Office Hours Cleaning: Challenges & Best Practices

Office hours cleaning is an alternative cleaning service that many companies and businesses choose to have in their workspace. Whether it is due to the nature of their business, the size of their property or just a preference, office-hour cleaning comes with a few challenges for the cleaners. But like every other challenge, there are ways to deal with them with an optimised and pre-planned cleaning practice.

In this article, we’ll discuss the main challenges of office hours cleaning and the best cleaning practices for cleaning the office during working hours.

What is Office Hours Cleaning

Office hour cleaning, as the name implies, is cleaning the workspace during business hours when employees and clients are present in the office. This is an alternative cleaning mode as opposed to after-hours cleaning that many commercial office cleaning companies offer.

While the cleaning tasks are mostly similar, the time and duration of cleaning are different as staff should undertake cleaning tasks when the business is operating normally.

Companies interested in office hours cleaning should hire full-time or part-time in-house cleaning operatives or outsource it to commercial cleaning contractors who offer managed cleaners. Office hours cleaning requires skills and extensive training and outsourcing it to cleaning contractors is a logical move.

Read More: The Hidden Costs of Dirty Office Space

Office Hours Cleaning Challenges

While it is recommended for almost all businesses to choose after-hours cleaning services over office-hours cleaning, there are some exceptions. Many companies have certain conditions and rules and may have specific cleaning requirements based on the size and the setup of their office and business.

For example, in most companies that deal with confidential documents, office hours cleaning is the only option as cleaners should always be accompanied by an authorised employee to clean certain areas in the office.

Therefore, they have to go with office hours cleaning to ensure the workspace is safe and hygienic for their employees and clients. In this case, there are some challenges that cleaners should expect.

Read More: Daily Routine of a Professional Office Cleaner

Here’s a list of office hours cleaning challenges:

• Office hours cleaning may cause disruption and distract employees. For example, a vacuum cleaner makes a loud noise. Or the toilet is temporarily closed during the cleaning.
• Wet mopping is difficult during office hours. Wet floors are not only slippery and dangerous for people walking around in the office but also may cause more stains and mud marks as people walk on wet floors, turning the dirt on the bottom of their shoes into mud.
• Office hours cleaning is slower as there is often a short window to effectively clean certain areas in the office.
• Using a vacuum cleaner during office hours poses another risk. Long electrical cords may not only cause people to trip over when they walk around the office but may also tear and expose the metal wire and cause electrocution and fire.
• Using cleaning solutions and chemical agents during office hours may cause allergic reactions, eye irritation and breathing problems in vulnerable employees in the office, which makes office house cleaning challenging.
• Cleaning highly confidential and sensitive office spaces is challenging as cleaners should be accompanied by an employee when cleaning certain zones in the workspace like the archive and record rooms.

Read More: How to Prevent Sick Building Syndrome?

Best Practices for Office Hour Cleaning

While office hours cleaning is challenging, there are a few ways to mitigate them or make cleaning easier and more effective. The following list includes the best practices you can implement on top of the daily cleaning checklist for office hours cleaning operations:

• Prepare a scheduled cleaning plan for each area and inform employees before starting cleaning.
• Identify off-peak hours for different areas in the office and clean them during that time.
• Clean different areas in the office zone by zone in rotation during the day or during the week to reduce disruption without sacrificing cleaning efficacy.
• Use green cleaning products or odour-less cleaning solutions to prevent allergies and other complications of using cleaning chemicals.
• Invest in low-noise vacuum cleaners.
• Use caution signage during cleaning like wet floors, descaling in progress, etc.
• Provide training for cleaning confidential office space and run background checks (Like DBS Check in the UK) before hiring cleaning operatives.
• Ask employees to participate in keeping the office clean.
• Use robotic vacuum cleaners to constantly clean office floors. This is effective for cleaning open-plan office spaces.
• Use commercial cleaning AI software to create a usage pattern for each office zone and schedule the right cleaning frequency.
• Cleaning different office zones like private offices or meeting rooms during vacant periods.
• Cleaning toilets and kitchen towards the end of each day to avoid causing disruption.

Read More: Best Cleaning Strategy for Law Firms

Office Hours Cleaning vs. After Hours Cleaning

Although office hours cleaning is a necessity for many companies and businesses, it is still beneficial for them, if possible, to switch to regular office cleaning after working hours. Daily office cleaning has several benefits and when compared with office hours cleaning, there are more reasons to make the move and outsource it to commercial cleaning contractors.

• Regular office cleaning is:
  • Faster and more efficient,
  • cost-effective and helps businesses reduce cleaning costs,
  • and doesn’t cause disruption or distraction.

Read More: The ROI of Outsourcing Office Cleaning

Conclusion

Many businesses and companies have no choice but to have office hours cleaning due to certain circumstances, the size of their office or the setup of their business. Office hours cleaning, compared to regular after-hours cleaning services, has many challenges. In this article, we discussed the most important challenges of office hours cleaning and provided the best cleaning practices to mitigate or deal with them effectively.

The information provided in this article can help you identify the challenges with office hours cleaning and implement ways to deal with them without sacrificing cleaning quality in your workspace.