Lifting The Lid

On The Workplace

Bathroom



Want to find out how your workplace & office bathroom habits compare to others and their office bathroom experiences?

Does the person who sits opposite you really take too long in the bathroom or is that normal?

Over a whopping 12,000 people were surveyed and the results are below - Which ones did you expect to see and which ones come as a surprise??

How Did We Gather These Results? As well as our customers and blog readers, we ran a Facebook ad campaign over a few weeks and months until we reached our intended 10,000 benchmark - Then, admittedly, we got so excited by the results, we forgot to turn it off 🙂 so we did go beyond our intended benchmark but........ We are now certain that the 12,400 people surveyed is a big enough pool to get an accurate insight into today's workplace bathrooms



The BIG Workplace Bathroom Survey

What star rating would you give to your workplace bathroom/toilets?

The first question out of the block was a simple one, What overall rating would you give to your workplace toilets? 12,415 people gave their opinions and you might be surprised to see while more people sit between the 3-5 Stars range than the 0-2 stars, that most people gave a 3-star rating - It's clear most employees indicate definite room for improvement in most cases





Do you avoid using the works bathroom?

Now, there is no indication of male or female on this question which would have been interesting to see if there was a difference in results

The results do show that out of the 12,343 people who answered this question - 6708 or 54.3% of people suggested they have avoided required bowel movements at work by answering they either avoid it completely or only go when absolutely desperate

Take from this what you will, Are the bathrooms in the workplace that bad? Compare these results to the star rating above and you can make your own conclusion about the reasons for avoidance, is the 'workplace poop of shame' behind all this?






How many visits a day at the workplace?

This one is self-explanatory. But we cannot help but wonder how many of your colleges are offsetting those that avoid it by having multiple visits a day

The results show that a good percentage avoid the toilets at all costs as per the previous question while those that make only 1 visitor or 2 at the most are split down the middle with those that make 4 or more visits

Total votes - 12,198





Average time taken per visit

11,854 people answered this question. I assume the drop off in numbers was due to those that do not go at all

If we take the medium amount of minutes for each, for example, if we say those that answered '5-10 minutes per visit took 7.5 minutes on each visit on average. This gives a total of 44017 minutes. (For the 15+ Minutes, I set this at 15 exact visits with 'pee and go' I set to 30 seconds)

If you divide 44017 minutes by 11,854 people, this gives an average of 3.71 minutes per visit

If we do the same for the amount of visits per day. This gives a low-end estimate of an employee spending 10 minutes on average a day in the toilet

NOTE: This average result will be offset by those that do not go at all and those that go for more than 15 minutes we counted as 15 minutes exactly



Do you go to the work toilet just to get off work?

Of the 11,835 People brave and honest souls that answered this one, it may surprise some (and maybe not some others) to find out 84.4% of people have gone for a toilet visit to avoid work. 32.3% of those surveyed do it weekly and 14.55% of workers disappear daily from their duties






Do you take your mobile phone to the toilet?

11,869 people answered this one, which is a little strange as the number of people answering questions seemingly tapers down as we start to go down the list, maybe people were keen to have it know they take their phones or are keen to say they are repulsed by it ............ let's find out 🙂

Are you surprised to hear that 88.7% of people regularly take their phone to the toilet and out of those, over 82.6% are doing non-work related activities? Wow! This figure astonished us, me especially as the toilet is my favourite place to answer client emails





Have you read all the work-related Info posters?

Ahhh, the good old strategically placed notices in the works bathroom to tell you all about the company news and health and safety, do you read them? Well, 11,798 people took the time to read this question so that's something and it helps to figure out just how worthy the endeavour of a company informing an employee while they go pee or poop can be

Well, when workers aren't on their phones, these results show that a massive 70.46% of people read most if not all of the notices inside the bathroom .... Wow! What is maybe more surprising is that, we also see 31.64% of companies do not take advantage of this which is a waste of the 'bathroom bulletin board"






Are your workplace toilets fully equipped to meet your needs?

Now we're getting back into the bathrooms themselves - Just over 11,750 people answered these questions






So it would seem most workers value having a good bathroom with 76% of people indicating a poor bathroom would be an issue and 47% of people stating they would have an issue with a bathroom that was less than average

This might be a concern when 39.45% of people have found their bathroom ill-equipped with 7.95% of people needing to bring their own toilet roll



What improvements or upgrades would you like to see in your workplace bathroom?

With the importance of a good workplace bathroom proven - Let's look at some of the area's that are commonly lacking and our survey shows are in need of improvement




This is quite revealing - Seemingly 41.18% of workers, regularly or always wish their toilets where cleaned more often ...... wow, that seems high and more than I probably might have imagined with only 26.6% being totally satisfied with how clean their workplace bathroom cleanliness























A few facts to unpick here, the first being that Only 28.3% of people totally happy with the supplies offered in their toilets

A whopping 77.15% of people want to see Eco friendly bathroom items in the workplace

Only 37.44% of people are satisified with the amount of mirrors, meaning 62.55% would like more mirrors - 9.86% are happy with no mirrors at all

While toilet seats are seeming pretty comfortable which is good news for all those bums that get to meet them





Have you found any of the following?

Here are a few questions that probably relate a little more to peoples individual behaviour rather than the toilets themselves. A few are a little to the imagination however we found some quiet surprising

Who would havve imagined that most people found unflushed urine and most people have had to leave the toilet on at least on one occasion because of the smell?

Please note - These remaining questions asked "over all your office rolls" so the answers are not just for their current office, but for the persons entire working life....

Why did we do this? Firstly, for these habits, we get the average of the persons workplace toilet experience. While we can average a persons age (starting work 18, retiring at 65 gives an average age of 41.5), what we cannot do is know how long they have been in the current office role, a person could work in a place for life or just the last week - So we asked people about their 'general experience'




























We'd like to thank all that took the survey and a big thank you to you for reading

So, there you have it - We hope you enjoyed it & enjoyed seeing the results from other people