As a Facility Manager, you are responsible for assuring your building always looks its best. You are also charged with managing operating costs and even looking for ways to reduce expenses. So it can be tempting to try to save money handling facility maintenance with in-house personnel. Or even using cheaper cleaning services to try to meet budgetary requirements. Using in-house personnel to clean your office doesn’t add up to cost savings, cuts into your time and adds to your hassle factor. And shopping for janitorial services only based upon cost is likely to net you poor services, plenty of headaches and even compromise your reputation and the safety of your building’s occupants. In order to get green office cleaning services that deliver, you need to consider the following cost saving benefits and must haves with regard to your office cleaning services.
Many office buildings are built with sealed construction that creates efficiencies and reduce energy costs. But this efficient building design can also impact indoor air quality by keeping any pollutants trapped inside your office building. A quality green cleaning company can help keep your building clean and improve indoor air quality by removing allergens circulating throughout your facility and settling into furnishings and carpet. Likewise, the most effective green cleaning companies will utilize green cleaning chemicals reducing the chemical load in your facility while assuring your property is clean, healthy and your building occupants can breathe easy.
The best commercial green cleaning services understand touch points, hotspots and dwell times. The science of clean is real and if your janitorial company isn’t in the know, you are missing out on the many benefits of outsourcing your office cleaning. Touch points, hotspots and dwell times, what do all these words mean? Touch points and hot spots are those areas in your building that see many hands over the course of the day and thus, tend to collect and transmit disease causing germs among employees and visitors to your building. By focusing green cleaning efforts on these oft touched surfaces, like door knobs, switches, computer mice and more, your green cleaning services hits germs where they live and can significantly reduce illness, absenteeism and even hits to your overall productivity that can arise from sick employees. Dwell time is an industry term that refers to how long a green cleaning product must sit wet on a surface in order to effectively kill germs. If your office cleaning company is rushing their work and isn’t following proper dwell times, they are leaving disease causing germs behind ready to take down employees and your bottom line.
There have been a number of strides in the cleaning industry in recent years. New cleaning equipment is greener than ever. But you might think that with new, state of the art cleaning equipment comes excessive increases in green cleaning prices when the opposite is often true. How can you SAVE money with cutting edge technology? Along with getting greener, cleaning equipment is getting leaner, meaning newer green cleaning equipment often requires far less in terms of labor hours, a janitorial company’s greatest single expense, and better cleaning equipment uses fewer resources, all adding up to savings for you. Not to mention green cleaning equipment is most often more effective, easier on air quality, more sustainable and even easier on the employee operating it.
Building maintenance budgets are continually tightening leading Facility Managers to find more creative ways to cut costs without compromising their building’s maintenance. Green cleaning can coincide with your janitorial company’s Smart Cleaning program. What is Smart Cleaning? Smart Cleaning is about partnering with a green cleaning company to identify the essential services in your facility, outlining those that are important but not essential and marking out those areas you can intermittently service without an unacceptable dip in overall building maintenance and the perception of tenants, employees, customers and visitors. You and your green janitorial services company will strategically identify:
“What are you doing, does it make sense?”
“What must you get even on a reduced budget?”
“Are there things that could be done less?”
“Are there things that perhaps don’t need to be done anymore?”
“Are there better, more efficient ways to do those things we must do?”
When you partner with an effective, reputable commercial green cleaning company, they are responsible for equipment acquisition, maintenance, repair and more. In fact, it is so much more efficient to have a janitorial company purchase equipment and replace it more frequently than to purchase equipment for your facility only to either get stuck with dated, less effective, but usable equipment. Think about it, your janitorial company can invest in state of the art green cleaning equipment like backpack vacuums and expensive floor scrubbers because of the scale of which they do business. Their scale also allows them to more frequently replace dated, aging equipment meaning you get the latest and greatest in your facility with less cost and responsibility.
Often your commercial office cleaning service will offer other services like HVAC, plumbing and even emergency services. This means that when you suddenly have a need for immediate maintenance, you already have an established relationship with a trusted building maintenance company. That means you go to the head of the line, rather than languish waiting for a new vendor to get to you. Likewise, the foundation between you and your green cleaning company means pricing, negotiating and managing other services is much easier than starting from scratch.
The right green office cleaning services can help your building shine all the while helping you reduce costs and make your facility a healthy place to work. Green office cleaning doesn’t have to come at a premium. Partner with an effective, established, reputable and experienced building maintenance company, and you can establish a partnership that will serve you both well for may years to come.
At Stathakis, we offer green office cleaning, green medical cleaning and more to Southeastern Michigan businesses just like yours. We work hard to provide our valued customers with the latest and greatest in green cleaning without the sticker shock. With more than thirty years serving our local community, Stathakis understands the demands put on the facility managers we work with. If you are interested in green office cleaning or other building maintenance services, please contact us today to get started at 1-800-278-1884.