FACTS

1. Poor personal hygiene can make a working environment unpleasant. Issues such as persistent coughs or strong perfumes can make it hard to concentrate.
2. Issues such as a persistent cough may be because of an employee working while they are unwell. This would be a health risk that you should address.
3. Personal hygiene in the workplace can affect another employee’s quality of life. This includes issues like a foul-smelling environment or contracting illnesses.
4. Some employees may not even be aware of their bad personal hygiene at work. This is why it’s good business practice to implement a personal hygiene at work policy.
5. Poor personal hygiene at work can be detrimental to co-workers. Bad personal hygiene at work can contribute to a loss of personal productivity.

STATS

• Research shows that washing hands with soap and water could reduce deaths from diarrheal disease by up to 50%.
• Researchers estimate that if everyone routinely washed their hands, 1 million deaths a year could be prevented.
• Handwashing reduces the risk of respiratory illnesses, like colds, in the general population by 16–21%.
• The use of an alcohol-based hand sanitizer in U.S. classrooms reduced absenteeism due to infection by about 20% overall among 16 elementary schools and 6,000 students.
• Handwashing education in the community:
  • Reduces diarrheal illness in people with weakened immune systems by 58%
  • Reduces absenteeism due to gastrointestinal illness in schoolchildren by 29–57%
• More than 50% of healthy people have Staphylococcus aureus living in or on their nasal passages, throats, hair, or skin. Within the first 15 minutes of bathing, the average person sheds 6 x 106 colony forming units (CFU) of Staphylococcus aureus. Showering before entering recreational waters (such as pools) prevent the spread of germs by reducing the microbial load.
• The average individual swimmer contributes at least 0.14 grams of fecal material to the water, usually within the first 15 minutes of entering.
• Trachoma, the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide, is related to the lack of facial hygiene. An estimated 41 million people suffer from active trachoma, and nearly 10 million people are visually impaired or irreversibly blind as a result of trachoma.