How to maintain a clean business environment with a simple cleaning plan

Creating a simple cleaning plan.

Fall is officially underway, which means that most business owners are gearing up for the busy holiday season ahead. With so many things happening in the last three months of the year, both professionally and personally, one thing that is easy to forget about or let fall through the cracks is maintaining a cleaning schedule for your business.

With that being said, having a clean and clutter-free business at the busiest time of the year needs to be kept as a top priority for both owners and employees. In addition to maintaining a company’s image and reputation, having a clean business environment also reduces safety hazards, promotes employee productivity, and promotes the health of everyone that is in the space.

One way you can tackle the job of cleaning your business is by hiring a commercial cleaning service to do the job for you. A benefit of doing this is ensuring you have a clean business when you open the doors every morning.  However, sometimes hiring this job done isn’t feasible for small-business owners.  Plus, a cleaning service will not be there during business hours to clean up messes that happen during that time.

So how do you ensure that your business stays clean when there are so many other things to focus on and a cleaning service isn’t feasible or available? The solution for this is all in the planning and delegation of tasks.

• Create a Checklist for the End of the Day: Having a checklist of all the things that need to be cleaned before leaving for the day helps ensure that all of those tasks get done. Furthermore, having the person that completes a task initialize that it had been done helps prevent multiple people doing the same job and keeps the person who did the chore accountable
• Schedule Employees to Stay Later: In the busy season of the year, businesses usually have customers right up until the doors are locked. This leaves employees little time to do their clean-up work at the end of their shift. Scheduling employees to stay for a period of time after closing gives them time to do the end of the day tasks without distraction.
• Designate a Spot Cleaner for All Shifts: In an ideal situation, a person would only clean once a day and not worry about it until the next day. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many daily tasks since things happen that create messes that need to be cleaned or safety hazards that need to be addressed. A drink may be spilled or someone may come in with snowy shoes that leaves a slipping hazard.  These are things that simply cannot wait until the end of the day to be handled.  Having a go-to person on every shift who is in charge of watching for these types of situations is the best way to ensure they will not be an issue.
• Pick One or Two Monthly and/or Weekly Tasks to Complete Per Day: Along with cleaning tasks that need to be completed on a daily basis, there are larger items that need to be handled weekly or monthly. Unfortunately, these are the tasks that are most likely to be over-looked when it is busy. To ensure they don’t go undone, put one or two of them on the daily checklist until all the items are completed and make sure it is initialized when done.
• Do a Double Check Prior to Opening: No person or business is perfect. Things get overlooked or forgotten all of the time, especially at the end of a long and busy day. Doing a quick double check of the business prior to opening the doors in the morning makes those forgotten or overlooked items less noticeable or non-existent to customers.

Another important aspect of keeping your business clean for the busy season is ensuring you have all the chemicals necessary to do the job.  Advanced Chemical Solutions is here to ensure you have all the right products at the right time.  Give us a call today at 406-252-7408.