On the Subject of Bathroom Breaks

To all departments,

The Department of Analytics has flagged a trend in the Q1 reclamation data that requires company-wide acknowledgment.

Bathroom breaks now account for 11.3%of all reclaimed time across the Hardly Working employee base. This represents a 2.1 percentage point increase from our February baseline, and positions the bathroom as the third most popular reclamation venue after “desk” and “break room.”

The Data

Average bathroom break duration has increased from 4.2 minutes in pre-smartphone studies to an estimated 8.9 minutes in our current dataset. The Department of Analytics attributes this increase to what it clinically refers to as “secondary screen engagement during primary biological functions.”

In plain language: people are on their phones.

This is not a revelation. This is a statistic.

The Concern

Several members of the Analytics team have asked whether Hardly Working Corp. should address this trend — whether through awareness campaigns, suggested time limits, or gentle nudges within the application.

The answer is no.

Our Position

Hardly Working Corp. does not monitor, regulate, or express opinions about how its employees spend their bathroom time. This policy is non-negotiable.

We note that a growing number of employers have installed timed locks on bathroom stalls, placed bathroom usage on performance dashboards, or designed office layouts where the bathroom is visible from the manager's desk. These practices are documented in our files. We have no further comment.

If an employee chooses to spend nine minutes in the bathroom instead of four, this falls outside the scope of organizational review. The matter is between the employee, their phone, and their digestive system.

Recommendation

The Department of Analytics is instructed to continue tracking bathroom break data for aggregate benchmarking purposes only. Individual bathroom durations will not be surfaced, ranked, or compared.

Employees are reminded that they may log their bathroom time under Code 02 (Bathroom Break) without further detail. The system does not ask what you were doing in there. It never will.

This concludes the Department's assessment. No follow-up is required.

— Dept. of Analytics
Reviewed by: Dept. of Employee Morale (dissolved)