more delicate issues, the “quiet-little-word”.  But managers are expected to monitor and account for everything that takes staff away from their “core activity.” I never personally measured anyone’s toilet times, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that shows up on the list of “metrics” in future.

What’s exasperating is that so many of these problems start with poor design but no-one ever seems to learn. I’m sure this isn’t just a Civil Service problem. From visiting trader’s premises, I’ve seen a wide range of toilets ranging from the luxurious to the prehistoric. It’s just amazing that in modern Britain, there’s one function which puts us all on the same level regardless of employer status or pay grade and we can’t get it right.


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