5 ms·

The Office of the Future Will Still Have a Terrible Bathroom

37 points by mxhold 11y ago

Someone1234 11y ago
> it's unease around the gap between the door and the partition Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it. As to the article overall: This is an interesting topic that is rarely discussed. I often see embarrassed bathroom patrons utilise the disabled-accessible bathroom because it is it's own room (i.e. not stall-separate, wall-separate). I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong. But it would be interesting if companies starting doing a "private bathroom" as a perk again, something that was popular some time around the 1980s.
- mc32 11y ago
  Just make them all unisex. What's wrong with unisex bathrooms, so long as they have partitions and not troughs or heads out in the open and have the urinals sectioned off at one end.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    I answered this in my post... > I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong.
    - mc32 11y ago
      If the stalls are cleaned out nightly I don't see there being a cleanliness issue. People with gastric issues can cause nastier environs irrespective of sex or gender. And if hovering is an issue then clean nightly so people don't feel they need to hover and second educate. Talk about it... Lastly think about squat toilets. Easy maintenance.
- dominotw 11y ago
  >Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it. People are less ashamed of such mundane things. US being a new country is not bound to the same social taboos that you see everywhere else. Also practical reasons like, easier to see when its empty, ease of cleaning, ventilation ect.
  - elthran 11y ago
    > easier to see when its empty Is a little dial connected to the lock saying "engaged/vacant" or green/red that difficult to see?
    - peterwwillis 11y ago
      We don't have those on American bathroom stalls, but it would be useful.
- VLM 11y ago
  "But it would be interesting if companies starting doing a "private bathroom" as a perk again" Given decent wifi coverage, that bathroom would then have better working conditions than the stylish but low productivity open office, raising lots of questions, so its not possible until after open offices are no longer trendy.
- nzmsv 11y ago
  ArtLebedev in Moscow did have "designer" single bathrooms as a perk: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/toilets/ http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/toilets/
- kaitai 11y ago
  In the US most women feel men's bathrooms are nastier, and refuse to use them in general. Hovering & "seatpissing" is highly regional; almost none in the midwest of the US, while much higher (70% of seats?) in some parts of Europe (I am afraid in my experience Portugal is worst). Can't remember but the coasts are worse than the Midwest in the US and regions in California also differ. It's partly a result of how clean you expect things to be to start with: if you don't trust that seats will be clean, you won't sit, and then you'll guarantee they're not clean. If you expect them to be clean, they'll remain clean(ish).
- jsz0 11y ago
  > Why is this a thing in the US? Cheapness. A door with bigger gaps requires less maintenance. Same reason they use partial/floating walls. They're easy to remove for maintenance, easy to replace when damaged, easier to clean, etc. Public bathrooms are an unwanted expense to most building owners.
- scurvy 11y ago
  Oh if only US restrooms were like those in Japan. Even run of the mill ones in Japan are great.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    I'm just glad they're not like some French bathrooms. Essentially a drain hole in the floor. Try to hit it.
- paulmd 11y ago
  Building/fire codes are a big factor. When you have enclosed spaces with doors that shut tightly then a variety of regulations come into play, whereas with a loosely-fitting partition with a gap underneath they do not. If push came to shove you could kick most partitions and they would have enough flex to pop the door open, or you could crawl out on the floor. Apart from that - the ability to see if the stall is occupied without tugging on the door and perhaps causing an awkward encounter, making it more difficult to smoke or shoot up stealthily, and just simple cost/ease of installation.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Everything about the stall door was irrelevant. They are made so cheap and with such gaps because, they are cheaper that way. They won't go down to the floor because, that would be 12" more material cost. They won't ever fit closely because, they sag and bend because they're cheaply installed. All the blather about how they could be different is ignoring the cost factor, which would be large. ON a different note, I visited a dept store bathroom recently and was surprise to see, it was a hallway of individual bathrooms! Irrelevantly, they were marked Male and Female. If only one person is in it, why does it matter? The one at my house, upstairs first door on the right, is unisex.
- lobotryas 11y ago
  I never understood when a place has two single occupancy bathrooms with one marked Men and the other Women. Maybe there's a law that requires this in some places or are they just catering to social expectations?
  - VLM 11y ago
    Womens rooms have sanitary napkin dispensers etc. In the old sexist days only womens rooms had a baby changing table. There are also social issues, is a one stall / one urinal a single occupancy or not? Technically there's two holes. Also you'd be surprised architecturally how many are precisely arranged such that a strategically located adjacent closet could be sacrificed to double or triple the bathroom size at a later date, if it because necessary. (edited to add, if you assume the massively dominant cis, the labeling is to prevent office romance trysts, along the lines of joining the mile high club on a plane but without the plane)
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Those dispensers cost ~$10. Cheap to have them in every bathroom. The guys are not going to have a conniption fit if they see them. So there's no longer a good reason to mark individual bathrooms as far as I can see.
    - peterwwillis 11y ago
lobotryas 11y ago
I'm surprised to hear that people have found the bathroom going experience so suboptimal, but I can understand where they are coming from. The vertical gap between door and frame is sometimes more than a finger wide! Personally, I mostly find the situation funny. I figure I've heard/smelled/been adjacent to my colleagues going to the bathroom more than any other member of my family. There's also something humanizing about seeing your VP walk out of a stall (eye contact optional) after you just smelled them commit acts most foul.
- noxToken 11y ago
  The vertical gap issue has always been weird to me, but I don't understand the issue with going to the bathroom in general. It's something that we all do. I would better understand it if only half the population were afflicted with this strange curse called the poops, while the rest of us had digestive systems that could convert all waste into urine. That's not how it is though. Everybody poops. Within the next 48 hours, it is pretty much guaranteed that all of your coworkers (from the sheepish new hire to the disgruntled 15 year veteran) will release something foul from their back end. Males, females and everything in between included. Most of them will probably stink something awful. Everybody poops. Let's end this strange taboo.
turar 11y ago
Gender inequity in tech has one downside if you are a male -- lack of bathrooms. If there is one male and one female bathroom on the floor, and male-to-female gender ratio is 5:1, then you're gonna have a bad time. :)
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  Plenty of downsides of gender inequality in tech for dudes beyond just that.
- voidlogic 11y ago
  Men cycle through a bathroom much faster than women when urinating (ever been to a sports event?). I imagine someone must have urination vs defecation stats. I'd like it be like 30:1 or something.
  - untog 11y ago
    > I imagine someone must have urination vs defecation stats. Might make for a tricky office survey.
    - Thrymr 11y ago
      Luckily, the wired bathroom of the future will gather these stats for us!
  - teuobk 11y ago
    It's more like 6:1, though I don't have a good citation handy. However, some people seem to have a strong reluctance to defecate in public bathrooms, so the ratio in an office bathroom might be much higher.
    - voidlogic 11y ago
      Right, I was speculating about public restrooms specifically.
gadders 11y ago
I have always wondered why US toilet cubicles are so "gappy". In most of the UK offices I have ever worked in, in the cubicle the toilet door is floor to ceiling and closes completely - like being in your own mini-room with a toilet in.
ryandrake 11y ago
If the bathroom environment is really the worst thing about your workplace, you're doing alright.
zimpenfish 11y ago
We have two (2) cubicles and two (2) urinals for probably 200 males. One cubicle currently has a broken seat and the other is frequently (at least once a week) blocked with toilet paper and filth (properly splattered all over, of course). It's the worst office bathroom situation I've ever encountered.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  That is grossly out of code [0]. With only two urinals, there should be a minimum of six full toilets. Management should be alerted to the violation ASAP so that they can take immediate corrective action, followed up by a complaint to OSHA. [0] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=STANDARDS&p_id=9790 https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...
  - singron 11y ago
    Our office has the same issue. The problem is, the code only talks about number of employees but not proportional allocation between genders. It's possible that they have 200 men but less than 230 employees. This means they need 8 waterclosets, but naturally the builders made 4 for women and 4 for men. It's up to code, but don't expect to always be able to use the bathroom at work.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      The table is per sex. So, if you have 100 females, you need at least 5 water closets available to females.
  - zimpenfish 11y ago
    Sadly OSHA has no jurisdiction over the UK. On the other hand, http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm is the relevant document - which agrees that 2C+2U is too few.
ssharp 11y ago
The University I used to work for had started the practice of building several small one-person bathrooms next to one another, so the would be a block of three or four bathrooms by each other. I found this to a nice setup but I'm sure this would cost far more than a men's bathroom with toilet stall, urinal and sink and a women's bathroom with two stalls and a sink. I used to go to night classes after working all day and would often times want to change from my business casual attire to something more comfortable. Having those types of bathrooms certainly made changing easier and more private. I'm sure the University had various reasons for doing this, but I think the spark had come to help alleviate anxiety regarding bathroom use by non-cis persons.
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  At a resort I've been to a few times, the nightclub area had a cool design. It was a largish round room with sink in the middle. The perimeter was individual tiny rooms with just a toilet. These were all gender-neutral, I guess that's OK because they were actual rooms, having walls and doors. It seems like that gender neutrality would allow for extra efficiency, so that the dense-pack around the perimeter of a single restroom can handle more potential guests. I never asked about how it affects cleaning effort, though. In any case, the original article points out specific OSHA regulations. So it doesn't really matter if there are alternate designs that could work better; you're still stuck in the traditional paradigm, as regulation always acts as a drag on innovation.
zeveb 11y ago
> OSHA rules require that workplace bathrooms remain clean and dry and a mop can slide right under partitions. Well, that explains why so many public bathroom stalls in Europe are nice, private, fully-enclosed spaces and none in America are. Thanks, OSHA /s
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  With the downside that cleaning them is a bit more difficult (and expensive), since you have to pay more attention to the (lower) end of the partitions, as a cleaner. More effort, or possibly even another OSHA violation because the cleaners would have to bend more (but I'm sure they can use a mop on the sides too, or something). There's also the matter of time spent cleaning.
- elthran 11y ago
  Yeah - why on earth do you need the mop/partition regulation? Surely you just clean the stall when its empty, and open the door?
brentm 11y ago
I spent some time last year working out a We Work office in NY and I will say one of the best things they did was create nice private bathrooms. Each stall was a small private room in itself, similar to some airport lounges.
settsu 11y ago
Are so many adults that insecure and self-centered that they think everyone is focused on their bathroom activities? I'm certainly not paying that close attention. That said, I flush for noise and smell out of courtesy but not because I'm ashamed of something that I largely can't control.
pi-err 11y ago
I remember having been immediately struck by differences in office bathrooms between California and UK/France/Germany (where I worked). The offices were usually nicer overall in the US (roomier, more recent), except for the bathrooms. Small, low quality, like 2 stalls in a 600 persons building. Usually pretty far away from work stations. Turns out labor code enforces much higher standard for bathrooms in most Europe countries. IIRC for France: 1 stall for 10 person minimum, with a top value somewhere (maybe 10 stalls max), with adequate AC, lighting, water-saving systems, etc. There's a maximum walking distance to workspace. I believe it also now requires full-size partitions (or maybe in mixed toilets only if there's not enough room for separate). It should also now be 100% accessible in new office constructions and redevelopments. An architect friend told me those costs do add up, so the money doesn't go in fancier paint or lighting. It can also limit growth in team size if there are not enough stalls in the building. I suppose it doesn't change in the US as a perfect "dark design": shitty bathrooms means people will use them less. So bathrooms sum up the pros/cons of market regulation. Also speaking of regulation, I like that the german labor code requires that all employees should have permanent access to daily light (with precise lumen values).
- scurvy 11y ago
  I work at a company whose office gets a fair amount of press for being cool and "stylish." What you don't see in the press is the half of the office whose only natural light is a 1 sq ft porthole in the corner. It's a dark, depressing work environment that shouldn't be legal. The other half of the building is "open" and "stylish." I seriously wish we had those German laws to prevent situations like this.
samstave 11y ago
At my current work, we have a completely separate bathroom with a shower - in addition to "normal" bathrooms with a urinal and a stall toilet. It's wonderful actually. At Facebook there was one bathroom on the second floor of building 15 with a shower as well. That was the best bathroom I found there. It's great to have a nice bathroom and full privacy, it just makes it more comfortable. At sales force at fifty Fremont there is a guest bathroom adjacent to the main reception on 36 that is individual and private - best restroom in that building.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mixmastamyk 11y ago
I'm reminded of a gym I frequent, with blasting music out on the weightroom floor. Of course it is pin-drop quiet in the toilet area. :/
scurvy 11y ago
Another tip: get rid of those stupid Dyson hand dryers. They're unsanitary and don't work.
- dominotw 11y ago
  hate those so much.

37 points by mxhold 11y ago

> it's unease around the gap between the door and the partition Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it. As to the article overall: This is an interesting topic that is rarely discussed. I often see embarrassed bathroom patrons utilise the disabled-accessible bathroom because it is it's own room (i.e. not stall-separate, wall-separate). I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong. But it would be interesting if companies starting doing a "private bathroom" as a perk again, something that was popular some time around the 1980s.

mc32 11y ago
Just make them all unisex. What's wrong with unisex bathrooms, so long as they have partitions and not troughs or heads out in the open and have the urinals sectioned off at one end.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  I answered this in my post... > I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong.
  - mc32 11y ago
    If the stalls are cleaned out nightly I don't see there being a cleanliness issue. People with gastric issues can cause nastier environs irrespective of sex or gender. And if hovering is an issue then clean nightly so people don't feel they need to hover and second educate. Talk about it... Lastly think about squat toilets. Easy maintenance.
dominotw 11y ago
>Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it. People are less ashamed of such mundane things. US being a new country is not bound to the same social taboos that you see everywhere else. Also practical reasons like, easier to see when its empty, ease of cleaning, ventilation ect.
- elthran 11y ago
  > easier to see when its empty Is a little dial connected to the lock saying "engaged/vacant" or green/red that difficult to see?
  - peterwwillis 11y ago
    We don't have those on American bathroom stalls, but it would be useful.
VLM 11y ago
"But it would be interesting if companies starting doing a "private bathroom" as a perk again" Given decent wifi coverage, that bathroom would then have better working conditions than the stylish but low productivity open office, raising lots of questions, so its not possible until after open offices are no longer trendy.
nzmsv 11y ago
ArtLebedev in Moscow did have "designer" single bathrooms as a perk: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/toilets/ http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/toilets/
kaitai 11y ago
In the US most women feel men's bathrooms are nastier, and refuse to use them in general. Hovering & "seatpissing" is highly regional; almost none in the midwest of the US, while much higher (70% of seats?) in some parts of Europe (I am afraid in my experience Portugal is worst). Can't remember but the coasts are worse than the Midwest in the US and regions in California also differ. It's partly a result of how clean you expect things to be to start with: if you don't trust that seats will be clean, you won't sit, and then you'll guarantee they're not clean. If you expect them to be clean, they'll remain clean(ish).
jsz0 11y ago
> Why is this a thing in the US? Cheapness. A door with bigger gaps requires less maintenance. Same reason they use partial/floating walls. They're easy to remove for maintenance, easy to replace when damaged, easier to clean, etc. Public bathrooms are an unwanted expense to most building owners.
scurvy 11y ago
Oh if only US restrooms were like those in Japan. Even run of the mill ones in Japan are great.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I'm just glad they're not like some French bathrooms. Essentially a drain hole in the floor. Try to hit it.
paulmd 11y ago
Building/fire codes are a big factor. When you have enclosed spaces with doors that shut tightly then a variety of regulations come into play, whereas with a loosely-fitting partition with a gap underneath they do not. If push came to shove you could kick most partitions and they would have enough flex to pop the door open, or you could crawl out on the floor. Apart from that - the ability to see if the stall is occupied without tugging on the door and perhaps causing an awkward encounter, making it more difficult to smoke or shoot up stealthily, and just simple cost/ease of installation.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Everything about the stall door was irrelevant. They are made so cheap and with such gaps because, they are cheaper that way. They won't go down to the floor because, that would be 12" more material cost. They won't ever fit closely because, they sag and bend because they're cheaply installed. All the blather about how they could be different is ignoring the cost factor, which would be large. ON a different note, I visited a dept store bathroom recently and was surprise to see, it was a hallway of individual bathrooms! Irrelevantly, they were marked Male and Female. If only one person is in it, why does it matter? The one at my house, upstairs first door on the right, is unisex.

lobotryas 11y ago
I never understood when a place has two single occupancy bathrooms with one marked Men and the other Women. Maybe there's a law that requires this in some places or are they just catering to social expectations?
- VLM 11y ago
  Womens rooms have sanitary napkin dispensers etc. In the old sexist days only womens rooms had a baby changing table. There are also social issues, is a one stall / one urinal a single occupancy or not? Technically there's two holes. Also you'd be surprised architecturally how many are precisely arranged such that a strategically located adjacent closet could be sacrificed to double or triple the bathroom size at a later date, if it because necessary. (edited to add, if you assume the massively dominant cis, the labeling is to prevent office romance trysts, along the lines of joining the mile high club on a plane but without the plane)
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Those dispensers cost ~$10. Cheap to have them in every bathroom. The guys are not going to have a conniption fit if they see them. So there's no longer a good reason to mark individual bathrooms as far as I can see.
  - peterwwillis 11y ago

lobotryas 11y ago

I'm surprised to hear that people have found the bathroom going experience so suboptimal, but I can understand where they are coming from. The vertical gap between door and frame is sometimes more than a finger wide! Personally, I mostly find the situation funny. I figure I've heard/smelled/been adjacent to my colleagues going to the bathroom more than any other member of my family. There's also something humanizing about seeing your VP walk out of a stall (eye contact optional) after you just smelled them commit acts most foul.

noxToken 11y ago
The vertical gap issue has always been weird to me, but I don't understand the issue with going to the bathroom in general. It's something that we all do. I would better understand it if only half the population were afflicted with this strange curse called the poops, while the rest of us had digestive systems that could convert all waste into urine. That's not how it is though. Everybody poops. Within the next 48 hours, it is pretty much guaranteed that all of your coworkers (from the sheepish new hire to the disgruntled 15 year veteran) will release something foul from their back end. Males, females and everything in between included. Most of them will probably stink something awful. Everybody poops. Let's end this strange taboo.

turar 11y ago

Gender inequity in tech has one downside if you are a male -- lack of bathrooms. If there is one male and one female bathroom on the floor, and male-to-female gender ratio is 5:1, then you're gonna have a bad time. :)

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
Plenty of downsides of gender inequality in tech for dudes beyond just that.
voidlogic 11y ago
Men cycle through a bathroom much faster than women when urinating (ever been to a sports event?). I imagine someone must have urination vs defecation stats. I'd like it be like 30:1 or something.
- untog 11y ago
  > I imagine someone must have urination vs defecation stats. Might make for a tricky office survey.
  - Thrymr 11y ago
    Luckily, the wired bathroom of the future will gather these stats for us!
- teuobk 11y ago
  It's more like 6:1, though I don't have a good citation handy. However, some people seem to have a strong reluctance to defecate in public bathrooms, so the ratio in an office bathroom might be much higher.
  - voidlogic 11y ago
    Right, I was speculating about public restrooms specifically.

gadders 11y ago

I have always wondered why US toilet cubicles are so "gappy". In most of the UK offices I have ever worked in, in the cubicle the toilet door is floor to ceiling and closes completely - like being in your own mini-room with a toilet in.

ryandrake 11y ago

If the bathroom environment is really the worst thing about your workplace, you're doing alright.

zimpenfish 11y ago

We have two (2) cubicles and two (2) urinals for probably 200 males. One cubicle currently has a broken seat and the other is frequently (at least once a week) blocked with toilet paper and filth (properly splattered all over, of course). It's the worst office bathroom situation I've ever encountered.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jsprogrammer 11y ago
That is grossly out of code [0]. With only two urinals, there should be a minimum of six full toilets. Management should be alerted to the violation ASAP so that they can take immediate corrective action, followed up by a complaint to OSHA. [0] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=STANDARDS&p_id=9790 https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...
- singron 11y ago
  Our office has the same issue. The problem is, the code only talks about number of employees but not proportional allocation between genders. It's possible that they have 200 men but less than 230 employees. This means they need 8 waterclosets, but naturally the builders made 4 for women and 4 for men. It's up to code, but don't expect to always be able to use the bathroom at work.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    The table is per sex. So, if you have 100 females, you need at least 5 water closets available to females.
- zimpenfish 11y ago
  Sadly OSHA has no jurisdiction over the UK. On the other hand, http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm is the relevant document - which agrees that 2C+2U is too few.

ssharp 11y ago

The University I used to work for had started the practice of building several small one-person bathrooms next to one another, so the would be a block of three or four bathrooms by each other. I found this to a nice setup but I'm sure this would cost far more than a men's bathroom with toilet stall, urinal and sink and a women's bathroom with two stalls and a sink. I used to go to night classes after working all day and would often times want to change from my business casual attire to something more comfortable. Having those types of bathrooms certainly made changing easier and more private. I'm sure the University had various reasons for doing this, but I think the spark had come to help alleviate anxiety regarding bathroom use by non-cis persons.

CWuestefeld 11y ago
At a resort I've been to a few times, the nightclub area had a cool design. It was a largish round room with sink in the middle. The perimeter was individual tiny rooms with just a toilet. These were all gender-neutral, I guess that's OK because they were actual rooms, having walls and doors. It seems like that gender neutrality would allow for extra efficiency, so that the dense-pack around the perimeter of a single restroom can handle more potential guests. I never asked about how it affects cleaning effort, though. In any case, the original article points out specific OSHA regulations. So it doesn't really matter if there are alternate designs that could work better; you're still stuck in the traditional paradigm, as regulation always acts as a drag on innovation.

zeveb 11y ago

> OSHA rules require that workplace bathrooms remain clean and dry and a mop can slide right under partitions. Well, that explains why so many public bathroom stalls in Europe are nice, private, fully-enclosed spaces and none in America are. Thanks, OSHA /s

Cthulhu_ 11y ago
With the downside that cleaning them is a bit more difficult (and expensive), since you have to pay more attention to the (lower) end of the partitions, as a cleaner. More effort, or possibly even another OSHA violation because the cleaners would have to bend more (but I'm sure they can use a mop on the sides too, or something). There's also the matter of time spent cleaning.
elthran 11y ago
Yeah - why on earth do you need the mop/partition regulation? Surely you just clean the stall when its empty, and open the door?

brentm 11y ago

I spent some time last year working out a We Work office in NY and I will say one of the best things they did was create nice private bathrooms. Each stall was a small private room in itself, similar to some airport lounges.

settsu 11y ago

Are so many adults that insecure and self-centered that they think everyone is focused on their bathroom activities? I'm certainly not paying that close attention. That said, I flush for noise and smell out of courtesy but not because I'm ashamed of something that I largely can't control.

pi-err 11y ago

I remember having been immediately struck by differences in office bathrooms between California and UK/France/Germany (where I worked). The offices were usually nicer overall in the US (roomier, more recent), except for the bathrooms. Small, low quality, like 2 stalls in a 600 persons building. Usually pretty far away from work stations. Turns out labor code enforces much higher standard for bathrooms in most Europe countries. IIRC for France: 1 stall for 10 person minimum, with a top value somewhere (maybe 10 stalls max), with adequate AC, lighting, water-saving systems, etc. There's a maximum walking distance to workspace. I believe it also now requires full-size partitions (or maybe in mixed toilets only if there's not enough room for separate). It should also now be 100% accessible in new office constructions and redevelopments. An architect friend told me those costs do add up, so the money doesn't go in fancier paint or lighting. It can also limit growth in team size if there are not enough stalls in the building. I suppose it doesn't change in the US as a perfect "dark design": shitty bathrooms means people will use them less. So bathrooms sum up the pros/cons of market regulation. Also speaking of regulation, I like that the german labor code requires that all employees should have permanent access to daily light (with precise lumen values).

scurvy 11y ago
I work at a company whose office gets a fair amount of press for being cool and "stylish." What you don't see in the press is the half of the office whose only natural light is a 1 sq ft porthole in the corner. It's a dark, depressing work environment that shouldn't be legal. The other half of the building is "open" and "stylish." I seriously wish we had those German laws to prevent situations like this.

samstave 11y ago

At my current work, we have a completely separate bathroom with a shower - in addition to "normal" bathrooms with a urinal and a stall toilet. It's wonderful actually. At Facebook there was one bathroom on the second floor of building 15 with a shower as well. That was the best bathroom I found there. It's great to have a nice bathroom and full privacy, it just makes it more comfortable. At sales force at fifty Fremont there is a guest bathroom adjacent to the main reception on 36 that is individual and private - best restroom in that building.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mixmastamyk 11y ago

I'm reminded of a gym I frequent, with blasting music out on the weightroom floor. Of course it is pin-drop quiet in the toilet area. :/

scurvy 11y ago

Another tip: get rid of those stupid Dyson hand dryers. They're unsanitary and don't work.

dominotw 11y ago
hate those so much.