Pro CleanWhen it comes to running a successful business, there are three main areas that should always be top of mind: People, products, and processes. This means:
- Having the right people in place,
- Offering the right products or services, and
- Following appropriate processes to ensure the highest levels of efficiency and productivity.
You can have the absolute best products or processes in place. However, if your employees are not performing to your productivity standards due to illness-related absenteeism, it can cause a variety of issues for your company, such as impacting the quality of the products or services you offer as well as profitability.
This is where office cleaning is an important factor in helping to reduce employee absenteeism and the costs associated with it.
The Dreaded “A” Word
Absenteeism, or an employee’s absence from work, is a big problem for companies worldwide. Employers have a responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment for their employees. When employees are frequently staying home sick, the resulting absences can result in decreased productivity.
In fact, according to a 2016 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “productivity losses from missed work cost employers $225.8 billion, or $1,685 per employee, per year.”
Maintaining a clean building can help to remove dirt and other contaminants that can contribute to employee illnesses. However, when it comes to office cleaning to promote employee health and overall office health, there’s clean and then there’s clean.
The Dirty Truth
Many companies claim to provide the best cleaning services. But, just because they say it doesn’t necessarily make it true. When it comes to levels of cleanliness, public experts break it down into three categories: Sterile, Disinfected, and Sanitary.
The first level, sterile, refers to an environment that is 100% free of contaminants (one example is a medical laboratory). Because this requires specific processes to maintain, this level of cleaning isn’t conducive to an office environment.
A disinfected environment is one in which cleaning processes have removed 95% of harmful substances and pathogens. This is the level at which Pro Clean operates as a bare minimum for all of our clients.
Sanitary is the last level. It refers to a level of cleaning in which some contaminations and risk of diseases still exist; however, general employee health is protected nevertheless.
Your employees’ health and wellness is a top priority for our highly-trained and experienced employees. We achieve disinfected-level results by following industry best practices and by adopting an Operating System 1 (OS1) approach to comprehensive cleaning. This ensures that we clean with health first in mind and don’t just clean for appearance only.
Cleaning Beyond the Surface Level
When you hire a professional cleaning service to improve office health, it’s important that you hire someone who goes beyond just vacuuming, mopping, and dusting. With our team of experienced cleaning professionals, we always go beyond the minimum to provide our clients with the best possible services every time.
Still not convinced that you need more than a basic office cleaning? We have a few concerning statistics that may help change your mind.
Business Insider cites statistics that show recirculated air inside of a building can be “up to 100 times dirtier than outside,” and that people working inside buildings are “exposed to a variety of unhealthy gases and chemicals.” These risks are increased inside buildings that are not well maintained, as dangerous bacteria, mold, and other toxic substances and particles travel through the air system.
Do your employees frequently eat at their desks while working? Then you might be shocked by some research that is cited by the National Center for Health Research (HCHR), which shows that University of Arizona researchers found that the average desktop has 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat.
Even more disturbing — HCHR cites the results of a study conducted by researchers at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, who discovered that:
“Two deadly drug-resistant types of bacteria (vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)) could survive for up to 24 hours on a keyboard, while another common but less deadly bug (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) could survive for an hour.”
Do we now have your attention?
Bottom Line
As an employer here in the United States, you are held to certain standards regarding providing a healthy and safe environment for your employees to operate in each day. This means that you need to make sure that your office cleaning responsibilities are being performed to meet the highest standards. This means sanitizing everything from large areas like kitchens, bathrooms, and common areas to even carefully cleaning the smallest of details — elevator buttons, soft drink machine buttons, and door knobs.
At Pro Clean, we hold ourselves to the highest industry standards to ensure that we do our jobs right so your employees can stay healthy and focus on theirs.
As the first company in Florida to receive the cleaning industry gold standard certification, ISSA’s Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS) — with honors, we might add — Pro Clean is held to the highest standards by industry experts regarding our use of environmentally-responsible cleaning products, equipment, and processes. This helps us to reduce our environmental impact while achieving the best results for your business.
Contact Pro Clean today to speak with one of our cleaning and facility maintenance experts about how we can help you improve employee health through our top quality office cleaning services.
