As an employer you must protect your staff from harm, this means you should take reasonable steps to protect your workers and visitors from coronavirus or other infections. Such virus’s and infections can transfer from people to surfaces and can be passed on to others, keeping your workplace clean reduces the potential of this spread and is a critical part of making and keeping your business ‘COVID-secure’. You may want to take on some of this responsibility yourself, or you might want to look into cleaning services from a commercial cleaning company.
Anything that is frequently touched, by lots of people, is going to need more regular cleaning than usual. Here are some examples of items you may want to consider cleaning more often.
Work surfaces: desks, platforms and workstations should all be cleaned more often.
Handles: from doors, windows, and rails to water dispensers. All handles should be cleaned frequently as they are used so often.
Common areas: perhaps usually only being cleaned at the end of the day, common areas should be cleaned sporadically throughout the day. Examples include lifts, staff rooms, toilets and changing rooms.
Appliances: taps, kettles, water heaters, fridges are all things that are used often by lots of staff, and so need to be cleaned often.
Computer equipment: touch screens, phones, monitors and keyboards should also be cleaned often.
You can also think about what you can do to reduce the need for such frequent cleaning. Can you limit the movement of people around your workplace? You may want to give everyone a dedicated desk if you have previously used hot desking. Can you reduce peoples need to touch surfaces? Are you able to close off spare workstations and put away items that you don’t truly need? This may help you reduce the need for frequent cleaning, but you may still want to look into professional cleaning services to conduct a deep clean at the end of the day.
This is cleaning at different times throughout the day. You may want to set up a schedule so that certain areas are cleaned every hour and then signed off. On top of this you could encourage staff to clean things such as meeting rooms, or shared spaces after each use.
This is a thorough clean of all frequently touched surfaces at least once per day. This can take up a lot more time than periodic cleaning, so this is where you may want to hire the help of a commercial cleaning company for cleaning services.