Dog Friendly Office Project Point 8: Basic Manner Training
In the spirit of ‘Enriching the Workplace with Your Dog" at free stitch, we started the ‘Dog Friendly Office Project’ in September 2019.
Since then, we have listened to the feedback from our customers about how their workplaces view bringing pets to work and we have created a set of guidelines for our staff who come to the office with their pets.
Through a series of blog entries, we hope to expand on and explain some of the reasoning behind the guidelines that we created in the consent form.
This time, we will focus on rule 7 of the guidelines; ‘pets must have received basic training, such as toilet and manner training’. This is a very important point when considering converting to a dog-friendly office.
Bringing a pet to the office that hasn’t received basic training naturally poses potential problems and issues, however it is difficult to set a universal standard as to what constitutes ‘minimum or basic training’ as this varies from owner to owner and breed to breed, so we haven’t clearly stipulated the requirements in our guidelines. In free stitch’s case, the requirements for pet manners and discipline are set by the management staff present on the day based on the attending pet’s character and unique circumstances. Pets have different temperaments and abilities for adapting to new environments and conditions, so making a judgment based on the situation is important.
At free stitch, we would like to avoid telling our staff not to bring their pets to work because they are ‘inadequately trained’; instead we prefer to encourage our staff to bring the pets by creating opportunities to work together and train their pets so they can come to the office.
To make opportunities for owners to improve their pet’s quality of life, especially those who have difficulties with new situations, it is important for all staff to work together and co-operate in this endeavour.
In our next series of blogs, we will be taking some real-life issues our staff have experienced bringing their pets to the office under the Dog-Friendly Project and expanding on some of the solutions we have developed. The first of which will be ‘using collars and leads that your pet is familiar with’.
For more information on the dog friendly office project, please click here.
Check out the Dog-friendly Office Project on SNS
