Cleaning and infection control management plans have risen from the least important to the highest priority of all business operations.
The cost of having your business closed, or closed for longer than absolutely necessary is massive. Without a strong plan, businesses will struggle during periods of virus surge/seasonal flu and potentially risk closure.
The most effective way to prevent this is by ensuring your cleaning management plan is considered and effective, so you can protect the people, the operations of the business and the bottom line.
So how often should your cleaning team attend and what should they be doing?
There’s no one size fits all solution or government guidelines to follow. However, we always recommend the ‘bums on seats’ principle.
Say you have a small – medium office with approx. 10 employees. Most employees will visit the bathroom a minimum of 3 times daily during a workday, as with kitchen facilities to make tea, coffee and lunch.
That equates to 150 bathroom visits and 150 kitchen visits per day. Over 300 opportunities for cross-contamination in shared spaces. Adjust the equation to a large office of 50+ people and the numbers are staggering.
Often when we highlight this to potential clients, there’s an immediate understanding of how easily infection can spread so quickly, between workplaces and into the community. It just takes one person, often unknowingly carrying a virus.
Cleaning Scope: How do you decide what to clean?
We recommend breaking your cleaning scope into high and low priority areas.
Dusting and cobwebbing is important but has less of an impact relating to infection control than say cleaning door handles that are frequently touched.
There are 4 high-risk areas to consider.
These 4 key areas should be the priority for each clean. If you’re cleaning service frequency is once weekly, we recommend talking to your team about implementing basic cleaning practices of these areas on a daily basis. This can be as simple as having disinfectant and disposable cloths accessible in the kitchen to spot clean touched surfaces. Whilst it’s not as effective as a commercially trained cleaning crew, it will still provide an important level of infection control.
Scheduling low priority areas additionally to that throughout the month will help to ensure every cleaning task required is attended to by a professional team within a one-month period, without blowing out the budget!
Commercial Cleaning Frequency Guidance
The below is a simple but useful guide. Whilst it doesn’t consider the size of the workspace, or the industry, it will give you an idea of best practice.
With our many years’ of experience within the industry, we’ve had the benefit of witnessing what delivers the best outcomes for all businesses, from small offices to large corporate facilities. We hope that by providing insight into how easily a virus can spread, we can help businesses successfully mitigate the risks within their own workplaces.
If you’d like us to review your current scope of works and provide a quote for your business, please call us on (07) 4998 5250 or email admin@cleanfeeling.com.au.
