The next time you are in your office, ask yourself, “Is my janitorial service really doing their part to keep the office a clean and healthy place to work?” The office can be a daily confluence of people in a confined space, the perfect ground zero for bacteria and viruses that cause disease. Such microbes cause a host illnesses ranging from mild to much more severe outbreaks that can potentially keep employees home for weeks at a time. Despite healthy workplace habits like hand washing, if your commercial office cleaning company is not committed to keeping the office clean and sterile, employees will get sick and the workplace will quickly be ridden with absenteeism, lowering overall productivity and profit margins. The best defense against frequent outbreaks of colds, flus and worse is your office cleaning company. A commercial office cleaning company dedicated to the halting the spread of common, infectious bacteria and viruses, as well as keeping the facility an overall healthier place will invariably reduce these common and costly problems.
In the modern era of technology, more is known about the spread of bacteria and viruses than in anytime in previous history. For instance, on average a single adult touches approximately 25 communal items, items that can be contaminated by just one ill individual. As a commercial cleaning company, we recognize the importance of cleaning these heavily used and often contaminated areas in an office. This is so crucial because many studies suggest that as a result of their communal nature, items such as desktop surfaces and telephone receivers often have a bacterial load higher than a toilet seat! Many cleaning companies fail to recognize this and it can cause significant surges in costs and dips in productivity. You need commercial cleaning services that are committed to helping businesses just like yours reduce their losses by training their teams to clean these critical locations as well as put best practices into play in order to stop the spread of disease in its tracks.
Touch points are shared areas of your office building where many hands come into direct contact with items making them hotspots for disease-causing microbes. As such, maintaining the cleanliness of these hotspots is critical in keeping your office a healthy, disease-free environment. Extensive research informs us what you may have guessed, the objects that are touched most often house the most bacteria and viruses. These items range from phones to railings to computer mice and if they are not properly and frequently disinfected they quickly become ground zero for the transmission of disease. Does your commercial cleaning company sufficiently clean all these touch points giving each one the specific treatment it requires? If not, employees risk of illness and subsequent absenteeism, lowered productivity, decreased satisfaction and disengagement increase dramatically. Remember, making these items seem clean isn’t enough to protect your office from these invisible pathogens. Surfaces and objects can’t just LOOK clean, they must BE clean.
Everyone appreciates a clean, fresh smelling office, but beyond that the most important goal is protecting the health of your employees. It is evident that the transmission of pathogenic microbes makes people ill and even more clear that the correct use of appropriate chemical cleaners reduces if not eliminates such microbes in areas were they are most dangerous. Even further, numerous studies have indicated that when microbial hotspots are properly decontaminated that office related absenteeism starkly drops. Along with decreased absenteeism brings increased employee satisfaction, which in turn creates more productive workers and higher retention and engagement. So, the best place for employees to be is in a clean, healthy office environment.
The best cleaning companies understand that their primary goal is to clean for the sake of health. They thoroughly sanitize office hot spots and touch points and have a clear grasp on the difference between cleaning a surface, disinfecting a surface, and sanitizing a surface. They take into account dwell times and manufacturer recommendations to maximize their ability to combat the bacterial load in the office space. Finally, they not only make surfaces and objects visually clean, but biologically clean as well. The science of bacteria and viruses is advancing rapidly and so must your commercial cleaning company’s ability to apply these scientific advancements to assure your facility is clean, sanitized and ready for work. If they fail to do this, it opens you and your employees up to the risk of illness and prevents you from getting the full value of your cleaning budget. So what can you do to make sure your office space is protected? First, partner with a commercial office cleaning company that is always a forerunner in cleaning technology and in effective training for the office cleaners that will care for your building or buildings. Next, push your employees to adopt industry approved practices in hand washing and in illness related etiquette. Finally, make sure that your employees do not show up for work ill, they will not only be less productive but also run the risk of infecting other co-workers.
At Stathakis, we understand the importance of touch points and hotspots in our cleaning practices. We understand that the most important aspects of creating a healthy, clean workplace are professionalism, responsiveness and effectiveness in how we approach the care of your facility. We understand that WHO cleans your space is as important as HOW they clean it. We pride ourselves on going far beyond industry standards in keeping up with scientific advancements in cleaning products and practices, as well as recognizing the specific needs of your office location and modifying our general practices to match them. We can help protect your company from unnecessary absenteeism and make sure that you get the maximum value of your dollar for any cleaning plan. If you are interested in some of the numerous ways we help Facility Managers like yourself with affordable, state of the art janitorial services, please contact us at (800) 278-1884.Proudly serving the Southeastern businesses of Ann Arbor, including Detroit, Royal Oak, Farmington Hills, Downriver, Farmington, Dearborn, Livonia, Troy, Auburn Hills, Novi, and Plymouth.