We recently had to investigate a bullying claim, with a twist.
The claim was brought by a number of greenkeepers against the Head Greenkeeper, and the thing that made it all come to a head?
Turns out the Head Greenkeeper had taken the door off their one standalone toilet and insisted on holding team meetings – whilst he was sitting on the loo!
It had taken months for the greenkeepers to tell anyone outside of the team about this.
Months!
Clearly, this was behaviour that needed addressing, but it also highlights a hygiene factor (pardon the pun) that all employers should be checking on a regular basis:
- Is the toilet regularly cleaned?
- Is there a door on the cubicles?
- Do the locks work?
- Is there a sanitary bin?
- Is it regularly emptied? And not only on request.
A “walk-through” inspection should be enough to check whether these things are in place.
And this isn’t the only toileting tale I’ve heard of recently – a town council has recently lost a tribunal case at appeal.
They’d offered shared toilet facilities for men and women, but everyone had to walk past the urinal to get to the cubicle.
The way to make sure that the women didn’t have to do this? Put a sign on the door that said “busy”!
This sign kept not being used or falling off the door.
At no point does anyone seem to have thought that it would be better to just fit a lock to the outer door, so whoever was in there, including men at the urinal, would have their privacy.
The council also failed to arrange to empty the sanitary bin, and only did so when asked.
The tribunal held that they had discriminated on the basis of sex against the female workers.
The mind boggles that this stuff wasn’t done, but even more so when you consider that rather than addressing the complaints at the time and simply fitting a lock on the toilet door, this council thought that it would be easier and cheaper to go to an Employment Tribunal.
And not only that, but to appeal once they’d lost the first time.
We don’t currently know the award, but the council’s legal fees will be many tens of thousands of pounds.
A lock? About £5.
