The Comfort of Clean

4 Monthly Tasks That Will Keep The Whole Office Cleaner

16 January 2020

Irma Stewart

An office should be a clean, sanitary environment where people can feel confident and comfortable getting their work done. If you are part of an office building cleaning team, however, you might feel like you're fighting an endless battle. Every day, there's more dust to vacuum up off the carpet and more grime to wipe off the desks. While you could just keep cleaning up all the grime day after day, there is another approach. If you can manage to tackle these four cleaning tasks just once a month, the office will stay cleaner, and your daily cleaning burden will go down.

1. Change the air filter.

This one is not cleaning in the strictest sense, but it is a maintenance task. In many commercial buildings, the HVAC techs only come out when there is a problem, so everyday maintenance like changing the air filter can get ignored. Changing the air filter once a month will reduce the amount of dust that blows through the system and ends up all over the office. A new filter will also do a better job of catching allergens like mold spores and dust mites so employees will feel more comfortable during the workday.

Changing an air filter is usually pretty easy. You pull the old one out of the slot and slide a new one in. If the building's HVAC system is located in a secluded space, like the basement, make sure you get the key to access such a space.

2. Launder the window treatments.

Window treatments tend to get covered in dust and debris pretty quickly. Yet, in most offices, they rarely get cleaned. When you open a window or a breeze gets blown through the room by a fan, dust gets blown off the curtains or blinds and into the room.

If the office has curtains, take them down and have a dry cleaning service clean them once a month. (Some dry cleaning services will even pick the curtains up for you and return them, cleaned, a day or two later.) If the office has blinds, wipe them down or vacuum up the dust. If you find your current window treatments tough to clean, you may want to consider replacing them with a more easily cleanable option, such as wide blinds or shades.

3. Clean behind books and other shelved items.

If a lot of dust and debris accumulate on shelved items, every time someone removes an item from that shelf, the dust will get scattered all over the place. A better strategy is to remove items from the shelf once a month and then clean both the items and the shelf. You can wipe down the items with a cloth that has been lightly sprayed with an all-purpose cleaner. Vacuum the dust off the shelf using a wand attachment. 

If you feel odd about dusting the items on various employees' shelves, see if the employees themselves would prefer to do this cleaning task once a month. You can then clean the shelves of employees who don't want to do their own and are okay with you touching their things.

4. Change out your cleaning products.

When you use your cleaning products every day, you sometimes lose track of how dirty they are becoming. Your mop might become a bit moldy. Buckets may accumulate grime. So once a month, clean your cleaning products! Throw away disposable or cheap items, and replace them. Launder mop heads, scrub out buckets, and rinse all of your scrub brushes.

Sometimes the best way to keep an office clean is to tackle the big tasks. If you can manage to do these things once a month, the entire space will require less cleaning overall. 

Share  

Search