This article is from the WeChat public account: loveifanr , author: Fang Jiawen, from the title figure: Figure worm

Have you ever seen anything weird in the company toilet?

It’s no surprise to see a colleague’s forgotten mobile phone in the toilet. Recently, a mouse appeared in the toilet of Aifaner’s office.

In the future, the “strange things” we encounter in the toilet may not be as dramatic as the mouse, but they carry anti-human design ideas. It is a “standard toilet (StandardToilet) “.

In short, the “standard toilet” is a “sloping down” toilet designed to make you uncomfortable.

Mahabir Gill, the company’s founder, told the British version of “Wired” that by tilting the toilet 13 degrees forward, the person sitting on it will enter a squat position, which will require more pressure on the feet. After five minutes, you will start to feel uncomfortable.

Picture from BBC

If it is more oblique than this angle, (13 °) , there will be wider problems. 13 ° doesn’t cause too much inconvenience, but makes you want to leave the toilet quickly.

Gill said that the inspiration for designing this toilet comes from the company’s dissatisfaction with employees’ occupation of toilets: from time to time, he finds that workers are sleeping in the toilets and often queue up for a long time when they want to go to the toilets.

Gill claims that the toilet posture created by the “standard toilet” is more conducive to defecation, but he also admits that the design is mainly to prevent corporate employees from “paid shit” and more value lies in “saving money for employers.”

Some people think that this design is just a paragraph, right?

However, it has been approved by the British Toilet Association (British Toilet Association) , a company dedicated to promoting better public toilets Non-profit membership organization. In addition, Gill has been negotiating with councils and highway service stations in several places in the United Kingdom, with retail prices of 150-500 pounds The price is for “standard toilets,” and dozens of other American companies have expressed interest in this product.

If we look back at the Internet’s discussion of “paid shit” in the past year or two, we might not be surprised that anti-humans like “standard toilets” actually have orders.

How long can I squat in the company toilet? Should I care?

The large-scale discussion of “paid shit” originated from the deduction of a Japanese netizen in 2018: the stool must be stooled in the company. One can save toilet paper, and the other is equal to stool can also make money, stool. “It became a valuable thing.”

After that, some netizens extended the calculation: “Suppose you spend 10 minutes a dayStool, one year, you will have 40 hours of paid poop time, which is equivalent to getting 5 days of annual leave. “

For this statement, there are two factions on the Internet:

While thinking that the angle of Japanese netizens is too great, everyone may wish to shit with pay;

On the other side, “paid shit” is a false concept for companies that measure employee output. The work goals you have to accomplish will not change because of this, and will put you into a vicious circle of “paid shit at work and unpaid overtime after work”. In addition, the popularity of this term will also give the boss a sense of whether employees are “paid shit”, and the psychological pressure on employees to go to the toilet will increase.

After the term became popular, some netizens did say that the company was controlling “paid shit”.

A netizen broke the news that NetEase installed a signal jammer in the company’s toilet to prevent employees from going to the toilet and playing with mobile phones to “concentrate on toileting” (It is said that due to Your feedback was canceled) . Subsequently, a netizen posted a message saying that Toutiao and JD are doing similar things today.

Picture from Sohu

Under this approach, there is actually a wave of support from employees. They all looked at Qiushui in front of the company’s toilet grid and were forced to collapse by the long-occupied toilet.

In order to improve this situation, Internet companies such as 360 and Sohu have adopted applications similar to “Find Pit” internally, providing real-time usage of each toilet compartment, and even listing the length of time each toilet compartment has been occupied.

360 Company’s “Toilet Guide”

Although they all start with toilets, there are fundamental differences in the above measures.

The anonymous pit finding function is mainly for the convenience of people looking for toilets. Whether it’s installing signal jammers or using anti-human design toilets, they are for people who have difficulty accessing the toilet.

More extreme is that some netizens half-ridiculed that the company might as well check in and go to the toilet, or count the employees’ toilet time, and make a list. In a way, this is a shame on the inevitable physical needs of the person.

Image from US News

People have many reasons to spend more than five minutes in the toilet. People with gastrointestinal problems tell us that they are already embarrassed and sometimes humiliated because of this, but they do need to spend more time in the toilet than the so-called “normal time”.

People use the toilet to rest and get some time to rest and recover alone. In fact, companies should provide employees with such space instead of forcing them to breathe only in the toilet.

Jen Slater says she spent three years investigating how to build safe and accessible toilets. Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, an assistant professor at Purdue University, also believes that in today’s open office fashion, toilets are often the only place in the company where employees can get a little private space, and most of themEmployees need a place to take a break.

Image from KRT Marketing

Unfortunately, most of the employees who can initiate such discussions and even change company policies are from companies that have barely been concerned about the company’s outreach. The workers in the factory are more oppressed.

In some domestic factories, workers wear a bracelet connected to the work station, so when they need to leave the work station to the bathroom or other places, the behavior will be recorded.

In Amazon, there are clear rules for workers’ rest periods. There are reports that Amazon’s warehouse workers will urinate in trash cans to avoid exceeding breaks or failing to catch up: In a four-story building, there are only two toilets on the first floor, for more than 1,200 For one employee, it took 10 minutes to walk to the toilet.

Picture from MEL Magazine

Technology makes monitoring “silk and smooth”

The toilet in the company is a “grey area”.

Because it is a “privateEvent “, which involves the physiological needs that everyone can’t avoid, and the monitoring of this space can cause a particularly heated discussion.

But outside the toilet, did the surveillance stop? Of course not, but we have discussed less in this part. With the blessing of science and technology, the monitoring method is becoming more and more “silk and feelless”.

In a 2018 report, Gartner pointed out that in multiple industries worldwide, 22% of companies are collecting and using employee behavior data, 17% of companies monitor employee computer usage data, and 16% of companies monitor Outlook or calendar data.

Picture from The Economist

Humanyze, a startup from the MIT Media Lab, makes devices with built-in RFID sensors, accelerometers, microphones, and Bluetooth that are about the size of an average employee card. This “smart card” can be used to collect voice intonation data, the accelerometer can determine whether employees are sitting or standing, and Bluetooth is used to determine what employees have face-to-face communication.

Humanyze’s “Smart Card”, pictured from Archinect News

Humanyze emphasizes that the device samples speech data at 48 samples/ S, used only to determine the intonation of speech, not the content of the conversation.

Steelcase, which specializes in office furniture and interior design, provides customers with an “office space consulting” service-they will “strategically” install sensors on the furniture, monitor and analyze the use of an office space in real time, and feedback to employer.

Really even the furniture is monitoring you, picture from Steelcase

Well-known wearable products such as Fitbit are also used to track employee health, and data will be linked to benefits. According to ABI Research, by 2020, US companies will purchase 44 million health tracking devices.

What’s more worrying is that the control of technology products on employees is not just about recording data without feeling, it has even gradually started to play a role in decision-making.

In April of this year, a public document obtained by The Verge stated that Amazon’s AI management system can not only track the progress of everyone’s work in real time, calculate employees’ “non-working” hours, but even “bypass management layers and automatically generate Warnings about job quality and efficiency or firing employees. ”

AI is that your boss has become a reality, picture from TheStranger

At the end of last year, a special report from CNBC pointed out that smart voice assistants are also gradually entering the workplace. Different from the past technology monitoring, the voice assistant can not only record what employees are saying, but also is developing in the direction of understanding employees’ emotions.

Cogito’s customers are mainly medical, banking, and insurance companies, and their AI assistants can “coordinate” telephone customer service. When AI finds that employees speak too fast or interrupt customers, it will remind employees; when it encounters emotional customers, AI will also guide employees on what to do.

The interaction between us and virtual assistants will become more and more like human-to-human communication. Everyone in the office gets a personal behavior assistant. Technology will become ubiquitous.

Cogito CEO Josh Feast said. In addition, Feast said that in the future, employees’ physical and mental status obtained from wearable devices can be used to more accurately determine the physical and mental status of employees so that they can better guide them in their work.

Picture from The Daily Dot

CNBC reports that technology giants such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google ’s smart voice assistants have also begun to launch applications for businesses, and smart voice assistants will become more widely used in the workplace in the future.

Almost all surveillance products have the title of “Improving Productivity”, but no one has a convincing proof. On the contrary, there are a lot of data that point out that these monitoring will have a negative impact on employees ‘work-inspiring employees’ negative emotions and promoting “anti-monitoring” strategies.

Voice assistants’ past security hazards, the former, have made people wary of the danger they will bring. To make matters worse, existing personal privacy protection laws cannot be applied to corporate employees.

Almost everything in the workplaceConsumer privacy protection rules can be exempted from (signing) .

To a certain extent, employers also know that there are risks-a Accenture report states that 62% of corporate executives say their company collects employee data, and less than 1/3 of them are safe about this data. Sex means confidence.

For knowledge workers, the most important factor in improving efficiency is to create an environment where they can think deeply.

Charles Duhigg says he is the author of “The Power of Habits: Why We Live Like This and Work Like That”. In his view, a comfortable environment, eliminating interference factors is the key to improving productivity. Whether it is anti-human design toilets or uncomfortable surveillance products, they will only bring negative effects.

However, from the perspective of enterprises embracing monitoring technology, just as we keep swiping our phones towards “missing phobias”, most companies would rather make mistakes than miss this opportunity, even if they should do The goal is to set up a management system that better motivates employees to work actively.

This article is from the WeChat public account: ifanr , author: Fang Jiawen