When it comes to designing and outfitting an office space, many business owners will usually think of the offices themselves, workspaces, communal areas like breakrooms, and so on, and that’s where they’ll start their planning. Of course, all these areas are important, and you wouldn’t be able to run a successful business without them, but what about the bathrooms? These can so easily be forgotten and become a real afterthought, just thrown together without much thought about design and aesthetics, but that is actually a mistake, and it makes much more sense to think about your office bathroom well ahead of time.
One of the reasons for this is that if you think about it in advance, you’ll be able to make it as high quality as possible, and that’s crucial. Read on to find out why it’s so important for your office bathroom to be good quality, and you’ll soon realize you might need to think again when it comes to your design.
Employee Wellbeing
If you have employees, you need to take care of them – you can’t just set them to work and leave it at that. When you’re a boss or a manager, you actually have a lot to do in terms of the care you need to give your teams, and making sure your employees’ wellbeing is looked after is a vital aspect of this.
Think about it this way: if your employees are feeling good and they know their well-being is in hand, they’ll be more productive because they’ll be happier and healthier. They’ll know they can handle any issue with your help, and they’ll know that they can move forward in their careers because you’re taking care of them.
What has that got to do with an office bathroom? The fact is that a clean, well-maintained, comfortable bathroom will help to create a positive work environment, and that helps to support employee wellbeing. If someone is going to be in the office for perhaps eight hours a day, five days a week (give or take – you might offer flexible or hybrid working, for example), they’re going to need to use the bathroom at some point, and if they have to walk into a horrible, dank, dark room without any high-quality components like Phenolic toilet partitions to make things better, they’re not going to feel good about their office space. They might even decide they should look for a job elsewhere because they’re not being looked after properly.
Hygiene And Health
It’s vital that every workspace and office is as hygienic as possible, and that’s even more true in a shared office with a variety of different people. The last thing you want is for the place someone works to make them sick – and for that sickness to spread. That will cause huge problems for your business because of downtime and trying to meet deadlines, and it’s a stressful situation for everyone. Not to mention the fact that if people are sick, that’s not great for morale.
Now more than ever, business owners need to ensure that offices are as clean and hygienic as possible, and a good quality bathroom will certainly help with that.
Firstly, a good quality bathroom will be easier to clean; there will be fewer nooks and crannies and much better quality elements installed, meaning that those areas that might have been missed in the past when it came to cleaning no longer will be. Plus, because everything just looks great anyway, it becomes easier for people to stay motivated and keep it clean.
On top of this a good quality bathroom won’t be missing any important elements like soap dispensers and hand dryers, for example – it will contain everything anyone could need to keep themselves clean and hygienic as well.
A well-maintained bathroom isn’t going to have any mold or mildew causing problems because it will be cleaned regularly, but it will also have proper ventilation and any maintenance issues will be dealt with quickly. In the end, investing in a high-quality bathroom for your office could mean the difference between happy and healthy employees and sick ones who can’t come to work.
Productivity And Efficiency
It might be a strange thought, but the fact is that the state of the office bathroom really can have a direct impact on how productive and efficient employees can be. If the bathroom is poorly maintained, overcrowded, outdated, low quality, and just generally an unpleasant place to be, it’s not going to make employees feel valued, and that’s not going to make them feel too motivated to do more work than they really need to – and they might not even get all the work they’re expected to do completed either.
Plus, there’s the frustration issue. If the bathroom is small and too many people have to use just one space, employees might feel rushed and stressed when they’re using the bathroom, and frustrated if they have to wait their turn. All of this leads to negative feelings and a lot less productivity in the long run.
Brand Image And Reputation
You might not think that the quality of your office bathroom really matters because it’s only you and your employees who are ever going to know about it – why spend money on updating the bathroom to be great quality and comfortable if that’s the case?
The fact is that anyone who has contact with your employees might find out about the subpar facilities that the office, and whether they’re visitors, clients, or friends and relatives of your employees, word will soon spread about how your bathrooms are awful and you’re not putting the interests of your employees first.
It might seem like a silly thing to be worried about, but the reality is that your brand image and reputation are crucial, and if it starts to become negative, people will stop buying from you, preferring to use a company that helps its employees and takes care of them. Plus, you’re likely to lose employees if they can see that your image is suffering, and that could be hugely detrimental to your business.
Jeena Alfredo is a passionate digital marketer at The Business Goals. She is working with other companies to help them manage the relationship with The Business Goals for the publications.
