It is time for your meal break where would you normally choose to eat?At your office desk or sitting on the toilet?
I guess most of you would choose to eat at your office desk, wouldn’t you? You may change your mind when you learn that your average toilet seat in offices today has less bacteria on it than your office desk. Arizona University researchers collected swabs from around one hundred offices right across the US and on analysis found there was over 400 times as much bacteria on the office desk as on the average toilet seat. Does your Aberdeen office cleaner clean the office desk properly?
However, I have news for you that computer keyboard that is sitting in front of you right now had on average around 3,300 microbes per square inch. Scroll down using your computer mouse to read the rest of this article and you will around 1750 microbes per square inch. But the telephone – that thing that keeps ringing whenever you are trying to do your work – has 25,000 microbes per square inch.
The Alba Office Cleaning company regularly visits offices across Aberdeen to speak to staff who use a different contract cleaning company and occasionally finds a place where cleaning priorities are not fully worked out.
On one of those visits an office manager was telling me how she regularly has to complain to the office cleaners about the odd paper clip that has been left for days on the floor. Why she did not pick it up herself the first day I still don’t know.
On asking what the cleaners had been instructed to do about cleaning the office desk I was often told not to disturb any papers so staff had everything to hand. With her permission I spread a few clean sheets of paper from her printer on the desk. Tipped her own keyboard upside down and tapped it a few times to remove the crumbs, bits of skin and dirt from between the keys. After speaking about some other cleaning priorities and the stats I quoted above we signed a cleaning contract to provide that office with a regular cleaning contract which included the desk-tops and computer equipment using our own specialist cleaning staff.
I simply ask that when drawing up office cleaning schedules we give more attention to the welfare of office staff to get maximum performance from them.