Sunday 10 July 2011

Bad breath in the workplace

Fresh Breath for the Workplace

Being physically near to someone in the workplace can have certain consequences.
For instance, offensive mouth odour (halitosis) cannot be contained and may be extremely offensive to spouses, friends, acquaintances and, or co-workers.
Society uses odours as a means to define and interact with the world. The intimate emotionally charged nature of the olfactory/smelling experience ensures that value coded odours such as bad breath are interiorized by people in a deeply personal way. Thus bad breath odour becomes a very public issue in the workplace. Like it or not smells and odours affect us physically, psychologically and socially.
Unfortunately, individuals are unaware of their own odour as it cannot  be smelled by oneself. The  sinister thing about bad breath is that  the odour can be most repulsive and
cause distress to people nearby.
Since smells and odours have such a high ability to produce emotional responses, defense tactics such as negative body language may be used  around people with bad breath. These  defensive behaviours can erode an individual’s self image. Thus breath odour can have devastating social and employment consequences.  It is a difficult but important issue to approach with co-workers. Sometimes breath odour indicates an untreated systemic medical condition.


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