Call centre toilet nightmare

Staff at a government call centre in Sydney were ordered to observe a three minute time limit when using the toilet, and keep diary entries of time spent in the bathroom, according to this report in the Daily Telegraph.

Managers at the Parramatta branch of Medicare, which administers Australia's universal health care system, were even following staff into bathrooms to hurry them along, allegedly.

What could be the reason for such behaviour? Enhancing productivity, it would seem. The report says that managers ordered all staff to fill out the length of toilet breaks in a "compliance diary", threatening staff who failed to spend at least 92 per cent of their time on the phone with disciplinary action.

Apparently the policy concerned logged time spent on some work activities, including processing claims and other paperwork, as time spent off the phones. If that doesn't count as proper work, managers must have seen toilet time as something akin to sleeping on the job.

Following media attention and a staff revolt (staff claimed it unfairly targeted pregnant women and older employees), the policy was canned.

It's hard to imagine a more blatant breach of privacy than this. It beggars belief that a public sector body could come up with something like this. Sure enough, Medicare denies having a policy that "specifically monitored toilet breaks". And "a log of time away from work was only ever a local practice and never a national policy," a spokesperson reportedly said. "It is no longer in use."

The Daily Telegraph ran a poll about this, asking whether employers should be allowed to ask staff to monitor their toilet time. The most bizarre thing about the whole episode is that 14 per cent actually voted in favour.

- Greg Cain