The Ultimate Guide to Keeping Your Office Clean and Healthy

No matter how many people work in your business offices throughout the week, your office space will become dirty. Even if no one steps foot on the premises, dust in the air will settle on surfaces, creating a thin layer of microbes across your desks, chairs, and floors. Avoid an unclean office by implementing routine cleaning practices. Here is the ultimate guide to keeping your office clean and healthy.

Start With a Plan

The most important step of your office cleaning regimen is creating the plan. During this stage, you’ll anticipate all your cleaning needs and analyze the best ways to boost healthiness in your workspace. Though the planning stage will look different for every kind of business, shop, and office space, the core parts remain the same.

Assess Your Layout

You must assess your layout. Understanding where you need to clean and how to navigate the space itself is vital to a successful cleaning system. For example, a square area with tile floors and evenly spaced cubicles will be straightforward to clean. However, a space with multiple corridors, collaborative workspaces, and creative pods will require more thought. Assessing the nature of your layout will give you an idea of how much square footage you must cover on the floor, as well as the number of surfaces to wipe down.

Consider Your Use and Activities

Once you have a mental image of the space and a plan for navigating it, you should think about the type of cleaning you’ll need in each area. A desk with a monitor and keyboard will require routine wiping down to avoid dust buildup. But if you have a workspace where you handle messy substances, you’ll need more time and more robust cleaning supplies to clean up.

For example, a metalworking shop will have slightly different cleaning needs than an insurance office. In the former, the metalworking offices will likely coexist with the industrial workspace. Metal filings and furnace-heated ash residue may find their way toward the desktop and computer system. Cleaning this space will require hard scrubbing to remove gunky buildup. On the other hand, an insurance building is a simple desktop cubicle environment where the only messy substance to clean up is the occasional spilled coffee. When you consider how you use your office space and the activities that go on inside, you’ll have a much more targeted and detail-oriented plan.

Write It Down

The final part of the planning phase is to write it down. You may think it’s easy enough to remember, but the specifics will get lost amid the hectic day-to-day life of the office. Don’t let your cleaning plans fall apart and write them down for consistency. Then, when you make a streamlined plan with clear steps, anyone with the time can follow it accordingly.

Address the Logistics

With a plan in place, it’s time to address the logistics of the cleaning process. The toilets won’t clean themselves!

Stay Accountable

After you record your sanitation expectations, you must appoint someone to oversee the duties. The cleaning manager will either complete the cleaning themselves or handle the task delegation. This person can then implement their own tracking systems, like timestamp sheets for recording cleaning times.

Assign Tasks Evenly

There are two options when assigning cleaning tasks in your office: using a cleaning rotation for staff in the office and hiring outside cleaning help. Depending on the system you choose, you must assign tasks evenly, so no one person feels overwhelmed with work. The last thing you want to do is task people unfairly with sanitary responsibilities.

Stock Up on the Essentials

Before you can actually utilize a cleaning system, you need the cleaning supplies. Ensure you have a stock of cleaning essentials that you’ll use every day and week. While you may wipe down and disinfect surfaces each day, you’ll likely polish the tile once every few days. Build your supply closet based on the anticipated frequency of use.

For example, you may use a ton of moist towelettes for surface cleaning, so buy bulk antibacterial wipes like ours at Dutch Harbor Brands. When you buy wholesale wipes in bulk, you maximize your wipe count for dollars spent.

Ensure Healthy Sanitation

There’s a big difference between wiping a surface with a wet paper towel and an antibacterial wipe. While you may not perform daily blacklight checks to analyze microscopic cleanliness, you should still expect a baseline health standard.

Focus on High-Contact and Germ-Dense Areas

If you want a truly healthy environment, you need to focus on the high-contact and germ-dense areas. These are the places around your office where people frequently touch and where the most germs congregate. In fact, most of the areas coexist, making them doubly important to clean.

Surprisingly, these general areas are the same in the office context as in the home. You must keep a close eye on the cleaning practices in your office kitchen and bathroom. In the kitchen, people can spill the lunches they brought from home, leaving a mystery mess of stick stuff on the counter. In the bathroom, people touch toilet seats, stall doors, and sink faucets that carry bacteria. If you don’t clean these areas consistently, germs will spread from the toilet to the sink to the bathroom door and out into the office itself.

Encouraging Office Cleanliness

Your office sanitation is just as much about routine cleaning work as it is preventative cleanliness culture. For instance, you should put up signs that encourage people to wash their hands for the full 20 seconds to avoid bathroom germs from reaching computer keyboards. You should also prompt people to use hand sanitizer upon arrival to stop outside germs at the door handles.

With this ultimate guide to keeping your office clean and healthy, you can begin your journey to a cleaner, safer office space. As the weeks pass, hold yourself accountable to the cleaning regimen and refresh your stock of cleaning supplies. Explore all our wholesale cleaning products at Dutch Harbor Brands and find an easy, affordable way to continue your cleaning without a hitch.