Hygiene in the work place

Hygiene is usually never meant to be an issue in the general office type environment workplace. Obviously workplaces that involve hospitality (particularly food) and the health services need to have fairly strict hygiene standards. Generally, hygiene issues are not that big a deal in the standard office workspace.

However, when you are working in a call centre, there are some important issues to be aware of in regards to hygiene. Most call centre type work spaces have policies in place to deal with these issues. Unfortunately, an organisation may have the best policy in place, but if it is not effectively policed by the team leaders and managers, then it is useless.

Working in a Government department, I always thought that there would be well implemented policies on most (if not all) matters related to OH&S. Generally this has held to be true. Unfortunately, like many other things in life, People tend to only pay attention to those things that relate to themselves, or that they can see the point in.

Enter the issue of headset hygiene.

My current employer has policies in place to deal effectively with telephone headset hygiene. My current team is not what you would call a real call centre environment. Our team consists of about 30 people spread throughout the region, distributed between about 4 offices. Our office usually has 4 members of the team, and we sit in our own section of the greater office space, make our little phone calls all day long. We use telephone headsets for obvious reasons. I have seen our department's policy on headset hygiene on our intranet, but it doesn't get policed in our office.

The biggest issue with headsets is reusing the ear padding. This is meant to be a big no-no. However, this does not seem to be an issue for my local office. In my short time ere, I have changed desks 6 times, and used at least 4 different headsets. None of them have had their ear padding or microphone covers changes as I went around the desks.

You would expect a government organisation to have good standards on this, but I have found private companies to be much better on this. A call centre I have previously worked in gave all its workers their own microphone tube and earpiece pad to take with them for which ever desk they moved to.

Look, to be honest this is not something that would really upset me. Apathy is really not a motivating force to make you want to kick up a stink about these things. But then, something happens that drives home the point of these policies, and the need to enforce them.

I have mentioned earlier that the Hippie has left us. Well, one of our old team members has re
turned to our team from maternity leave to take the Hippie's place, and her desk. This returning team member has discovered that she has been infected with head lice. Her first thoughts were that her older kids had got them from school, but upon checking out her whole family, she found that she was the only one with nits.

Se has gone over her movements in the last while, and she the only place she can see that she would have got the lice from, is from the Hippie's headset.

I guess this makes another good reason for her to have gone. We first of all loose her negative whining attitude, but now we have lost her dubious personal hygiene.