Trying to keep your business clean without employees cleaning it is impossible without extra help. In an ideal world, office pantries, restrooms, and workspaces would just clean themselves and stay that way. The reality is, big companies with big budgets can hire professional cleaners, but many businesses don’t have that option. We rely on our existing teams and a dependable facility supply service to keep our business spaces clean.
Make Cleaning a Matter of Safety Instead of Preference
A clean business is a safe business. Clean, organized workplaces are at a lower risk for accidents and diseases. Your employees may have varying standards as to what clean means, but we can all agree on what safety means. Making safety the central point for keeping the workplace clean is a better, more objective motivator.
Challenges Keeping Employees From Cleaning Regularly
In an employee’s mind, main tasks will always overshadow “accessory duties.” Motivating them to keep your business clean requires more creativity. We’ve got some tips to help with that.
Here’s our number one tip: micromanaging your employees into keeping your business space clean never works. For one, it’s not sustainable. Two, it stresses out both your managers and employees. In the end, the business suffers. Here are better solutions to try out instead:
Practice CLAYGO
The Clean as You Go (CLAYGO) policy may be popularly associated with dining, but it’s applicable elsewhere too! It helps reduce the big end-of-shift clutter that is almost always too discouraging to clean at the end of the day. Moreover, it also encourages a sense of personal responsibility.
Incentivize Cleanliness and Cleaning
Negative reinforcement hardly ever works. This is especially true when encouraging employees to keep the business clean. Replace penalties with incentives instead. For instance, you can divide your workplace into stations, with employees in each station responsible for the upkeep of their own areas. Regularly hand out rewards for the cleanest stations. This not only motivates employees to keep their areas clean. It can also bolster a sense of teamwork and healthy competition amongst your employees.
Give Everyone Equal Cleaning Responsibilities
No one likes to clean. More importantly, no one likes having to disproportionately take on the cleaning burdens for the entire team. This breeds attitudes of burnout, resentment, and dissatisfaction. Instead, distribute the responsibility equally. Create cleaning teams that take turns cleaning the workplace. This way, you’re giving everyone equal obligation. It also encourages your employees to maintain cleanliness to lessen the cleaning burden they’d have to tackle on their assigned cleaning schedule.
Make Cleaning Supplies Easily Available
Your business’s cleanliness does not only depend on who does the cleaning and how frequently the cleaning takes place. It also depends on the easy availability of cleaning supplies. For instance, a coffee spill in the pantry is more likely to be cleaned promptly if there is a mop within easy reach. Encourage better cleaning at work by making sure high-quality cleaning towels, mops, and other janitorial supplies are easily available.
Metropolitan Linen Has Your Business Covered
Contact Metropolitan Linen in New England today! We have a complete selection of cleaning tools, delivered right to your doorstep promptly and accurately. Call us today at 1-617-381-1156 to keep your business clean.