What to Keep in Mind When Designing Bathrooms In Your Workplace and What Will Your Employees Appreciate the Most?
It is difficult to find many positives in the current times of home-offices from the perspective of company managers. However, if there is one, it is the opportunity to begin with the long-postponed reconstructions. The ideal place to start might be the office bathroom which will become an even more important place with the increased focus on hygienic standards in the future.
Although it may sound unimportant, the location, design and equipment of work bathrooms is an important feature influencing your employees more than you might have thought. People in the office visit the bathroom several times a day and it is often the place of unexpected encounters and small rests. Nevertheless, the focus on their design is often smaller than in the case of other common places in the workplace. What is the ideal way they should look?
From Efficiency to Interaction
There has been a shift in the way we understand the design and positioning of office toilets in recent years. A pure efficiency – to rather have a larger number of smaller bathrooms that are closer to the employees and they therefore do not spend too much time walking to them – is no longer the ideal.
On the contrary, more and more companies prefer centralised toilets which are not only easier to supply but stir up physical activity and a natural interaction between the employees which galvanizes the collective and ignites the best ideas. Those thirty seconds spent walking to or from the bathroom might be the source of an idea that the company can benefit from much more than from a couple of minutes saved on having the bathroom closer to the employees. This will become even more important in the post-covid times when employees will seek the opportunities for any social interaction even more.
Light and Scent
When it comes to the attributes of toilets in your workplace, employees will appreciate several specific qualities. The first one is light – the brighter your bathroom is, the bigger is our feeling of sanitariness. This does not apply only to the lighting but also to the use of colours in the bathroom – the lighter they are, the better (the ideal being the white colour).
Together with what the employees see in the bathroom, we should also not forget about what they can smell. Scent, just like bright colours, evokes a feeling of cleanliness. On the other hand, any unpleasant smell in the bathroom makes us more perceptive to other insufficiencies and uncleanliness we might otherwise ignore. In the times when everyone wants to be sure the common areas are hygienic and safe, this is an area which really should not be overlooked.
Anonymity and Uniqueness
An important aspect, at least subconsciously perceived by everyone, is the feeling of privacy in a bathroom. In order to achieve it, you should think about it already during the designing of the bathroom. The individual cubicles should be separated by firm partition walls reaching all the way from the floor to the ceiling. Another useful solution intensifying the feeling of privacy is music playing from the speakers in the bathroom.
A well designed and arranged bathroom is missing only one last piece – to be furnished by the ideal mix of products. Which dispensers, disinfection, soaps, toilet papers and paper towels will you choose? In this regard, the Solution Finder application might come in handy, being able to plan and order the ideal mix of hygienic products for your workplace in a matter of seconds.
