An employee claimed that his company began tracking the amount of time he spent in the washroom and even asked him to work extra hours to make up for what it considered excessive bathroom breaks, sparking outrage online.
The employee shared his experience in a Reddit post on r/IndianWorkplace titled, “My company is counting my washroom breaks.”
According to the post, the employee has been working at a small company in Ahmedabad in the revenue cycle management (RCM) sector for nearly 10 months. He said that management recently informed him that they had monitored all of his visits to the washroom and calculated that he had spent a total of 53 minutes there, exceeding the company’s unofficial limit of 30 minutes.
As a result, he was told to remain in the office for an additional 40 minutes to compensate for the extra time.
Calling the move “ridiculous”, the employee pointed out that he had maintained the same routine for the past 10 months and that his work had never suffered because of it. He added that he leaves his phone at his desk whenever he uses the washroom, which is only a few steps away, and insisted that he completes all his tasks on time without receiving any complaints.
“It is messing with my mind now,” he wrote, asking fellow users for advice on how to deal with the situation.
The post quickly attracted reactions from others, many of whom felt the employee might be getting singled out and advised him to start looking for another job before the company decided to push him out altogether.
Several users argued that if an employee’s work is being delivered on time and there are no complaints about performance, the duration of washroom breaks should not become an issue. They also suggested that the employee pay close attention to who was raising the concern, saying it would be particularly worrying if it was coming directly from his reporting manager.
Others shared similar experiences of what they described as excessive micromanagement. One commenter recalled being in a workplace where the boss’s secretary allegedly required employees to inform her before going to the washroom.
The post has triggered discussions around workplace surveillance and employee privacy, with many users questioning whether monitoring bathroom breaks so closely was an example of poor management rather than a genuine productivity concern.