How Should Businesses Deal With a Bedbug Infestation in the Workplace?

A workplace bedbug problem is rarely a pest control problem in the way a hotel's is. It is a communications problem with an insect attached, and getting the communications wrong makes the insect permanent.

Start From What Is Actually True

Bedbugs feed on people who are still for hours. Nobody is still for hours at a desk. So an established, breeding population in an office is unusual — what you almost certainly have is bedbugs being carried in repeatedly from somewhere people sleep.

That single fact should shape everything that follows, because it means treating the office alone will not end it, and it means somebody in the building is living with a problem they may not know about.

Why Hunting for the Individual Backfires

The instinct is to work out whose desk is the centre of it. Resist it, for three reasons.

• You will often be wrong. The desk with the most finds may simply be the one nearest the soft seating, or the one whose occupant actually looked
• Bedbugs are not a hygiene failure. They have nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with travel and proximity. Treating it as a hygiene matter is both wrong and cruel
• If people think they will be identified, nobody reports anything. Which means you lose the only early warning you had

A workplace where the first person to say something gets whispered about is a workplace that will find out about its next bedbug problem in six months rather than six days.

What to Communicate, and How

Say something, to everyone, at the same time, without naming anyone. Silence is worse — people find out anyway and fill the gap with something more alarming than the truth.

A message that works tends to contain these things:

• What was found and where, factually
• That bedbugs are a travel problem, not a cleanliness one, and can happen to anybody
• What the company is doing about the building, with dates
• Practical advice staff can use at home, offered to everyone rather than aimed at anyone
• A confidential route to say 'I think I have this at home', and a genuine offer of help if they do

That last point is the one that actually solves it. A business that quietly helps with a treatment at somebody's home has ended the problem at source for a fraction of what repeated office treatments would cost.

What to Treat in the Building

Hard surfaces and open floor are not where they will be. The productive places in a commercial interior are the soft ones:

• Upholstered chairs, particularly fabric task chairs with seams
• Break-out seating, sofas and soft booths
• Meeting room chairs that nobody moves from one year to the next
• Staff rest areas, sleep pods and first aid couches
• Coat stores, lockers and anywhere bags sit together
• Carpet edges and skirtings immediately around all of the above

Practical Measures That Help

• Hard-surface or wipeable seating in break-out areas, when furniture is next replaced
• Lockers rather than a communal pile for coats and bags
• Bags off soft seating, which sounds trivial and is the single most effective habit
• Hard flooring in the areas where people gather, rather than carpet

The Legal and HR Edge

We are pest controllers, not employment lawyers, and anything involving an individual employee is a conversation for your HR advisers rather than for us. What we can say is that every case we have seen handled badly was handled badly in the same way: somebody was identified, informally, and it got out.

Deal with the building, offer help to everyone, and let the person who needs it come forward on their own terms.

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