Surprise – It’s NOT the Restrooms!
Believe it or not, your public restrooms are NOT the dirtiest place in your facility.
A 2004 study out of the University of Arizona showed that the average office desk is teeming with over 10,000,000 bacteria — 400 times higher than your average toilet seat!
Many people don’t expect common places like a kitchen sink to contain more germs than surfaces in a public restroom, but the fact remains: more sickness is spread through front-facing high-contact touch points that we assume to be ‘clean’ than more obvious culprits like toilets, garbage cans, or the sink at your interstate truck stop.
Here are the four germiest places in your facility, and what steps you can take right now to make them safe, clean, and irresistably touchable!
- Lobbies and Entrances
Few places in a facility see as much foot traffic as the building’s lobby or front entrance. Beginning with the moment an individual steps foot into your building, they are both evaluating and contributing to the cleanliness of the facility.
Public-facing areas like waiting rooms can see hundreds of people pass through in a single day, with stationary objects like couches, chairs, check-in desks and water fountains gathering countless fingerprints, sneezes, saliva droplets, and layers of dust.
Not only is physical health a key factor in increasing public safety and comfort in these areas, but the first impression made by a high-traffic front facing area has the potential to impact perceptions on any person who spends time in your facility.
Ask yourself: what are people seeing when they spend time in my lobbies and building entrances? Are the corners free of dust, hair, dirt, and salt? Are the chairs and upholstery free of stains and grime? Are the high touchpoint surfaces being regularly treated with commercial grade disinfectants, and optimized for their appropriate dwell time with each application?
If not, it could be time to talk to a cleaning expert.
- Break Rooms
In a survey of its office supply customers conducted by the Quill Corp. of Illinois, more than 57% of survey participants responded that “a clean break room is directly related to the success of a business.”
Beyond being places where your employees eat lunch or make their morning cup (or 2 or 3…) of coffee, break rooms contain a multitude of common items that are regularly exposed to human contact.
Without regular disinfecting and cleaning, popular break room items like microwaves, draw pulls, countertops, sinks, and refrigerator handles become magnets for unwashed hands, greasy fingerprints, oily smudges, and GERMS.
Because of the high volume of foot traffic, break rooms need to be routinely sanitized to prevent the spread of sickness through common use items and shared surfaces. But beyond keeping sickness at bay, a sparkling break room is proven to significantly boost employee morale and increase workplace efficiency!
Safeguard your team’s health and happiness by engaging a professional commercial cleaner today.
- Conference Rooms
Participating in an afternoon meeting is probably so routine that you don’t realize the implications of an unclean environment; however, meeting rooms have the potential to spread sickness and leave employees and clients worse off due to environmental factors like food debris, overflowing trash cans, smudgy glass, and unsanitized boardroom tools.
Think about how many times you’ve ever taken a meal in a conference room. Now, imagine all the surfaces that make contact with your hands, your food, your utensils, and your meeting materials.
Without the proper cleaning protocols, conference rooms have the potential to quickly become breeding grounds for pests, debris, and germ-ridden high touch-point surfaces like whiteboards, markers, tabletops, arm rests, and door handles.
At Vanguard Cleaning Systems of Minnesota and Wisconsin, we understand how crucial it is that you receive the same level of excellence during every clean. That’s why we’ve created Scope of Work documents to checklist each and every area in need of service, so you receive a sparkling clean meeting room sure to inspire — each and every time.
- Employee Workstations
Coming in at number-one for germiest office area is employee work stations.
While it might be easy to think an employee’s workstation doesn’t matter all that much in terms of influencing the health of fellow employees, research shows that bacteria can live on hard surfaces for anywhere from 3 days to 6.5 months — meaning, that cold your secretary came down with two weeks ago may still be lingering on her workspace!
As the global workplace continues to forge through the effects of COVID-19, it’s crucial that facilities actively disinfect workspaces to eliminate the risk of cross-contamination.
And remember: just because it looks clean, doesn’t mean it is! Office phones hold around 25,000 microbes per square inch, while keyboards infamously hold 400 times the amount of bacteria than a toilet seat.
Get peace of mind for your facility and talk to a team member at Vanguard Cleaning Systems of Minnesota and Wisconsin today.
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