Wiping the Slate Clean
Why we struggle to part ways with paper towels when dryers will take us into a greener future.
Featuring five solutions.
Handwringing Behaviours and Stress Relief.
We’ve all seen the nervous man mashing his hands together, apprehensively scanning for his date through the window in the café, or the woman who’s standing on the railway platform, anxiously twiddling her digits, waiting for a train that’s been delayed. We see it in hospital waiting rooms where big news awaits an expectant father, a worried mother, or a scared child, or during a football match when a fan’s hands weave and twist as their favourite player dribbles the ball towards the net. Handwringing is something we do in times of great tension, stress and anticipation. It’s a natural and powerful self-soothing mechanism, but how does it translate into the workplace?
Perhaps it’s safe to say that these crescendo events are well remembered in everyone’s lives, but arguably, we should think about how handwringing impacts our choices at work. If you’re an employer offering handtowels rather than hand dryers, it might be time to take a look at how your employees are using this option. If you’re using up a lot of handtowels in the workplace, are you checking the stress levels in your workplace?
Handwringing is a natural part of the process of using paper towels in the bathroom. You have to perform the very same action with a paper towel to get the excess water and soap off your hands. It naturally mimics this self-soothing gesture and I’d like to argue it offers the same effect in the bathroom as anywhere else. Given this, it might be time to consider how stress is impacting your environmental goals. Is there a link between hand towels and the stress levels of employees?
In 2018, a survey of 1274 employees in the UK found that 70% took extra toilet breaks as a stress management mechanism . This was the second biggest stress relieving tool, trailing just behind complaining to friends, family or colleagues about working conditions at 76% . Stressed employees are more likely to choose paper towels to self-soothe, and they’re more likely to revisit the bathroom often in an attempt decompress.
Given these factors, reducing stress in the workplace and meeting your environmental goals are closely linked. As a company invested in the promotion of more sustainable contributions, it becomes important to consider how your employees use paper towels in a behavioural and psychological sense to help meet the needs of a greener future.
The Psychology of Cleanliness – How Wiping Our Hands Makes Us Feel Clean.
Since the Victorian era, cleanliness has held psychological and religious significance. It’s where we get the idiom ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ from! Being clean identified your social class (ascending in class, ascending in cleanliness), but also functioned as a spiritual and psychological purification method. Though much of the Christian ideology that underpinned this outlook has died back in modern society, the cultural, psychological and behavioural impact of cleanliness is still very much felt today. Looking clean, presentable, well-dressed and well-groomed all indicate a person of good moral character. When we clean our hands, we’re wiping away our defects as well as our dirt.
How does this apply in the workplace? Paper towels provide physical comfort in emulating the anxiety relieving technique of handwringing of course, but they also act as a visual stimulus. We may feel as though, by using paper towels, we’re catching more of the dirt and grime in the towel than we would if we used a hand dryer. We can see the water and leftover soap transfer onto the paper and off of our hands. The hand dryer can struggle to show, in quite so concrete terms the transference of residual soap and water, but there are solutions, stay with me and I’ll give you a few ideas later on!
Discarding – A Psychological Mechanism of Unburdening.
Minimalists have been telling us to chuck our worldly goods forever, to uncomplicate our lives and experience the tranquillity of the adage ‘less is more’. We are constantly told that a productive workspace is a clear workspace. Chuck your rubbish, declutter and simplify, reduce, reduce, reduce! A study conducted on a non-profit organisation’s employees in the Netherlands found that surface cleanliness had a positive impact on productivity . Jordan Peterson, controversial public figure in the Canadian political sphere, but more pressingly, a psychologist by trade, tells us all: ‘Clean your room!’ in his book: Twelve Rules for Life. Even the famous song I want to Break Free by Queen, depicts the lead singer Freddie Mercury cleaning the house in drag. Getting rid of things is freedom, science, psychology and society tells us.
So, when we chuck that paper towel in the bin, it’s a symbol. A symbol of freedom, clarity and peace of mind. We’re discarding the burden of our anxieties and our deeply embedded cultural feelings about being unclean in that scrunched up piece of paper that we watch tumble into the bottom of the bin. It’s only a small gesture, a habit that seems empty of meaning at first, but comes laden with all the mechanics of anxiety, stress and even our own sense of morality.
Regardless, we are entering a greener era. We must find better ways to conserve resources. Hand dryers are the way forward. Paper towels are finished. From a planetary perspective, we can’t justify the use of hand towels when our trees are being harvested too quickly, our greenhouse gas crisis is at boiling point and we thirst, ever more eagerly, for better water conservation solutions.
So, with that in mind, what can we do?
Five Ideas for Less Paper in the Workplace Bathroom:
1. Reduce stress in the workplace.
Reducing stress in the workplace will not only reduce your employee’s likelihood to use as many hand-towels (if you still offer them), but it will also reduce the number of trips they take to the toilet while at work, simultaneously improving productivity and helping you to meet your environmental goals.
2. Choose hand dryers with more tactile feedback.
Not all hand dryers offer the same feedback when used. A blade dryer can apply pressure to the hands and may offer more tactile feedback than other types of dryers with slower or more diffuse air currents. It’s worth considering how tactile feedback with powerful air currents might simulate or encourage the feeling of cleanliness for employees.
3. Choose high quality hand creams that feel fresh, clean and hydrating, and encourage employees to relieve stress without paper.
Who said the soothing action of handwringing has to leave the bathroom with paper towels? Consider, instead, adding a high-quality, sustainably produced, hand cream to your employees’ bathroom to encourage them to satisfy their self-soothing gesticulations in a greener way.
4. Encourage employees to try and cut caffeine.
Caffeine is a diuretic. More caffeine, more toilet breaks. More toilet breaks, more paper towels. More paper towels means you’re further from your goals for a greener future. Encourage employees to try and reduce their caffeine intake. Caffeine can also increase stress levels in the body, so it can sometimes be in a person’s best interests to cut out coffee and tea. In doing so, you’re also reducing contributions to greenhouse gasses and deforestation related to agriculture.
5. Offer bike to work schemes.
Exercise is a proven stress killer. Encouraging employees to bike to work with schemes that reward them, reduces car journeys as well as stress levels. It’s the perfect way to come close to environmental targets while improving your employee’s wellbeing both at work and away.
