roductivity is one of the most important considerations for all businesses and schools.  Maximising the amount of time that is spent learning or working helps to improve efficiency and delivers better overall results.  While bathroom breaks are a necessary factor, they can take up significant amounts of time and in a large workplace have a major impact on profitability.  On average over the course of a working day, each employee loses around 15 minutes of time across three bathroom breaks.  This means that over the course of a full year, more than 60 hours of work are lost!

Reducing Bathroom Break Times

According to a recent survey by Initial, it takes an average of just under 5 minutes between a member of staff or pupil leaving their desk and returning when they take a bathroom break.  This time includes walking to and from the toilet, using the facilities, and then washing and drying their hands.

Of these actions, aside from ensuring that people have bathrooms near their working area, the only area that can be reasonably improved is in hand drying.

Conventional warm air hand dryers can be slow to operate.  They need to be activated and reach operating temperature before they will successfully dry the user’s hands, and this whole process can take between 30 seconds to a minute – or between 10% and 20% of the total time for the bathroom break.