6 min read

Office Cleaning Checklist

Office Cleaning Checklist

Offices are a central hub for your employees and a vital piece of your business's operations. Making sure your office is safe and healthy is an essential step in improving employee morale and reducing workplace illnesses. Establishing a plan of action for your office cleaning will help reduce employee sick leave, and improve your office aesthetic. 

It's most important to thoroughly clean areas where bacteria are most likely to grow and thrive. It's also common for these areas to be a breeding ground for bad smells. Ultimately, an efficient cleaning program will help you kill two birds with one stone and keep your building clean and safe, but also looking and smelling great.

 

Bustling Office

 

Determining Your Office CLeaning Schedule

The cleaning frequency you will need to adopt for your office is dependent upon several variables. 

  1. Office Size: Large buildings will require more frequent cleaning.
  2. Office Population Density: Sparsely populated offices need less frequent cleaning than densely populated offices. 
  3. Willingness to Self-Clean: Offices whose employees handle cleaning tasks will need far less frequency than those who leave all cleaning tasks to their janitorial supplier.

We've quoted just about every size office imaginable and created a huge variety of cleaning plans to accommodate each building's needs. We've come across office buildings that need 40 hours of cleaning five nights a week. We've also encountered offices that prefer cleaning one time each week for four hours, and offices that want one hour of cleaning five nights a week. Fortunately for you, cleaning companies are adept at understanding your building's needs and helping you reach a cleaning routine that meets your requirements and fits your budget. 

 

Daily Office Cleaning Checklist

While no office is quite the same, cleaning offices remains fairly consistent from building to building. The following list contains the most common cleaning tasks performed by office cleaners:

  • Waste Removal
  • Carpet Cleaning
  • Hard Surface Floor Care
  • Restroom Cleaning
  • Lunchroom Cleaning
  • Disinfection
  • Dusting
  • Wiping Down Desks

1. Waste Removal

The main feature of waste removal is removing trash from personal trash cans at each employee's desk and replacing the can liner. It's important to remove trash cans each night, especially if employees are snacking and eating at their desks and putting their trash in their trash can. Leaving food waste in personal cans for too long poses potential health and safety issues, just to name a few:

  • Food scraps will attract insects and pests and is a breeding ground for bacteria. 
  • Common foods and drinks like bananas and coffee can will create a very pungent odor in your space that can cause issues for nearby employees.

It's important for buildings that don't receive daily cleaning services to put measures in effect to prevent food waste from lingering in personal cans for too long. Providing supplies for employees to change their trash can liner or having a designated food waste receptacle in a common area can help mitigate food-related issues in your building between cleaning days.

 

2. Carpet Cleaning

Many offices are completely covered with carpet, with common exceptions for high-traffic hallways, lobbies, and lunchrooms. With such large swaths of carpet, it's incredibly important for office managers to make sure their carpets are getting properly cleaned. 

Dirt, water, salt, and other outside contaminants from daily foot traffic join forces with occasional food and drink spills to wear, tear, and stain your carpets. Office managers must take care of their carpeting. Daily vacuuming, spot cleaning after spills, and regular carpet deep cleaning prevent your carpet from picking up harsh odors, reduces fraying, and increase the longevity of your carpeting. If you're interested in learning more about carpet cleaning, go check out some of our other posts like the importance of keeping carpets clean or carpet cleaning services from Summit Building Services.

 

3. Hard Surface Floor Care

Many offices feature hallways, lobbies, and lunchrooms with hard surface flooring. Hard flooring comes in many varieties like tile, VCT, vinyl, and concrete. The most surefire way to keep any of these flooring types clean daily is simply sweeping and mopping. 

In addition to sweeping and mopping, we offer a variety of floor cleaning and refinishing services that keep hard surface floors looking great year-round. These services include buffing, top scrubbing and recoat, and stripping and waxing. 

 

4. Office Restroom Cleaning

Clean restrooms are a basic necessity in the workplace. While office restrooms don't face the wear and tear of a factory bathroom, it's still important to remain vigilant about the state of your restrooms. Daily restroom cleaning covers the basic steps of cleaning mirrors and countertops, wiping down toilets, replacing low rolls of toilet paper and paper towels, removing trash, and sweeping and mopping. We've explored restroom cleaning in much fuller detail in our Comprehensive Restroom Cleaning Services Checklist.

 

5. Office Lunchroom Cleaning

The lunchroom is a central hub area in your building where employees gather during their lunch breaks and throughout the day to wind down. Cleaning tables and counters, sweeping floors, and removing trash are essential steps necessary to keep lunchrooms fresh and clean. These are just the basic steps, if you're interested in a complete guide on lunchroom cleaning, check out our definitive lunchroom cleaning checklist

 

6. dusting

Dusting is a critical part of any office cleaning routine. While dusting doesn't need to be an everyday cleaning task, thoroughly dusting an entire building each week prevents too much unsightly dust from settling on high surfaces. 

The best way to perform dusting is not to do an entire building at once, though it is certainly a way to do it. It's best to break a building into chunks and dust in that area each night of service. While making little difference to building occupants, it makes dusting large buildings much more attainable for cleaners. 

 

7. Misc. Cleaning Tasks

While we try to create our quotes in a way that our cleaners effectively use their entire shift, there are times when cleaners work quickly and finish their normal cleaning tasks. When this happens, we encourage our employees to spend the rest of their shifts taking care of some miscellaneous cleaning tasks that aren't part of their normal cleaning routine. These tasks include some of the following:

  • Wiping Down Desks
  • Disinfecting door handles and light switches
  • Clean fingerprints off glass doors 

 

Benefits of Daily Office Cleaning

Having a laid-out and well-defined cleaning schedule allows both the cleaning company and the customer to have a better understanding of what's required to be done, and when. The following benefits are the result of aligning customers and service providers, which begins during the bidding process until the two parties part ways. 

 

1. Better Cleaning

Regular cleaning is the best way to ensure consistent disinfection and allergen removal. Implementing more frequent cleaning services allows us to focus on maintaining Indoor Air Quality at a high level and that makes a huge impact on the occupants of your facility. 

Allocating time and incorporating detailed cleaning into your building specifications is a huge added benefit to your final cleaning product. High and low dusting, vent cleaning, detail vacuuming, carpet cleaning, and upholstery cleaning are weekly to quarterly cleaning tasks that can be game-changers for your building's health. 

 

2. Pandemic Cleaning

Now more so than ever, setting and keeping a disinfection schedule is essential. Pinning down days of services, areas, and methodology is critical in keeping building occupants healthy. 

We have put in our due diligence to better understand how cleaning companies can assist businesses to resume working from the office. Head over to our coronavirus disinfection page to learn more about Coronavirus cleaning procedures and see how we can implement them at your facility. 

 

3. Boost Employee Productivity

Numerous studies have shown clean buildings significantly improve worker productivity. Setting up your cleaning program to maximize the cleanliness and efficiency of your space has dynamic effects on your staff.

Lunchrooms and restrooms are both notorious for creating a myriad of unpleasant odors that can harm employee morale. Daily cleaning and waste removal is a strong first step in keeping these areas fresh. 

 

4. Healthier Working Environments

Frequent cleaning reduces germs and harmful bacteria that can live in your office. Regular cleaning of restrooms, lunchrooms, and other high-traffic areas in your facility reduces the accumulation of dust, dirt, and harmful pathogens in the air and on your building surfaces.

Daily vacuuming and weekly dusting and cobweb removal improve Indoor Air Quality. Removing dust, cleaning, and disinfecting high-traffic touchpoints in your building greatly reduce the spread of infectious germs, decreasing the likelihood of office health issues.

 

5. Impress Your Customers

Treat your customers to a clean and welcoming experience in your building. A clean building lets your clients know you take pride in how you present your business and the care you take regarding your client's and employees' health and safety. 

Whether you're an office hosting executive meetings with clients or a store dazzling customers on the showroom floor, your visitors will be pleased to find a fresh and clean building awaiting them.

 

6. More Accurate Quality Assurance

A fixed maintenance schedule helps us deliver highly consistent service for our customers. Knowing when your building has been cleaned helps our quality assurance inspectors accurately assess the quality of work our cleaner is putting into your building.

Accurately assessing our cleaner's performance is the best way for us to correct cleaning deficiencies promptly making sure you're receiving consistent cleaning every time we step into your building.

 

7. Long-Term Savings

Daily vacuuming and regular hard surface floor care can greatly improve the life of your flooring systems. Semi-regularly scheduled deep cleaning services extend the life of your flooring, creating long-term value for your flooring systems.

Routine carpet care routines remove a large amount of dust, dirt, and allergens. These contaminants left unattended and under heavy foot traffic will tear and destroy the fabric of your carpet and coating in hard surface floors. 

 

Let's Talk About Your Office

Summit Building Services are trusted stewards of janitorial services for 200+ businesses throughout Northeast Ohio. We've cleaned buildings and offices in nearly every industry from grocery to steel. With this experience, we've been able to create cleaning programs that meet the specific needs of each building we service. We create these programs around each client's cleaning needs, and their cleaning budget to create win-win situations with our clients. If you're looking to make a change in your office cleaning provider, Summit Building Services is ready to help you. Your free quote is just a few clicks away when you schedule a building walkthrough

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