Did you know that the average employee loses 9 working days a year to sickness and if that person is carrying a virus, they could contaminate 50% of the working environment in just 4 hours?! Having a clean office space is a necessity to company productivity, ensuring less staff illness and providing a more pleasant and efficient working environment for employees, customers, and clients. The emergence of our dear friend COVID-19 has only made this an ever-more important issue to address, which is why we’re providing you with Twelve office cleaning tips to ultimately increase staff productivity.
Help People Help Themselves
Installing antibacterial hand gel dispensers, tissues, and cleaning supplies in the office allows each person to take care of the cleanliness of their own space, reducing the number of germs spread throughout the day and ensuring a cleaner working environment for all. Office desks, especially when ‘hot-desking’, can be dangerous if not properly cleaned, computer keyboards containing over 20,000 bacteria. Providing cleaning tools for individual workers means they can keep on top of the cleanliness of their own work area.
Tidy Office, Tidy Mind
This rule is something many professionals swear by. If surrounded by mess, your thoughts will become a mess. Therefore, keeping desks clean by avoiding clutter and having enough storage solutions to accommodate all your needs is essential for productivity. There’s nothing worse than an untidy desk and not being able to discern the important pieces of paper in a pile from the doodles; simple solutions such as organisers, file folders, and filing cabinets can solve these issues with ease.
Concentrate on your own tidiness and wellbeing
Make it habit to keep your own office space clean and tidy every day and wash your hands regularly, especially in today’s current climate. The government recommends washing your hands for at least 20 seconds often throughout the day, especially before and after eating, after using the toilet, and after handling unclean items. We also recommend carrying a small bottle of antibacterial hand gel with you just in case you don’t have access to soap and water.
Keep communal areas clean
Whether this is the kitchen, the break room, or the bathroom, keeping these communal areas in your office clean is important. Believe it or not, the dirtiest surface of all is not the toilet seat, but the microwave door handle. Just ensuring daily cleaning of these areas will hugely reduce the number of germs collected and spread throughout your office.
Don’t forget to clean the kitchen
Considering the previously mentioned fact that microwaves are worse for germs than toilet seats, it’s no wonder keeping the kitchen area clean is so important. Kitchens often build up a lot of bacteria and germs if not properly and regularly cleaned. Ensuring you are regularly sanitising worktops and microwaves and cleaning out the old, out of date food from the fridges can make a world of difference. Additional daily tasks you can practice including: avoiding eating at your desk and making sure you wash your hands regularly, before and after eating, will reduce your own personal risk of contracting an illness.
Clean electronics
It is a fact of physics that dust is attracted to electronics and accumulates in these areas. Good practice to keeping your office clean and dust free is to regularly dust your electronics and use dust repellent spray on equipment weekly. Disinfecting keyboards, telephones, and computer screens is essential as LOTS of germs will collect here throughout the day. This is especially important in a hotdesking environment in which a single keyboard may have passed through many different hands, with a multitude of bacteria.
Reduce rubbish, recycle
You’d be surprised how many people don’t know how to use a bin. Even just ensuring your rubbish is thrown away appropriately and making sure there are enough bins to accommodate the volume of rubbish, can improve the cleanliness of your working environment hugely. Then, at the end of the day, taking the bins out and disposing of them properly, whilst not allowing rubbish to build up, will hugely reduce the amount of bacteria accumulating in your workplace. Investing in recycling bins alongside your daily rubbish bins is also really beneficial, not only to your own wellbeing, but the planet’s also!
Regular professional office cleaning
The most essential part of keeping your office environment as safe as possible is to clean it regularly. We would recommend cleaning it at least five days a week to ensure the bacteria collected throughout each working day is disposed of. One of the best ways to ensure this would be to hire a professional commercial cleaning company to take care of it for you. This means you can put your mind at ease knowing your office will be kept clean and bacteria-free and focus on your own important tasks, while the professionals focus on the dirty work.
Understand how to use the correct tools
While hiring professional cleaners is the best and least stressful way to cope with your office cleaning needs, if this isn’t the ideal route for you it’s extremely beneficial to learn how to use the correct tools for the job. Using anti-bacterial surface spray is all well and good, but not many people know how to use it properly to its full effect. ‘Dwell time’ is something often overlooked and essential if wanting a properly clean surface. This method involves leaving the anti-bacterial spray on a surface for an extra couple of minutes before wiping it off, ensuring the anti-bacterial property of the spray reaches its full potential and advertised kill rate. Dwell times can vary from 30 seconds to 10 minutes dependant on the product you’re using. This small extra step in your cleaning routine will enable you to clean your office in the most effective way. For effective destruction of COVID–19 we would recommend leaving disinfectant spray on a surface for 1-3 minutes before wiping off.
Windows should be transparent
An often overlooked ESSENTIAL to a clean looking working environment is window cleaning. One of the first things your customer / client notices about your business is the building, and first impressions are important, so ensuring the windows are clean will ensure your business gets a positive first impression. It also allows a brighter working environment indoors which is in turn more pleasant for employees, many preferring a light and bright working environment. It makes sense considering office workers are stuck indoors all day, at least clean windows allows the illusion that you’re closer to the outdoors.
Deep carpet cleaning
Often overlooked, carpets are a hotspot for germs and uncleanliness, bacteria being able to live in a carpet for longer than four weeks! Ensuring carpets are deep cleaned at least every 6 months should be a priority (especially if you live by the five second rule!) and professionals are the best place to look if you want it done well.
Deep cleaning of office
This process is essential to keeping your office as bacteria-free as possible. While a deep clean isn’t necessary as often as your daily cleaning routine (we would recommend a good professional deep clean monthly), it is still a very important cleaning step to ensure a clean working environment. We would again, recommend hiring professionals to undertake your deep cleaning needs, the main areas of focus being carpets and windows. It is also worth looking into electrostatic cleaning technology.
Our professional cleaning checklist
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