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Micromanaging Bathroom Breaks: The Unseen Stress of Call Center Work
The Best Way to Destroy Employee Morale
Anyone who has ever worked in a call (or contact) center can tell you that bathroom breaks are a pretty contentious subject with both management and employees. Most of these employers will allow you an hour’s lunch break and two 15-minute breaks. But nature rarely calls on a nice little schedule.
Call center management rarely considers that the people answering the phones are humans, not cogs in some machine. This makes an already difficult job unbearable at times. You are not only dealing with customers all day but micromanagers with ridiculous metrics.
One post on the subreddit for call centers was from a woman who said she peed herself at work the other day. She said that they had to get approval from management to use the restroom outside of the assigned break times. She was waiting for two hours and finally couldn’t hold it anymore.
Personally, I would have gone anyway, but in today’s job market getting fired is a terrifying prospect.
The psychological impact of ridiculous policies like this is huge. First of all, there is the hit to employee morale. People who are being monitored to this…
