Finally you’ve arrived. You’ve moved your business out of your home into your first professional office space. You’ve started to employ staff and along with this expansion, the bills have started to pile in! This is when you will start to consider what support services you really need to purchase and what services can wait.
Ensuring you have good IT cover is essential as you can’t afford for your business and its services to grind to a halt but what about the other things such as hiring an office cleaner? At first you may think that you and your team will be able to handle keeping the office clean. You can always bring in a vacuum cleaner and duster but will you remember to clean the toilets and wash the tea towels? Will you forget to clean your phones and keyboard? Will your staff leave the waste paper baskets overflowing because they are too busy working on their ‘day job’? What you have to ask yourself is will this affect staff morale? We all have different standards and when it comes to cleaning you may find arguments breaking out amongst staff as some may appear to be more thorough than others!
First impressions count and if you want to have the right impact on your customers and clients then keeping your office clean and tidy is essential. If your surroundings look sharp and professional then this will be a strong indication of how you do business. If you look like you are running a smooth, efficient operation then this will help to reflect your company’s vision, values and ethos. Also you need to inspire your workforce. Expecting them to stop their work to tidy and clean the office will not be good for productivity and an added distraction away from their proper job.
Bacteria thrive in warm, wet areas and when bacteria levels can double every 15 minutes, items around the sink such as sponges and dish cloths become hot beds for contamination. Think of the sponges washing every cup in the office and the dish cloth spreading germs with every wipe! You can see how illness can spread. One person gets flu and rapidly the whole office could be affected.
You often hear of statistics indicating that your loo seat is cleaner than your kitchen sink, well the same can be said of the office. There are 49 germs on every square inch of a toilet seat but studies have shown there are 25,000 germs on every square inch of a phone! Other office ‘hot spots’ include keyboards, door handles, office kitchen sinks as well as the usual locations such any surface in the toilet! Considering staff sickness can cost companies dearly in terms of loss of productivity and sick pay, the knock on effect on businesses is substantial especially when at least 60% of all time off work is related to dirty offices!
Perhaps the expense of office cleaning should be thought of as an essential rather than an extravagance. The health and safety issues that arise when you let your office environment become untidy and unhygienic far outweigh the relatively small saving you will make avoiding the cost in the first place. Increasingly managers and business owners are realising that outsourcing office cleaning services reduces the overall risk of the spread of germs and establishing systems, procedures and checklists ensures your business is in line with legislation and best practice. So whether is down to protecting your staff morale or your organisation’s productivity, keeping your office ship shape is one expense you can’t afford to avoid.
