Gavin Bajin
National Director, ServiceMaster Clean
As municipalities are relaxing restrictions and allowing non-essential businesses to reopen, the main question on everyone’s mind is: what does the “new normal” look like on the other side of the lockdown?
Returning to work requires businesses to adopt protocols that limit the likelihood of virus transmission within their walls in order to protect the health and safety of workers. Some of these protocols include:
- Physical distancing to maintain a two-metre distance from others. For those that have reopened or are about to, this means a rethink of how office meetings will be conducted and how collaborative spaces will be used.
- Adjusting office layouts to ensure proper physical distancing.
- Ensuring employees and visitors practise healthy hand hygiene.
- Frequent cleaning and disinfecting of high-touch surfaces.
- A declutter policy that may include depersonalizing work areas to allow cleaning staff full access to clean and disinfect properly.
Long-term solutions for healthy workplaces
Facility managers will need to work with their commercial cleaning suppliers to adopt new cleaning protocols to ensure the safety of workplace occupants. Cleaning and disinfecting are more important than ever, but they’re only short-term solutions. The truth of the matter is that once a surface has been cleaned and disinfected, all that work can easily be undone by a passerby who re-contaminates the surface by simply touching it. Therefore, long-term protection is critical to keeping employees healthy and providing them with some peace of mind.
So, what do we mean by long-term protection? A cleaning plan that consists of cleaning, disinfecting, and a solution that inhibits microbial growth between cleaning and disinfecting services. These three steps work together to help ensure that surfaces — and workplaces — are clean 24/7.
