20 Jan

Tips on Keeping Your Communal Areas Clean From Covid-19

Many businesses operate with communal areas that are shared either among their own staff or with different companies working from the same building. These parts of a workplace are places where viral infections can be picked up all too easily simply because they have a higher footfall of people passing through them. For example, the entrances to many large office blocks will have numerous people going in and out every day. Although you may be operating with reduced numbers of workers in your office and have suitable arrangements in place for allowing office workers to socially distance, shared entrances, lobbies and reception areas can all be unwanted pinch points.

Equally, staff rooms in schools, essential lifts in high-rise offices, toilet blocks that are shared between different firms and even break-out areas where employees can relax a little will all constitute communal areas where the Covid virus could be present. What can office managers do to ensure their teams are able to use such places safely? Facilities managers, too, need to think about the type of cleaning regime they should put in place for communal areas rather than simply roping them off as out of bounds. Read on to find out about the sort of measures Clean & Tidy’s expert cleaners can offer.

More Frequent Cleaning

During the pandemic, cleaning more regularly has been an important part of combatting the threat of infection. If you are used to communal areas being cleaned once a week, for example, then we’d recommend upping this to at least once a day and even more frequently for areas with the greatest footfalls. Sometimes commercial landlords will take responsibility for cleaning lobbies and stairwells but they don’t always do this often enough to deal with today’s coronavirus concerns. We can augment our work in your offices to also include communal areas if you wish and supplement the cleaning regime that may already be in place.

Manual Antiviral Sanitation

Although the use of soap, water and vacuum cleaners will be of benefit to any business which wants to operate with its communal areas open to workers, to deal with Covid-19 effectively you have to go a step further. In short, this will mean undertaking antiviral deep cleans by hand. Sanitising all of the commonly touched surfaces, such as handrails, lift buttons, toilet handles and doorknobs with antiviral products and wipes is essential to make sure that everyone can continue to use communal spaces safely. Doing this work by hand is labour intensive and best reserved for the communal areas which see the most people passing through them.

Fogging

Fogging takes less time than hand-based antiviral sanitation but it also produces excellent results. Essentially, it means forming a fog or mist of antiviral droplets which then settle all over a space to render it free from a wide range of germs including viruses. A fogging machine is used which sprays this mist around. This means that communal areas can be sanitised more rapidly than doing the job manually. Of course, you can use the fogging method to clean communal spaces and then back it up with manual antiviral sanitation cleaning, too. Doing so would render the highest level of cleanliness possible in the fight against workplace viral transmission.

Call us today for more information on how to keep your communal areas safe and clean from Covid-19.