Stress is fairly common in the business world. As such, it can lead to coping mechanisms such as mental breakdowns, severe anxiety, and self-harm.

Of the latter, nail picking is a common issue. Although a lesser form of inflicting wounds, it’s nonetheless essential for your business to address the issue.

Not least as you don’t want your clients or customers to see disgusting nail debris left all over your premises.

How to Stop Employees Nail Picking

It’s best to take a draconian approach to your workplace policy here, otherwise your layabout staff won’t learn a thing.

Unlike your nose picking policy, you mustn’t rely on designated areas for such an activity.

It’s important to stamp the issue out before it becomes a widespread company foible. Your policy must be this—no nail picking. Ever.

However, employees get stressed about the silliest of things and may still break your rules. Stress triggers include:

• Tight deadlines.
• Relaxed deadlines.
• Deadlines.
• KPIs.
• Meetings.
• Planning meetings.
• Cancelling meetings.
• Colleagues stealing their lunch from the kitchen fridge.
• Coming into work hungover.
• Mispronouncing their boss’ name (e.g. Mr. Smithson becomes Mr. Dipshit).
• Worrying about picking their nails due to your policy, which inadvertently triggers off their nail picking.

Indeed, the latter point may seem a paradoxical nightmare. But it is a harsh reality of daily working life.

By simply imposing your nail picking policy, you may trigger off nail picking en masse amongst your panic-stricken employees.

As such, you may want to enforce your draconian policies in a subtle way. We shall now discuss your options.

Options For Nail Picking

Semtex is an obvious answer here, but as we’re (under law) supposed to provide more sensible solutions… sandwiches?

If your employees are too busy eating sandwiches, then there’s no way they can be too busy eating (or chewing) on their nails.

As such, if you believe you have a nail picking habit in your workplace, we recommend a 24/7 sandwich policy. This involves:

• A perpetual supply of sandwiches at all times, no matter the cost of time and/or human life.
• All sorts of fillings, such as houmous, cheese, vegan cheese, Marmite, pineapple, jam and ham, potatoes, and radishes.
• Brown bread only.
• Crusts on. What are you, children?

Based off the above postulations, make sure your staff have at least one sandwich in their hand at any given time.

Sandwich production at this point becomes an issue. Say, you have a workforce of 100. How many sandwiches will you need a day?

We suggest least 100 x 6 sandwiches to cover every employee, which will result in 600 (or just over) sandwiches you’ll need to provide on a daily basis.

That isn’t ridiculous. It’s just the math.

Regarding the cost. Well, it’s either nails all over your floor or about £20,000 in wasted revenue each you. For ROI, aim for the nail picking free environment.

It also stops tripping hazards for health and safety purposes. If you need further assistance with this issue, please contact your nearest lavatory.