The best ways to keep your building clean

When it comes to presenting a professional company image – cleanliness should be one of the highest attributes on your list. Presenting a clean front is a great way of maintaining both customer and employee relations and, in achieving these, a way of protecting the future of your business. Cleanliness may also help you avoid potential disastrous meetings with Health and Safety Officers, and hopefully help you avoid the risk of potential financially crippling accidents in the workplace.

Therefore, how you choose to clean your building is an important decision, and not one that should be taken likely with many businesses operating in cut-throat competitive markets, health and safety getting stricter every year, and a continual increase in employee claims arising from accidents in the workplace.

There are three main ways of cleaning your building, which are: incorporate cleaning duties into the roles of your current employees, employ a cleaner or cleaners to undertake all cleaning tasks, or hire a professional contact cleaning company like the one I use to clean your building for you.

Using current employees to clean

Many small and medium-size businesses often decide to ask employees to undertake cleaning duties such as tidying offices and staff-rooms, and then often fall in to the trap of asking or, worse, expecting them to take on more cleaning duties. Whilst this may seem a great short-term way of utilizing staff – in the long-term it can often prove to be a pitfall you should have avoided. Staff whose job descriptions do not include cleaning duties will often get disillusioned and demotivated if asked to do them. They may to do them for a while, often for fear of losing their job, but the chances are they will soon be taking sick days where they didn’t used to, and output and morale will soon plummet. Also, as untrained cleaners, the standard of the cleaning in your building is likely to sink to an unsatisfactory standard through no fault of your employees. You also need to consider that you will need to purchase and maintain any equipment that is necessary to achieve the required and desired standards of cleanliness.

Employing a cleaner

Whilst this is usually an improvement on using current staff, small and medium businesses often find it is hard to find reliable cleaning staff on a part-time or full-time basis. Of course, new members of staff will also have the right to take holidays and, as low-wage earners, are likely to take some sick days. During these absences, businesses find themselves having to again ask other members of staff to take up cleaning duties which leaves them open to falling standards of health and safety and employee morale. You also still have purchase, maintain and replace necessary cleaning equipment.

Hiring professional cleaners

One-way businesses can maximize the cleanliness of their buildings is to hire professional contract cleaners, and doing this should help you present that all important professional image as well as maximizing staff morale. Also, because professional cleaning companies know all about current regulations, you’ll find yourself worrying less about hiring and training staff and have more time to maximize the money-making potential of your business. Professional cleaning companies will also take responsibility for cleaning your entire building and recommend and provide all the services they think you’ll need. They also have their own equipment, which means the headache of buying, maintaining or possibly replacing equipment will vanish instantly. Even better, you don’t have to pay them sick pay or holiday pay, and the responsibility of cleaning your building, as set out in the contract, becomes theirs.