With the proliferation of remote work and hybrid arrangements, the comforts of home are more accessible than ever for knowledge workers during the workday.
You can do laundry or make coffee while taking in a team meeting. You can play music as loud as you want during your focused time, kick up your feet and even wear sweatpants.
At home, you can also go to the restroom with relative privacy and peace.
Even if you share a bathroom with a roommate, messy spouse or rambunctious kids, it’s usually much more comfortable than the one that you share with your coworkers, most of whom, even though you don’t know them well, can storm in at any time.
Office bathrooms have not been known for being inviting or nice.
“It was kind of a space that you didn’t really put money into,” Melissa Strickland, principal and managing director of the New Jersey office at the architecture firm HLW, told Newsweek. “You did what you needed to do. After COVID, people have noticed that their employees care more about that.”
Employers and building owners are increasingly aware of the evolving bathroom tastes of office workers, who now have the option of staying at home in many cases.
“Employees that have a poor bathroom experience are more likely to not want to come in,” Strickland said. “[A good one] will not necessarily bring them in, but [a bad one] will make them hesitant.”
It may not be on top of the HR list of priorities, but people thinking about office attendance and employee engagement should consider that the bathroom is part of the employee experience. If people believe the human processes facilitated by bathrooms can be completed more comfortably at home, they may opt to do so.
“I’ve worked on 400,000-square-foot projects, and I’ve worked on 20,000-square-foot projects, and we’ll do studies of all these big design features,” Strickland said. “But the number one thing that people always want to do some kind of study on or in-depth discussion on is the bathrooms.”
On a recent project, Samantha McCormack, managing executive at TPG Architecture, shared that she and her team were remodeling a single floor for a client, going through 40 different iterations.
“A lot of the changes on those floor studies were how the restrooms were getting laid out,” she told Newsweek.
The client ended up building restrooms with individual toilet rooms, a feature that was more common in Europe before gaining popularity stateside, multiple people interviewed for this story told Newsweek.
“This was a lot of money,” McCormack shared. “Even the finishing that they put in there, they wanted it to feel like a boutique, elevated experience. It was something that was really important to them. They didn’t want the experience that we had designed for the whole office to fall short in the bathrooms.”
Think “Bathroom Selfie”
The push for nicer restrooms at work aligns with the broader movement for the office to adopt a style more akin to a hotel, library or other hospitality environment compared to the drab motif of the past.
“My marker of a good restaurant is, How nice is the bathroom?” Colin DaPonte, senior designer from the firm Spectorgroup, told Newsweek.
“How people feel about the restrooms impacts the whole experience,” Janet Pogue McLaurin, chief director of workplace research at the design firm Gensler, told Newsweek. “We see it not only in the office but also in airports. It’s kind of the calling card for a restaurant. Is it clean? Do they take pride in detail?”
Bethanne Mikkelsen, senior principal at the firm Ankrom Moisan, points to the bathroom selfie trend to help explain why even office bathrooms are getting nicer. For at least 10 years, mostly in hotels and restaurants, celebrities, Met Gala attendees and influencers of all types, along with millions of other people, have been sharing bathroom selfies on social media.
“People like to take them. They like to go to a really curated experience, but especially [to] bathrooms because that’s where you can have a lot of fun. It’s a small space. People have privacy in there,” she said.
Mikkelsen also points out that during the pandemic, when offices began to open up after lockdowns, bathroom upgrades were about safety and sanitation, specifically preventing the spread of germs.
“Post-pandemic, it was all about how we can make the restroom safer, and so that was a lot of [automated] doors and even sensors for when people go into the bathroom, so it would alert you externally if somebody was in there. We went from that to all the way up here. The expectation for restrooms is unbelievable.”
While words like “fun” or “inspirational” would never be used to describe the office bathrooms of the past, it seems like many are moving in this direction.
“It stems from people working at home and then sort of bringing that hospitality or home feel back into the office,” Strickland said.
But before getting into comfort or whimsy, some basic needs must be met. Designers and architects told Newsweek that improved privacy, sanitation, sight lines, smells and music are coming to office bathrooms.
“Sometimes we’ve incorporated music. We’ve also had scent diffusers, so that you’re engaging sound and smell in a more pleasant way,” McCormack said.
Companies and employees are also looking for aesthetic upgrades.
“For finishes, we’ve been skewing more towards things that look more like natural finishes, whether that’s tile, stone or finishes that have a handmade quality,” DaPonte said.
Better Bathrooms for All
The first thing every designer interviewed for this story mentioned was the need to provide a more private experience, particularly with the stalls around the toilets.
“The number one issue that always comes up on my projects is privacy, and that’s specifically related to the toilet compartments,” Strickland said. “The height of the partition and not wanting to have gaps are the top two things that I get feedback on.”
“The biggest complaint that we get from clients when we start a process is the partitions are really high off the ground, or they’re really low from the ceiling; there’s gaps between the doors and the panels, and people feel like they can be seen,” DaPonte said.
Designers and architects noted the increased use-cases for the bathroom beyond using the toilets. Someone may go in there to freshen up between meetings, to take medicine or to wash their hands after going for a walk outside. They may go in for a two-minute break from their office or cubicle, for whatever reason.
“One of the things we will think more about in the restrooms is the experience of other things one might be doing in the restroom. They might be putting on makeup, they might be doing their hair,” McCormack said. “What is the lighting like in those places? How do you make sure that there’s a place to put your phone somewhere or have hanging space?”
“Lighting is super important in restrooms. If you’re working all day, you kind of want to just take a break, it’s kind of a reprieve,” Mikkelsen said. “We’re starting to see lounge areas return in restrooms, like a nice chair where you can just go and sit, that kind of doubles as like a quiet space.”
DaPonte agreed about the significance of lighting and added that even simple renovations can go a long way.
“We’ve done some minor renovations, where we give everything a good clean, provide some new fixtures and countertops and some nice paint and new lighting. It makes a huge difference,” he said.
Others are trying to bring the wow element to the office toilet.
“We’ve done some full renovations where we do some really fun custom millwork and storage options that gave it a residential spa feeling,” DaPonte said.
The heightened awareness of sanitation from the early pandemic era remains in many forms, including touchless doors, dryers, sinks and soap dispensers.
“Not wanting to touch surfaces is a big thing,” Strickland said. “We use tile a lot in addition to wall covering, but we generally try to push tile and surfaces that are easy to clean.”
Generally, people are expecting cleaner, nicer looking, better bathrooms and to keep their hands dry and clean as they leave.
“For the faucet at the vanity, a lot of people really prefer to have something that has a longer spout, so when they’re washing their hands, [they’re] not getting a bunch of water on the countertop. That’s a pet peeve for a lot of people,” Strickland said.
The desire for privacy extends beyond the toilets. In ideal settings, the entrance to the bathroom can be hidden by a corridor of some kind, so people at desks can’t see the entrance, and people walking by can’t see inside.
“We think about circulation,” DaPonte said. “Bathrooms are generally located in the core, so we generally try to provide two paths to the bathrooms … just so people aren’t kind of taking this circuitous path just to use the bathroom.”
If the corridor is long enough, it can even preclude the need for a door, like the bathrooms in many airports and other transit or high-traffic locations.
“You don’t want to have an open work area directly adjacent to a restroom entrance. It just is uncomfortable for people going into the bathroom, and it’s also uncomfortable for the people who are sitting right outside of that space,” McCormack said.
A More Inclusive Office
Better privacy in restrooms can also be more welcoming to employees who may be dealing with a variety of permanent, chronic or temporary health issues, such as those with anxiety, digestive problems or food poisoning, or people using wheelchairs. Multiple designers mentioned that using a wheelchair themselves to understand that user experience helped them realize how helpful it can be to go above the baseline standards from the ADA.
Gender inclusion has also been a factor around bathrooms, with some having shared sink areas outside of private stalls.
“We saw that in restaurants a lot more than we did in a corporate environment, but that’s starting to be incorporated,” Strickland said.
Ultimately, nicer restrooms are part of the push for nicer, more inviting offices. For many companies, landlords and building owners, this represents an opportunity to stand out.
With office attendance rebounding to near pre-pandemic levels, employers looking to boost it further will have to think about new ideas. Perhaps bathroom renovations are part of the solution.
“People really care about their bathroom experience,” Strickland said. “This is something that’s important to individual employees. Their privacy and safety are key.”
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