Every business makes mistakes. “Fail your way forward,” goes the saying.
And how you clean your business is certainly no exception. Making mistakes is okay, as long as you learn from them and aim to get better. But making the same mistakes that cost your company time and money, without making changes, isn’t okay.
Here’s some common ones your organization should watch out for:
1. “If it looks clean and smells clean, it is clean.”
This may be how you’re used to judging cleanliness. Yes, your premises can be clean to your senses. But, you could still have a horrifying number of germs, bacteria, pollen, viruses, pollutants, and other disease-causing agents thriving on apparently clean surfaces.
Sanitizing removes the vast majority of these. And typically, it involves just one extra step: using a disinfectant.
Business value: fewer absences due to illness and greater productivity.
2. Using the Wrong Cleaning Products
Yes, most businesses have linoleum or tile floors. But regardless of the floor type, it’s important to know the true composition of your floor so you know how to clean it and what to clean it with. In many cases, you can use a neutral cleaner. And that’s what you should use if you’re not sure what material makes up your floor.
If you have a marble floor, use a rayon mop, hot water, and diluted neutral floor cleaner. A microfiber dust cloth or floor buffer helps also.
Business value: Avoid damage and doing work that needs to be redone. Create an immaculate presentation that makes your employees proud and impresses customers.
3. Not Properly Cleaning Your Cleaning Equipment
Your cleaning equipment needs to be clean itself to do its job. Unfortunately, many organizations make the mistake of not keeping it in top shape prior to use.
Your mop may not need rinsing on smaller surfaces. For larger surfaces, however, you absolutely have to do this.
Your team needs to understand the importance of doing this. And you need to establish accountability (and follow through on it) so they have motivation to do it themselves.
Business value: You’ll get the clean surfaces you want. You’ll also get longer life out of your equipment and save on supply costs.
4. Cleaning Surfaces Aggressively and Too Often
Let’s take a look at the grout you might find in a bathroom, for example. Over time, it becomes dingy and grimy, so it doesn’t have the visual appeal it used to.
Scrubbing with a grout scrub brush does the job. But you don’t have to do this every day, or even every week. You can do this as infrequently as monthly, depending on the foot traffic to that bathroom. Since you also scrub the entire floor, that assists in cleaning the grout, further reducing the necessity to clean it separately.
Business value: Become more productive and efficient. Spend more cleaning time on what matters. Avoid causing damage you have to pay to repair.
If you find you’re making any of these commercial cleaning mistakes, fix them fast. Each one drives your business, and customers, a little more value.
