The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it.
As to the article overall: This is an interesting topic that is rarely discussed. I often see embarrassed bathroom patrons utilise the disabled-accessible bathroom because it is it's own room (i.e. not stall-separate, wall-separate).
I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong.
But it would be interesting if companies starting doing a "private bathroom" as a perk again, something that was popular some time around the 1980s.
> I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong.
And if hovering is an issue then clean nightly so people don't feel they need to hover and second educate. Talk about it... Lastly think about squat toilets. Easy maintenance.
People are less ashamed of such mundane things. US being a new country is not bound to the same social taboos that you see everywhere else.
Also practical reasons like, easier to see when its empty, ease of cleaning, ventilation ect.
Is a little dial connected to the lock saying "engaged/vacant" or green/red that difficult to see?
Given decent wifi coverage, that bathroom would then have better working conditions than the stylish but low productivity open office, raising lots of questions, so its not possible until after open offices are no longer trendy.
It's partly a result of how clean you expect things to be to start with: if you don't trust that seats will be clean, you won't sit, and then you'll guarantee they're not clean. If you expect them to be clean, they'll remain clean(ish).
Cheapness. A door with bigger gaps requires less maintenance. Same reason they use partial/floating walls. They're easy to remove for maintenance, easy to replace when damaged, easier to clean, etc. Public bathrooms are an unwanted expense to most building owners.
Apart from that - the ability to see if the stall is occupied without tugging on the door and perhaps causing an awkward encounter, making it more difficult to smoke or shoot up stealthily, and just simple cost/ease of installation.
The offices were usually nicer overall in the US (roomier, more recent), except for the bathrooms. Small, low quality, like 2 stalls in a 600 persons building. Usually pretty far away from work stations.
Turns out labor code enforces much higher standard for bathrooms in most Europe countries. IIRC for France: 1 stall for 10 person minimum, with a top value somewhere (maybe 10 stalls max), with adequate AC, lighting, water-saving systems, etc. There's a maximum walking distance to workspace. I believe it also now requires full-size partitions (or maybe in mixed toilets only if there's not enough room for separate). It should also now be 100% accessible in new office constructions and redevelopments. An architect friend told me those costs do add up, so the money doesn't go in fancier paint or lighting. It can also limit growth in team size if there are not enough stalls in the building.
I suppose it doesn't change in the US as a perfect "dark design": shitty bathrooms means people will use them less.
So bathrooms sum up the pros/cons of market regulation.
Also speaking of regulation, I like that the german labor code requires that all employees should have permanent access to daily light (with precise lumen values).
I used to go to night classes after working all day and would often times want to change from my business casual attire to something more comfortable. Having those types of bathrooms certainly made changing easier and more private.
I'm sure the University had various reasons for doing this, but I think the spark had come to help alleviate anxiety regarding bathroom use by non-cis persons.
It seems like that gender neutrality would allow for extra efficiency, so that the dense-pack around the perimeter of a single restroom can handle more potential guests.
I never asked about how it affects cleaning effort, though.
In any case, the original article points out specific OSHA regulations. So it doesn't really matter if there are alternate designs that could work better; you're still stuck in the traditional paradigm, as regulation always acts as a drag on innovation.
Personally, I mostly find the situation funny. I figure I've heard/smelled/been adjacent to my colleagues going to the bathroom more than any other member of my family. There's also something humanizing about seeing your VP walk out of a stall (eye contact optional) after you just smelled them commit acts most foul.
It's something that we all do. I would better understand it if only half the population were afflicted with this strange curse called the poops, while the rest of us had digestive systems that could convert all waste into urine. That's not how it is though.
Everybody poops. Within the next 48 hours, it is pretty much guaranteed that all of your coworkers (from the sheepish new hire to the disgruntled 15 year veteran) will release something foul from their back end. Males, females and everything in between included. Most of them will probably stink something awful.
Everybody poops. Let's end this strange taboo.
I imagine someone must have urination vs defecation stats. I'd like it be like 30:1 or something.
Might make for a tricky office survey.
However, some people seem to have a strong reluctance to defecate in public bathrooms, so the ratio in an office bathroom might be much higher.
It's the worst office bathroom situation I've ever encountered.
Management should be alerted to the violation ASAP so that they can take immediate corrective action, followed up by a complaint to OSHA.
[0] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...
On the other hand, http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm is the relevant document - which agrees that 2C+2U is too few.
ON a different note, I visited a dept store bathroom recently and was surprise to see, it was a hallway of individual bathrooms! Irrelevantly, they were marked Male and Female. If only one person is in it, why does it matter? The one at my house, upstairs first door on the right, is unisex.
There are also social issues, is a one stall / one urinal a single occupancy or not? Technically there's two holes.
Also you'd be surprised architecturally how many are precisely arranged such that a strategically located adjacent closet could be sacrificed to double or triple the bathroom size at a later date, if it because necessary.
(edited to add, if you assume the massively dominant cis, the labeling is to prevent office romance trysts, along the lines of joining the mile high club on a plane but without the plane)
And before anyone mentions cleanliness, my anecdotal experience (from experiences like the Starbucks) is that both men and women's toilets are dirty at about the same rate. I would love a janitor to give their observations :)
P.S.: While not what I was looking for, I was able to find this Reason article that talks about the issue: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/11/gender-neutral-bathroo...
Anecdotally, my office has about 60 employees and 8 individual bathrooms. They're fully enclosed with sinks and their own heavy closing doors. They also are all equipped with a white noise machine that's connected to the ceiling light switch. I guess we're pretty lucky to have this setup.
About two years ago, however, someone complained that all of the bathrooms were becoming "too dirty" in between weekly cleanings and it was blamed on the men. Therefore, three of the restrooms are now women only, while the remainder are unisex. It seems a bit unfair, but nobody has cared enough to complain.
Even if today nobody complains, the company might have suffer a lawsuit in the future, by a disgruntled employee.
Better to fix that now, perhaps
It took nearly three years of my complaining to finally get an End User License Agreement for our product, for example.
That is most likely a ventilation fan. The white noise is a side-effect.
It's not blather, I'm not sure where you buy wood, but if you think the wood of bathroom door even makes up 1% of the cost of building a bathroom... And 0.01% of the cost of losing an employee to something so trivial as a horrid bathroom.
Honestly, this sounds like a US-specific problem, in the UK none of the offices I've worked in have had a 'gap' in the cubicals. Nor the schools or public buildings or public toilets.
Reading these comments are comical at how a whole country can collectively do something so simple so wrong. No judgement, every country has silly quirks like that!
We proposed putting a fuzzy-logic controller into a Maytag washer. Maytag said, any controls had to come in under 75 cents including sensors and actuators, for them to make it up in pricing. We couldn't manage that back then (the processor chip was several dollars) so no deal. Because washers are a commodity from the manufacturer viewpoint.
But who buys a door which doesn't close the gap properly? That costs $1 less? In their multi-million $ buildings?
Only Americans.
Well, that explains why so many public bathroom stalls in Europe are nice, private, fully-enclosed spaces and none in America are. Thanks, OSHA /s
Surely you just clean the stall when its empty, and open the door?
It's wonderful actually.
At Facebook there was one bathroom on the second floor of building 15 with a shower as well. That was the best bathroom I found there.
It's great to have a nice bathroom and full privacy, it just makes it more comfortable.
At sales force at fifty Fremont there is a guest bathroom adjacent to the main reception on 36 that is individual and private - best restroom in that building.