Posted By Steve Skinner Ah ha.... it came from the Department of work and pensions as an internal doc, where it did not work either. Thanks anyway Steve

Posted By Phillipe Any ideas as to what the severity of lunch eating at your desk injuries are likely to be? Honestly, what a lot of tosh

Posted By A Campbell .... wiping away the crumbs... wasn't me guv!

Posted By Allan Curran Jack Baguette and his colleagues from BLT.

Posted By Sen Sar My daughter works for the above mentioned and by what she says it makes yours and mine look like a a piece of cake (crumbs included eaten at desk). Altough it does make sense to me that people get away from the work space/desk/station/place to eat & drink, just sounds like a reciepe for disaster!

Posted By A Campbell So...if in doubt create a blanket ban makes sense? example... attend meetings in meeting room most of morning... have more planned in the afternoon. Catch up with emails during lunch brake... Oops... must keep food away from desk... answer skip lunch and suffer diet related illness! Do you think the world is going bonkers?

Posted By A Campbell From my recollection of working in a call centre.... when it was time for breaks... I never knew of 1 person not eager to get away from their desk. Could this extend now to involve IT to flag up emails sent from home laptops & blackberry's after 5pm? there's always room to encourage but to enforce such items would be a nightmare... costly (I will look out for this in the next DWP budget!) and so very PC IMHO

Posted By Bob Youel try hot desking when those before you have left parts of their lunch [& worse] all over the worktop - We suffer from 'presenteeism' and one way to manage it is to get people away from desks as there is no need to eat at a desk its just a bad habit

Posted By David J Jones I recall some 6 years or so ago, there was something published (on this forum? - a search did not throw it up) indicating that a toilet seat has less germs and bacterial contamination than a desk where it's occupier regularly consumes food. There is also a problem with crumbs dropping into the keyboard and really getting up the I.T's guys noses when they have to swap out sticky/duff k/b's!

Posted By PMW LOL - if a person has 2 smoking breaks a day, average 10 mins each(conservative). Over a year this equates to 4 weeks extra leave. 27 smokers employed in our small company, 108 weeks of work that the non-smokers have to cover.

Posted By NSO Point to note, try following your cleaners to make sure they use different cloths for different things. I did and found our eastern european cleaner using the same cloth in the toilets as she did for desks. Mmmm nice. There is now a fully colour coded cloth and bucket system in place. Just as a little exercise try turning your keyboards over and tapping them gently to see what falls out. Now do you really want to eat at your desks?

Posted By Jane Bastow I'd rather Peter spent the 10 minutes on a different productive task to refresh his concentration - filing or watering the office plants or making everyone a cup of coffee instead of nipping out for a ciggie. When we moved a few Novembers ago to new premises with a large car park and yard area we made it all a no smoking zone. A year previously we had introduced a policy of not allowing paid smoking breaks as it discriminates against non smoking staff (record the time and make it up if you take a smoking break). Of 48 staff 22 were smokers - the walk in the cold to outside the perimeter and the introduction of stop smoking support paid off - now we only have 4 smokers - die hard addicts who can probably all find misplaced justifications for their deluded believe in the benefits of their habit (I can concentrate better, I'm bad tempered without etc) We have healthier, happier more productive workforce now. Although the policy was not popular with smokers when first introduced, 80% of them have subsequently made a point of thanking me for enforcing it, as it helped them give up.

Posted By Pete Longworth Why have a mess room when you can make a mess at your desk?