Do you know how dirty your office really is? New research has been released that confirms your working desk environment is a hazard to your health. This research reveals that two thirds of staff are prone to going sick due to the high levels of germs on their desks. Just take a look at the visualisation of a standard office desk below and you will see this is a real area of concern for employers and employees alike.

We are talking dangerous like germs here and failing to clean regularly can encourage bugs to breed, such as Helicobacter pylori, Staphylococcus aureus, E-coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to name a few. Make sure you do clean regularly and reduce the germ levels on desks and all key areas in your office.

Here Are the Desk Facts Many Don’t Know but Should!

• The average desktop harbours 20,961 germs per square inch
• Keyboards harbour on average 3,295 germs per keyboard
• Then there’s your dirty little mouse with 1,676 germs
• And a staggering 25,127 germs on the average office desk phone
• Have a work kitchen then add another 2,483 germs per square inch on your kettle handle, and your office tap around 1,331 germs
• Compare this to the 49 germs found on the office toilet seat and you can that most offices aren’t that clean, in fact they are an area of great germ creation and
• To highlight these, Printerland.co.uk have created new visualisations of bacteria at work (The image above ion this article). Their survey of 1,000 office staff, also unveiled that only a third follow suggested guidelines about cleaning up their workplace, while one in 10 never clean their desks.

Dirty Offices Increase Sick Days & Hit Your Productivity

So, what is the cost of this to the UK economy? The cost is truly staggering, poor productivity and sick days are costing the UK economy a massive £77.5 billion a year and this figure is growing year on year.

It’s no surprise when you discover that the average office desk is harbouring so many germs that sickness days are increasing and productivity declining. It’s very simple to focus on saving money within a business and not understanding the impact of cutting necessary services like office cleaning will have.

Although you can try to encourage staff to be cleaner you know it’s never really going to happen, but the sick days will. We are not saying cleaning desks will reduce sick days, but it will go some way to making your office environment less hazardous and ensure you staff are protected against some really nasty bugs that lurk all around the office.

Clean It Like It’s Your Own

Finding the right cleaning company never appears to be an easy task for many businesses these days. So why is it so hard to find the right cleaning company for your office?

The big issue for most is the fact of consistency, and that runs across the full service offering from the business delivering the service to the operatives that deliver the cleaning service you have been contracted for. The nature of the industry and where it sits within the logistics of office services means it is a lower hourly paid rated profession. This creates it appears issues of employee retention and the ability to deliver a clear set of cleaning KPI’s as promised to the client by many cleaning companies.

The biggest thing when finding the right cleaning company is that they have the mentality that is cleaning like it’s your own. It’s about the detail of cleaning that is delivered and ensuring that the team cleaning is trained and have solid processes to ensure best cleaning practices.

Cleaning Assurance use chemicals that pass EN 1276  so it kills bacteria in dirty conditions. BS EN 1276 is the European standard for the bactericidal activity of chemical disinfectants as proof of effective infection control against harmful micro-organisms such as MRSA, Salmonella, E.Coli, Flu Virus (H1N1) and Pseudomonas Aeruginosa. In order to pass this standard, products have been tested by an independent laboratory and must prove a bacteria kill rate of 99.999% within 5 minutes.

Cheap is not always the answer and long term it can very costly to not have the right cleaning company working for you. As you have read in this article germs are everywhere in the office and do increase sick days. Being the owner of a cleaning company, my focus has always been to outperform the competition not under cut prices.

Discover more about finding a professional cleaning company by clicking here.