5 Top Tips for Cleaning in Office Buildings

Your clients and their employees spend most of their working lives sitting in their offices and cubicles hammering away at their keyboards and answering the phone.

It's important that their work environment is clean and hygienic. Studies have found that the cleanliness of your office has a direct impact on your health, well-being and productivity.

Unclean, cluttered office environments aren't only a frustrating place to work in, they're also typically filled to the rafters with bacteria. And a lot of it has the potential to spread illness and disease.

Here are my top 5 tips for cleaning in office buildings to ensure your clients can work in a safe and clean environment:

Clean it likes it's your own personal work space

You wouldn't enjoy working in an unclean office environment and neither do your clients.

A lack of ventilation which potentially causes a build-up of hazardous fumes, or exposure to mycotoxins released by 'toxic mould' are just a couple of the problems an unclean, unhygienic office environment present.

That build-up of fumes can cause headaches, nausea and lethargy in your client's employees. It's highly likely their symptoms would only get worse over time if the problem wasn't rectified.

Exposure to toxic mould or, more specifically, very high-levels of the mycotoxins they release can cause serious neurological conditions and even death.

If you clean the place likes it's your own home or personal office space you're sure to clean it perfectly, from top to bottom, ensuring your clients are able to work in a safe and clean environment.

Ensure you implement a cleaning plan

As a commercial cleaning company, you likely provide a detailed cleaning checklist containing the services you supply. Your clients are able to pick and choose the services they need from you.

So, they know what you're going to do. But, how're you going to do it?

Once you receive your client's wishes you can begin creating a cleaning plan for your cleaners to follow. This is likely to be an adaptation of a general cleaning system you follow for smaller jobs.

Every cleaning plan you create should begin with performing thorough COSHH assessments. This allows you to identify risk or hazard in every building you clean. Include the cleaning chemicals you will use in your assessment so you can choose the correct controls.

Pay special attention to high-touch areas

High-traffic and high-touch areas require special attention and should be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected.

Here are a few short tips:

1. To ensure you don't spread bacteria from one critical area (kitchens, bathrooms, etc) to another, use different equipment for different areas by utilising colour-coded mops and cloths.
   

2. Remember that cleaning and disinfecting are not the same thing. It's recommended that you use a broad-spectrum, multi-purpose, Defra-registered solution.
   

3. Make sure you use the right chemical for the job. Different infectious bacteria require different disinfectants to eliminate.

Always top to bottom, inside toward out

This cleaning method has been recommended for a long time because it simply is the only way to really simplify the clean. Ensuring you go from the very top down to the bottom means you catch everything.

All of the dirt up high gets knocked down on to anything lower than it. You then clean the next level, moving all that dirt down further until it reaches the floor.

You're then able to easily remove all of that dirt, beginning from the farthest area from the entrance and making your way to the opposite side.

Cleaning this way will ensure you remove all the dirt and that you don't track any more through the building as you're finishing up and leaving.

Provide green-cleaning services

Green-cleaning is designed to lessen the impact that cleaning has on our environment. Green-cleaning products are designed to produce less waste and use less electricity and water to create.

It's a lot better for our planet and reduces the harmful chemicals that may linger in the air after a thorough cleaning of the building's environment.

The International Association for Chemical Safety has teamed up with Sevron Safety Solutions to offer free occupational and chemical safety training courses. Check them out right here!