Tips For Cleaning and Sanitizing a Commercial Building During COVID-19

Dec 13, 2021

Sanitization has never been as critical as it is right now. The COVID-19 pandemic requires commercial building owners to be even more diligent than they were before. As people return to the office, and life continues to move forward, you must have a plan to keep your commercial building clean and sanitized.

What are the best ways to ensure that you have a safe work environment? Here are some of the leading tips and advice for keeping your commercial building clean and sanitized in the middle of a global pandemic.

Take Inventory and Reduce Risks

You want to make sure to have a go-to list of the hot spot areas in your commercial building. These hot spots are places where people regularly congregate or frequently touch.

Examples of these areas include:

Light Switches

Phones

Railings

Desks

Elevator Buttons

Remotes and Buttons

Kitchen Area

Counters

And more

Try your best to eliminate any hot spots by closing-off the kitchen area, creating socially distanced workspaces, and getting rid of shared resources. You want to mitigate unnecessary risks and get rid of excessive sanitization needs.

Consider putting up glass office walls to keep employees safely separated. Eliminate or shut-off water fountains. It also might be beneficial to declutter and get rid of anything unnecessary inside the building. The more stuff you have, the more you’ll have to sanitize.

Create a Plan (and Follow It)

Once you’ve reduced unnecessary risks, you need to create a sanitization plan of action. This plan will address how you will keep all your hot spot areas clean and sanitized regularly.

It’s essential to both disinfect and sanitize regularly. Sanitizing cuts back on germs, while disinfecting kills the germs. Both are pivotal to keeping your employees safe and your building free of an outbreak.

You’ll want to disinfect hot spots several times throughout the day. Then, you’ll need to sanitize and deep clean at least once every day.

According to the guidelines from leading experts, to effectively clean and disinfect:

Always wear disposable gloves and throw them away after every single use.

Clean all surfaces with soap and water before disinfecting. (If you have natural stone, wood, or specialty countertops or surfaces like quartz, you’ll want to follow specific instructions on how to clean quartz countertops.)

Once you’ve sanitized, you’ll need to disinfect using an EPA-Registered Disinfectant or a diluted bleach or alcohol solution that is at least seventy percent alcohol. (Again, if you have specialty countertops or surfaces, you’ll want to get in touch with the manufacturers, because harsh disinfectants can warp quartz, wood, or other natural stones and fade or destroy your quartz countertop colors.)

Make sure to disinfect in well-ventilated areas only.

Let the disinfectant sit for several minutes before wiping it.

Clean soft surfaces like rugs, couches, and carpets with water and soap or vacuum and then spray them thoroughly with a disinfectant.

Keep on the lookout for updated guidelines for sanitizing and disinfecting.

Enforce the Policies You Set

Once you have a cleaning and sanitizing schedule in place, it’s important to enforce it. Not all your employees will be eager to add extra levels of cleaning to their day. However, sanitizing and disinfecting won’t work if you don’t follow through.

Be sure to have a cleaning schedule and expectations written up and printed out. Consider hanging these new procedures on visible walls, too. Assign employees specific sanitization tasks and help ensure they’re working to make these new procedures part of the routine.

Be Proactive

In addition to keeping your commercial building cleaned and sanitized, it’s crucial to have a plan in case it doesn’t work. You can do all the appropriate things, and someone still gets sick. The coronavirus is a sneaky illness that is quickly passed, and sometimes carriers don’t show symptoms.

Even if you’re checking temperatures at the door and enforcing masks on top of your cleaning procedures, you can’t control what your employees do outside the office. For that reason, you need to be proactive. Have a plan to handle an outbreak so that you’re never scratching your head, wondering what to do next.

This pandemic won’t last forever. You won’t have to be this strict with your commercial building’s cleaning policies forever. It’s a temporary adjustment.

If you follow the advice above, you’ll be poised to keep your employees safe, no matter what’s thrown your way.

Written by: Matt Lee

E-mail: [email protected]

Matt Lee is the owner of the Innovative Building Materials blog and a content writer for the building materials industry. He is focused on helping fellow homeowners, contractors, and architects discover materials and methods of construction that save money, improve energy efficiency, and increase property value.

Written by: Hans Hansson

[email protected]