Bathroom Campers

Over the past 8 years, myself and many of my co-workers have endured multiple lay offs and ever increasing workloads. Quality of work life has suffered drastically. We all cope in different ways. Some resort to the gym or walking. I think I have discovered how others are coping with the stress. I believe they have taken on a survivalist mentality, and have holed up in the company restrooms. I base this on my observations.

I am now 53 years old, drink coffee all morning and diet Pepsi all afternoon. The result of these three facts is that I visit the restroom often. I probably average one visit per hour. What I have noticed is that the same shoes are visible under many stalls over multiple visits. I must conclude that some of my co-workers are hiding out.


The only reason I can conceive of is that it has become their happy place at work. Nobody can stop by for a chat about their projects. The desk phone goes unanswered. If they doze off, nobody notices. They must feel it is a safe harbor in an increasingly frantic environment. It is also a place that management does not have the nerve to monitor or measure ... yet. That is until now. I submit for your consideration, a new and innovative program for performance management and corporate fund raising.


I think we can all agree that employees are not especially productive when they are in the restroom. We can use that fact as the basis for evaluating relative performance on our teams. If our staff were required to badge in and badge out of the restroom, we would receive the necessary metrics. With this information, we can Pareto chart our employees to find those who are significantly different than their peers. Who is in the top quartile of frequency and/or duration? Who is in the bottom quartile?

For fairness, we can normalize the measures by developing formulas that consider age, typical bowel habits (TBH), and urination frequency of the average person (UFAP). All new terms and acronyms added to the corporate lexicon. The wealth of data would become the basis of new performance evaluation criteria. Managers would be able to rank their team using non-performing bathroom time. It could become a better performance system that what is typically used today. Coaching would sound like this:

• Stan, I would like to see you lower your bathroom dwell time by 50% next year.
• Mary, I want you to work on holding it a little longer. We find that many of your bathroom breaks occur during the last half hour of the day. With just a little effort on your part, you could wait until you get home and raise your performance grade by one level next year.
• Wally, your non-productive bathroom time is the highest in the organization. If that continues, I am afraid that we will need to let you go.

There is also a fund raising dimension of the strategy. Today, corporate fund raiser campaigns often auction off a preferred parking space to the highest donor. This can be extended to the restroom. Imagine auctioning off a stall. The winner would own decorating, naming and exclusive use rights to their own commode. Naming could get imaginative. Paul's Stall, and Pete's Seat immediately come to mind. What better way to reward those that contribute to their community while encouraging a sense of ownership.


Any new program with a reach this far into corporate practices would require a significant level of governance. I have a possible solution. The company parking lot security people - those who boot cars that park in short term parking or reserved spaces - could take on the added role of restroom patrol.

The first order of responsibility would be to enforce ownership rights. Those in a reserved stall would be required to show ID and a title. If found using an unowned reserved stall, the perp would be sent home for the day. The second violation would be grounds for immediate dismissal.

The second order of responsibility would be to monitor duration for all stalls. Parking lot security would visit each restroom on the half hour and chalk the shoes of each stall dwellers. If they return the next half hour and see the shoe and floor chalk lines still match up, they would assume the inhabitant of the stall is having a medical problem and break in to check on them. If they find anything other than a medical problem, a ticket would be issued. Tickets would be consider disciplinary written warnings and fold into the performance management criteria.


I may be on to something here.