Earlier this week the existence of a tilted toilet threatened the simple joy of a relaxed loo break.
There’s a real luxury in nipping to the office toilets for a planned poo and being able to take your time. You can check your messages, scroll through Insta, or just sit and daydream, relishing the escape from your desk for a few extra minutes.
But one company has decided to put an end to this brief respite.
The ‘Standard Toilet’ is a porcelain throne that’s angled so it becomes unbearably uncomfortable to sit on after a few minutes, thus stopping any languid hanging about when you could be in and out of the cubicle in a matter of seconds.
The company marketed the toilet as an ‘asset to a business’, arguing that by making lengthy toilet breaks uncomfortable bosses could increase the productivity of workers and no longer miss out on the estimated £4 billion they claim toilet breaks cost British businesses every year.
The concept has caused outrage online, primarily because humans have, well, human needs, and do need to pee and poo throughout the day. We’re not able to just give up our human functions to be smooth machines whose only purpose is productivity. It’s troubling to think that bosses might actually prefer us to cut down our time spent urinating or defecating just so we can get more work done or spend more time at our desks.
The idea raises important questions: Can your boss limit your toilet breaks? Could they get away with introducing a tilted toilet for the express purpose of limiting your time away from your desk? And if you’re taking the piss with your pee breaks, could you end up getting fired?
The short answer to these questions is yes.
While it’s socially considered pretty odd to time other people’s trips to the toilet, there isn’t any law that says managers can’t do it. It’s entirely up to your workplace if they feel like being nice chaps and allowing you to take breaks of any length whenever you need, or if they want to impose a strict timeframe for you to do your non-business business on business time.
Paul Holcroft, Associate Director at employment law consultancy, Croner, tells Metro.co.uk: ‘As long as an employer is allowing workers the opportunity to take their statutory rest break period (20 minutes for all adult workers who work more than six hours per day), no law prevents them from restricting any further time away from work.
‘Ultimately, an employee is there to do a job, and employers are well within their rights to discipline or even dismiss them if they feel an employee is deliberately not doing what they get paid for.’
Toilet breaks aren’t given any special legal rights over any other time away from work, such as smoking breaks or heading to the kitchen to make tea, unless you have a disability that requires reasonable adjustments specifically in the area of breaks.
Your employer doesn’t know what you’re up to in the toilets, after all. In terms of time spent away from getting work done, just sitting in the toilet and doing nothing for ten minutes is the same as going for a poo or taking a ten-minute cigarette break.
That means that it’s entirely up to your bosses whether they want to crack down on any breaks from work, whether that’s for pooing on company time or any other little retreat from the desk.
The likelihood of breaks with time-limits is affected by your workplace culture and the type of job you do. A data entry job, for example, is less likely to involve tracking of your toilet time than one in which the desk is expected to be constantly manned or genuinely urgent tasks pop up.
If a workplace has been clear about expectations around breaks and you consistently take lengthy trips with no explanation, you could indeed get fired – because that would be seen as just dossing about and avoiding work, regardless of what you’re doing in that time.
Melissa Chuttur, an employment lawyer at Slater and Gordon says: ‘If an employer feels that staff are abusing their trust and taking excessive breaks, they could technically terminate their employment on the grounds of misconduct, if there is no reasonable explanation for the need for additional breaks, like health issues or disability.’
The ramifications of taking long breaks will likely come down to your overall productivity as well as your workplace culture.
If you’re spending ages away from your desk and thus hardly getting any work done, for example, that’s more likely to be flagged as an issue than someone who’s bossing their work but happens to take 20 minutes in the loo three times a day.
In any case, you’d probably face a warning or questions about your breaks before you’re let go.
‘It’s very unlikely however that anyone would get the sack for a one-off offence, particularly if they have been employed for longer than two years or have a disability,’ Melissa explains.
‘If these extended trips to the shops, tea breaks or extra-long cigarette breaks are having a damaging effect on someone’s performance or affecting their productivity, for example, they could be put on a performance improvement plan, which again could result in them losing their job if no improvements were seen in the near future.’
Of course, sacking someone for taking ages to poo at work is an awkward conversation and could reflect badly on the workplace, which may hold employers back from taking any action.
The length of breaks and your freedom to take them comes down to trust and your relationship with your manager.
If a manager can trust that you’re taking breaks for a valid reason (whether that’s for bodily functions or giving your brain a breather), that’s a positive reflection on both the employer and the employee. A lack of trust in that area spells trouble.
If you feel like your breaks are being tracked, you might feel less freedom within your job, leading to a lack of satisfaction longterm.
Employers can restrict breaks if they want to, then, but should they? Probably not.
‘Employers may also consider imposing restrictions on toilet break allowances during the working day,’ says Paul. ‘However, they should always approach this with caution.’
At the same time, though, workers should be aware that if they’re constantly taking prolonged retreats to the toilet and thus aren’t doing their work, that can be noticed and it can lead to dismissal.
Paul adds: ‘If someone is taking obviously excessive breaks constantly, there’s an issue.
‘Dismissal should be a last resort, with employers instead seeking to find out what might be affecting the employee’s performance and working to help them improve their time management.
‘But ultimately, constant flaunting of contracted working hours will put you at risk of being fired.’
You’ll need to work out your own workplace culture to evaluate whether you can get away with having a relaxed 20-minute poo break or whether that’s something that needs to happen during your lunch hour.
There may not be an official line on breaks where you work, but you can probably guess the social norms – an hour in the loo or running out of the office every 15 minutes, for example, is likely to be noticed.
‘Employers who value productivity over having bums on seats will probably care less about an employee taking a few short extra breaks throughout the day, especially with the rise of flexible working in general,’ says Steve Arnold, CEO of absence management experts e-days.
‘Higher pressure environments might still prefer to have people at their desks or place of work in a thoroughly controlled way.
‘As a middle ground, unofficial time limits might exist as office ‘best practice’ to discourage people from abusing the system.’
So we can meet in the middle. Employees can figure out if they’re taking the piss and managers can trust their employees and focus on work done rather than time spent chained to the desk. Getting a tilted toilet isn’t a wise idea – it doesn’t make a company look particularly chill or accepting.
Plus, there’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest having breaks during the day is better for productivity and wellbeing than solidly working for nine hours without budging once.
Melissa says: ‘Exercising a degree of flexibility with employees when taking short additional breaks to have a cigarette or a cuppa, can help keep staff motivated and create a positive atmosphere, that isn’t counterproductive to the business.’
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