Cleaning & hygiene checklist to eliminate COVID-19 risks

It’s no secret that germs have always spread at a rapid rate in workplaces. Employees pass germs on; entire offices come down with the common cold and the flu, while poor hygiene during lunchtime can result in food poisoning. Combining these elements with the added risk of COVID-19 means good workplace hygiene has never been more critical.

If you’re frantically searching for COVID cleaning services and tips, start with these achievable cleaning and hygiene steps to eliminate the risks from your workplace. These vital measures will prevent the spread of infections and protect your employees. Check them out below.

• Target high touch and high footfall areas
• Focus on personal hygiene
• Implement multiple hand sanitiser stations
• Add plastic screens
• Create a regular cleaning schedule
• Work with an experienced partner

Target high touch and high footfall areas

Stopping the spread of coronavirus and its risks starts by focusing on the areas people in your workplace interact with the most. Identify which areas see the most footfall, so you can clean these areas on a rotating basis throughout the day. These high touch and high footfall areas typically include:

• Clean door handles, furniture and entrances/exits
• Wipe down and pay extra attention to light switches, elevator buttons, stair rails, cabinet knobs and taps
• Focus on shared equipment, such as keyboards, phones, TV remotes, tablets, dispensing equipment — and even shared kitchen equipment like glasses and cutlery
• Don’t forget to create a cleaning rota to clean tables, desks, chairs, conference and meeting rooms, break rooms, the lunch area, waiting area and lobby

It might sound like a simple step, but it’s the first and most achievable cleaning tip to eliminate COVID-19 risks from your workplace. Why? Because these surfaces and areas are easy to contaminate by employees, which is one of the main ways this virus spreads.

Focus on personal hygiene

Another achievable way to eliminate COVID-19 risks from your workplace is to promote personal hygiene via thorough hand-washing. Here are some other steps to follow:

• Display posters throughout the workplace that promote handwashing. Whether you design them internally or ask your local public health authority for copies, these posters act as influential reminders to ensure good hygiene
• Combine these posters with other communication measures, such as guidance from WHO and other cleanliness updates
• Ensure everyone has easy access to areas where they can wash their hands with warm water and soap
• Also, emphasise respiratory hygiene in the workplace and promote this via posters in high traffic areas
• Make sure you offer a consistent supply of face masks and paper tissues, in case anybody develops a runny nose or cough
• Purchase bins with closed lids so everyone can hygienically dispose of their masks and tissues

These steps are also critical when attempting to eliminate COVID-19 risks in the workplace, as regular washing kills the virus on the hands and prevents the spread of coronavirus.

Implement multiple hand sanitiser stations

With more businesses returning to their workplaces, the demand for hand sanitisers has increased. Here’s what you need to do with hand sanitising stations in the workplace to reduce COVID-19 risks:

• Educate employees on hand sanitisers. The first step should always be to wash hands with soap and water — hand sanitisers are an extra layer of protection and are ideal in impractical or inconvenient situations
• Locate high traffic and high touch areas in the workplace and add hand sanitisers stations throughout the building, such as at the entrances, exits, communal areas, staff rooms, meeting rooms and on or near desks
• Ensure hand sanitisers are also wiped down as part of your cleaning routine. Although, there are some no-touch dispensing options where nobody will need to physically touch the sanitiser
• The NHS, hygiene experts and Public Health England say hand sanitisers require at least 60-80% alcohol to kill most viruses, so make sure your choices meet the requirements
• Stock up on sanitisers that don’t require alcohol to cater to different skin types
• Pre-order a sufficient amount of tissues and hand sanitisers from your supplier, including a batch of masks in the chance anybody developers respiratory symptoms

A coin-sized amount of gel or foam is enough to ensure clean hands. Combine this with regular handwashing with soap and water to reduce the risk of virus and bacteria transmission. As a result, you’ll have fewer illnesses and absenteeism.

Add plastic screens

Protective, plastic screens are the norm in many workplaces, and yours should be no different. The first step should be to keep staff working at a safe distance from one another — and then add plastic screens between them to ensure added safety.

They act as a physical barrier to enforce social distancing rules and stop airborne droplets that could contain the virus from travelling between employees. This follows the government’s advice to use barriers so you can separate people and introduce back-to-back or side-by-side working.

However, you must consider the airflow throughout the building when adding plastic screens. The last thing you want is to add protective screens, only to find they actually increase the risk of transmission due to blocking the airflow. An experienced partner can assist with this.

Create a regular cleaning schedule

Cleaning is everybody’s responsibility, but you need to create a regular cleaning schedule to minimise the risks of spreading COVID-19 within the workplace. Although everything mentioned so far will help you overcome these risks, you still need a regular schedule to ensure everybody remains safe.

What do you plan for your schedule to look like? Are you nominating people and creating a cleaning rota? Are you adopting a deep clean once a day? Or are you choosing a periodic clean at different times throughout the day?

If you’re keeping it in-house, you also need to think about PPE, stocking equipment, training and hiring costs — to name a few. These resources add up and can take your focus away from other areas of your role. 

Although it might seem like the right solution at the time, it isn’t the most cost-effective or safest way to keep your workplace clean. How do you know which chemicals to use? Have you considered the extra costs that could crop up? These are all things an outsourced, experienced partner can help with and solve.

Work with an experienced partner

The most effective way to eliminate COVID-19 risks from your workplace is to work with an experienced, outsourced partner. They have the experience, staff and industry knowledge on how your workplace can stay safe, so you have one critical task off your plate knowing a partner is taking care of this for you.

• Rest easy knowing unexpected costs like labour shortages and machinery breakdowns sit with the supplier — and not you 
• Enjoy superior service from the get-go with engaged, experienced and fully-trained staff from day one of your operation 
• Be confident you’ll remain compliant with a cleaning crew that always abides by critical health and safety rules 
• Hold others accountable for customer satisfaction and cleaning success, knowing a professional provider will never let standards slip 
• Be encouraged that all aspects of your organisation receive the right amount of attention, using a periodical cleaning system that highlights both high and low-frequency tasks 
• Feel good about the use of ethically produced, environmentally friendly cleaning products that meet high sanitation standards 
• Build a relationship with cleaning experts who can scale an operation in line with your own, so you never encounter teething problems or short-term visibility loss resulting from growth spurts
• The right partner will have the passion and high-quality service to ensure you and your guests feel comfortable — and your staff feel comfortable at work without constantly worrying about COVID-19 risks
• You’ll save time and money while benefiting from more expertise, a larger pool of talent and increased flexibility

Hiring a small cleaning team to clean a single office and eliminate COVID-19 risks is very different from managing a fleet of cleaning staff across multiple locations. If you want to adopt a cleaning approach that matches your growth plans, get in touch with an experienced cleaning team, like Kingdom Cleaning.

Outsource to an experienced cleaning team to minimise risks

Working with a professional cleaning service like Kingdom Cleaning gives you the peace of mind that commercial cleaning can be covered no matter how many sites you have. When it comes to eliminating COVID-19 risks from your workplace, this is the safest bet.

Our team of specialist cleaners are equipped to handle any commercial cleaning project and expand our capacity at short notice if you decide to expand or request additional cleaning services ahead of an event. 

Contact us below for more information.