It’s that time of the year again, the air is starting to cool and the warnings to be aware of the flu are starting to escalate in the media. ABC news reports Presenteeism, or put more simply sick workers that drag themselves into the office are costing the economy a reported $34 billion in lost productivity through the spread of office infection. So how can we mitigate the spread of infection throughout your workplace and ensure that it isn’t a ticking time bomb for unproductiveness and reduced productivity this winter?
The first and most important thing is to realise that potentially everyone is infectious and therefore proper procedures have to be implemented and followed at all times by all employees. The great thing is that these procedures have been taught to most of us already in the form of manners and basic hygiene. Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, wash your hands regularly, and if you’re not feeling well – keep your distance. These are a few obvious suggestions that will go a long way in helping to control infection.
The second most important is keep a clean workplace. A good cleaning team that understands the importance and how to implement good infection control strategies can go a long way to saving you thousands in lost employee productivity. To help you, The team at Solutions 4 Cleaning have compiled a few tips to help you this flu season.
Use the right chemicals for the job but more importantly understand how they work. Spray and wipe in most cases misses one important message in its title. It takes time to kill germs. Many of the germs that cause the common flu can take anything up to 10 minutes to be killed with the right chemical. It is important for your cleaning team to understand this and know how to include Spray, Leave and Wipe in their daily cleaning regime.
Use clean equipment and colour coding. Common sense right? Well sure, and most cleaners have some sort of colour coding in place, but clean equipment, this is another thing all together. The team at Solutions 4 Cleaning has identified that often poor planning can be a major cause of cross contamination in your workplace. Knowing how much clean equipment is needed to carry out a full shift; what areas will need to be cleaned; and even how many different sites they will be working at during their shift are essential parts of a good infection control strategy. If you get this wrong, you can often see cleaners using bathroom cloths to wipe over keyboards, desks and phones or simply just trying to do that last site of the day with one cloth altogether.
Have your washroom facilities deep cleaned regularly. Along with good daily cleaning practices your washrooms should undergo a deep clean at least quarterly. This means wash floors, walls, cubical doors and all other surfaces with a good disinfectant. Solutions 4 Cleaning also offers a fogging service that allows disinfectants to really penetrate killing even the most resilient microorganism.
Regularly wash your hands, change your gloves and have intelligent workflows in place. It is essential to regularly wash your hands and change gloves between the different cleaning duties that might be carried out in your workplace. Changing all the bins then wiping the desks for example is not a good strategy, but even wiping the desks then changing the bins should be accompanied by a good hand wash and a change of gloves.
The team at Solutions 4 Cleaning cleans a number of medical centres in and around Brisbane and has adopted many of its cleaning workflows, disinfection plans and employee training strategies into its general cleaning services. Their aim is to work with their customers to truly provide a clean work environment – not simply one that looks clean, and to do so for the long term.