6 Best Ways to Clean Your Office Space
If you’re not part of the cleaning professionals of Markham, chances are you’re unsure of what exactly is entailed in cleaning office space. It sounds easy enough, of course, to wipe down a few computer desks and ensure garbage bins are emptied at night. However, these are only a few of the minor surface tasks.
We often receive questions from our corporate clients, wondering how to clean an office space efficiently. It might sound like a silly question, but there are several moving pieces in an office, and that means a lot of parts need proper cleaning at the end of your shift.
If you’re an office manager or business owner in Markham, and you find yourself wondering about what your cleaning crew should focus on during an office clean up, here are 6 tips to get you started:
Disinfect
Your employees are coming from home; they’re driving cars, riding public transportation, pressing elevator buttons, answering cell phones, eating food, using the washroom, and shaking plenty of hands. Between the commotion, bacteria are passed from surface to hand, hand to surface, and back to another hand. This is the cause of illness, and illness leads to lost wages, time, and productivity. The solution? Disinfect everything.
From keyboards and landline phones to door handles and light switches, germs are prominent in office spaces. You can minimize the impact these microscopic beings have on your office by having your cleaners wipe down communal and commonly touched surfaces at the end of each day.
Sanitizing spray or wipes are available through many reputable cleaning companies. It might seem tedious, but this step in the cleaning process is well worth the effort.
Get rid of the dust
Another irritant floating around your office space is the enormous amount of dust that tracks on shoes, coats, briefcases, and purses. This dust settles in carpets, on seat cushions, and is kicked up every time somebody moves about your office space. This can cause allergies to flare up, worsen respiratory illnesses, and be a general nuisance to your workplace.
Vacuuming daily is a great way to ease up on the amount of dust that kicks around the office during the day. Dusting high shelves, light fixtures, and even the top of computers before vacuuming ensure your cleaners are getting as much dust as possible during each cleaning.
Clean up food messes fast
Some people don’t realize how dangerous food mould spores can become, especially in an ill-vented office space where multiple people work in tight quarters every day. If there is food left on the counter, in the sink, on desks, or anywhere else in the office, cleaning it as soon as possible is best practice.
Unless it’s something that could be eaten later, like an unbitten apple or unpeeled banana, it’s not good to leave food lying around. Not only could it result in airborne mould spores, but it could also attract ants and other pests.
Keep the break room tidy
The break room is one of the toughest spaces to clean in an office because so many people use it regularly. From tidying reading material to wiping down tables and scrubbing baked-on food off the microwave tray—it’s nobody’s favourite job.
The break room sees your employees through the day, providing a space to meditate, eat lunch, discuss personal lives, and veg out between work. If the break room isn’t clean and ready for use each day, it could result in a lack of productivity, or become a drain on company morale.
After each workday, have your cleaning staff scan your break room for clutter, mess, and grime. From sweeping the floors to clearing expired food items from the refrigerator, keeping your break room clean ensures that you keep your employees happy.
Empty garbage bins regularly
Conveniently, new laws across most Canadian provinces make separating waste a must. This keeps most of the gross stuff out of your trash bins. However, there’s always that one person who forgets and tosses the last bite of an egg salad sandwich into the trash. Clearing the trash each day keeps odours from forming in your office space. It also ensures that there’s always enough space in the bin for new trash to be stored.
A problem some offices face when trash bins aren’t emptied is that trash sorting becomes obsolete. If employees are unable to fit their bottles in the recycling or put crusts in the compost, they wind up in the trash. Also, plastic wrappers and non-recyclable coffee cups end up in the compost bin or blue bucket.
To keep your waste sorted and your office smelling fresh, focus on getting the trash separated and emptied by your cleaning staff before it fills and overflows.
File away the clutter
It’s normal for most Canadian offices to have a few stacks of paper here and a few piles of pens there. Unfortunately, what happens to all these stacks and piles is that new work gets added, old work gets lost, pens leak ink onto important documents, and the whole thing turns into complete chaos. Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration of an unsorted workspace scenario, but it could happen.
The workday is busy, and sometimes there’s no time to sort and file paperwork. Take the time at the end of each shift to ensure that documents are where they need to be, files are put back in the filing cabinet, and office supplies are stored neatly to make life easier for you and your cleaning staff.
Hire Cleaning Professionals
If you’re interested in having a noticeably clean office with lasting results, we recommend hiring cleaning professionals. Cleaning professionals are trained to get all the hard-to-reach spots, sanitize areas where you might not realize bacteria is lurking, and keep your office looking tidy all year round.
At RBC Clean, we specialize in office, janitorial, commercial, and industrial cleaning services. Located in Aurora, and servicing all of Southern Ontario and the GTA, Our team is well-versed in all the intricacies of office spaces and the electronics and filing that comes along with them. We’re extremely careful around delicate items, and tough on dirt when we need to be.
For more information on our cleaning services, we invite you to contact us at 1-866-278-8208.