You may have heard of COVID-19. For nearly two years, this virus has changed almost every aspect of life as we know it. Not only has it instilled a powerful newfound fear of crowds and infectious disease in most people, COVID has also made us think a lot—perhaps a little too much sometimes—about routine cleaning. Keeping our spaces clean is one of the most important ways we can keep ourselves and others safe from illness, and that fact has forced us to pay new, careful attention to tasks that until recently may have seemed mundane. Paying attention to cleaning is especially important in large, populous indoor spaces like offices. Because offices house numerous employees in relatively close quarters, extra health and safety precautions have become paramount in protecting the wellbeing of employees and their loved ones. In this post, we will look at some useful tips for keeping your office clean in this new state of being. Hopefully they will prove helpful in keeping your office a safe and productive environment.
Experiment With Work From Home Options
One of the most drastic changes to accompany the pandemic in terms of work culture is the rise of more flexible work from home policies. Of course, there are both pros and cons to expanding your remote work policies. But in the interest of health and safety, it can be the right thing to do. Now is a perfect time to take stock of your operations, consider which employees need to work in the office and which don’t, and adjust your plan accordingly. With fewer employees in the office, it is much easier to create a work environment with the proper amount of breathing room necessary to keep everyone safe and happy. In many cases, more flexible policies can be beneficial to your employees even if you set COVID aside.
Clean and Disinfect Surfaces Often
This one is almost a no-brainer, but it is incredibly important to step up the frequency with which you clean and disinfect the common surfaces in your office. Especially when it comes to shared surfaces like tables, doorknobs, and kitchen and break room counters, regular cleaning is key to reducing the spread of germs and keeping everyone from getting sick.
Make Cleaning Supplies Readily Available
In addition to doing your own duty when it comes to cleaning, it is also important that your staff and anyone else who frequents your office has access to the necessary cleaning supplies. The easiest way to make this happen is by keeping your supply of hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes high at all times and distributing them conveniently around the workplace. While most people may not seek out these supplies by themselves, they will be likely to use them if they are readily available. If everyone does their part in terms of sanitizing and disinfecting around the office, it will become a much safer place for everyone.
Encourage Hand Washing
Another crucial part of keeping your office clean is encouraging frequent hand washing. An office environment usually involves many people moving from place to place – in and out of meetings, to and from the bathroom, et cetera. If these people are not taking the time to wash their hands regularly throughout the day as they touch surfaces, their faces, and more, they can spread germs quickly. Stressing the importance of hand washing in the office is the best way you can get your employees thinking about what they are touching and when they are cleaning their hands. This will hopefully result in reduced transmission of germs like those that cause COVID-19.
Clean Whenever a Sick Person Attends the Office
It is also important to react accordingly when someone infected with the virus does happen to enter the office. First, you should make sure to clean any areas they visited as best you can. While it isn’t always possible to completely disinfect all points of contact, it is still a good idea to clean surfaces they touched. Second, follow up to find out which other people they came into close contact with and monitor for the possibility of new infections. If you can identify the people at highest risk of having been infected and encourage them to get a COVID test, you will have a much better chance of protecting the rest of your staff from the spread of infection.
Be Mindful of High-Traffic Surfaces Like Electronics
Electronics tend to gather germs as a result of being high-traffic surfaces. Especially in the case of touchscreens, keyboards, and other shared surfaces that get a lot of use, being diligent about cleaning is more important now than ever. Placing disinfecting wipes near these surfaces and creating policies for cleaning them after each use is one of the best ways to prevent infection from spreading between people in the office.
Require or Encourage Mask Wearing in the Office
Finally, wearing a mask is proven to be one of the most effective methods for stopping the spread of COVID infection. If you are willing, instating a mask policy in your office that requires everyone to wear masks while inside is an incredibly effective way to keep your staff healthy. Alternatively, if you do not want to enforce a strict mask policy, even just encouraging mask wearing will be much better than nothing. The higher the number of employees wearing masks while indoors, the safer your office will be overall.
COVID has turned our worlds upside down, especially when it comes to being mindful and purposeful about cleaning. Keeping your office clean and your staff safe might seem like an impossible task in light of the pandemic, but even if you cannot 100% ensure that nobody gets sick, there is a lot that you can do without too much extra effort. The tips listed above are some of the most effective ways to keep your space clean and stop the spread of the virus. And if you follow all of them, you can rest easy knowing that you are doing all you can to keep your employees and their families safe.
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