Many facility managers, understandably, have many concerns as the nation prepares to slowly reopen following stay-at-home orders and intense social distancing. After all, the COVID-19 virus continues to rapidly spread in our cities and towns.
Every facility manager’s mission is to keep their facility secure, clean, and well-maintained. How is this done in the event of a global pandemic?
Here’s what you need to know about safely reopening your Commercial Cleaning Services and Deep Home Cleaning Services facility.
Working in a home normally necessitates the following steps
Unless there is a direct risk to the household’s or public’s protection, no work should be undertaken in an isolated household where one or more family members are exhibiting symptoms.
Any work required to remedy a direct risk to the household or the public should proceed in households where one or more persons have been advised to shield. Other forms of work can be performed in the home at the homeowners’ discretion. Additional steps should be taken, as illustrated in step 3 below.
Prior arrangements should be made for elderly individuals to prevent any face-to-face interaction, such as while answering the door, when working in a household where someone is psychologically vulnerable but has not been asked to cover, such as the home of someone over 70. Handwashing, coughing, and sneezing grooming, such as covering the nose and mouth and discarding single-use tissues, should be prioritized.
Keeping up with the most recent advice and thinking about how it can be applied to your job. This can include things like:
- Washing your hands for 20 seconds with soap and hot water more frequently than normal, particularly after coughing, sneezing, or blowing your nose.
- When you cough or sneeze, cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or your sleeve (not your hands) if you don’t have one, then chuck the tissue in the garbage and wash your hands.
- Cleaning often touched objects and surfaces with daily cleaning products to minimise the risk of infection spreading to others.
- Speaking with residents prior to any visit to clarify how the work will be done in order to reduce risk for both parties.
- As far as possible, adhere to social distancing guidelines (2m, or 1m with risk reduction if 2m is not feasible).
- Establish a Safe Behaviour Practices Plan
When it comes to reopening, the CDC advises that each company and facility develop their own best practices to keep their building’s occupants as healthy as possible. How do you minimize your exposure to the virus and the danger of it spreading?
To make it cleaner, you may need to spread desks or workstations farther apart or delete shared objects like coffee creamer from the breakroom.
Other things to think about when it comes to healthy workplace conduct, according to the CDC:
To reduce the need for many people to access door handles, leave doors that don’t need to be closed open.
• Increase airflow by opening windows.
• Wipe down high-touch surfaces such as tablets, chairs, keyboards, staplers, and touch screens on a regular basis.
• Reduce social interaction in the workplace (e.g., in-person meetings or lunches).
• Encourage sick workers to stay at home by introducing non-punitive sick-leave policies and liberal work-from-home policies.
- Carry out and present your risk assessment
Your first step should be to perform a risk assessment before deciding whether or not to open your doors. Share the Risk Assessment with your staff and post it on your website to help build trust.
- Ensure that there are sufficient sanitation facilities at work
Perform routine cleaning procedures before reopening/resuming work. Clean surfaces with disposable cloths and warm soapy water or detergent first, then disinfect with a disinfectant to effectively sanitize the surface. Ensure that all sinks and basins have hot water, soap, disposable paper towels for hand drying, and, if possible, hand sanitizer (minimum 60 percent alcohol). Examine the ventilation system to see if it needs to be serviced or changed. Examine advanced equipment that hasn’t been seen in a while.
Open windows and doors wherever possible to do so in order to enhance airflow and avoid unwanted contact points. Hands-free systems could be mounted on doors that must remain locked.
- During the working day
Ensure that work areas and surfaces that are often touched by individuals are cleaned on a regular basis. This will include employees as well as, depending on the work environment, customers, and vendors. Between uses, make sure to clean the equipment and items thoroughly. Employers may also recommend limiting or restricting the use of high-touch products, such as stationary, water bottles, and tablets, to further reduce the risk of transmission across contaminated surfaces. At the end of the day, enforce a straightforward workspace strategy. Consider the cleaning procedure for costly machines and equipment that cannot be cleaned. Ensure that toilets, lockers, and change rooms are kept clean, and provide workers with instructions about how to use these common spaces in a socially distancing manner. Create cleaning procedures for any products, goods, or equipment that enters your workplace.
- Encourage good staff sanitation
- Encourage people to wash their hands regularly and thoroughly (for 20 seconds with soap and water.)
- Remind employees to stop rubbing their faces and to cough or sneeze into tissues that can be safely disposed of.
Remind employees on a regular basis to uphold hygiene standards, which includes washing clothes at the end of each day.
- If you have a uniform or dress code, consider loosening the rules on implementing it so that people can come to work in clean, washed clothes every day.
- Hand sanitizer should be available in multiple locations, particularly near “pinch points” like entrances and exits.
- Consider adding more handwashing stations.
- Try wearing a mask
According to the CDC, everybody should cover their mouth and nose with a cloth face covering while they are around others because COVID-19 will spread even if infected people don’t feel sick. This is to keep people safe from an infected individual.
Customers are being requested or forced to wear face masks when shopping in certain shops. Although each store’s policy on face masks is up to them, you can determine what yours is. Would workers be forced to wear masks? What about consumers or clients?
Knowing how you feel about face masks will help you plan how to reopen your facility.
- Take advantage of commercial cleaning facilities
It can take a lot of time and effort to incorporate all of these new protocols, stagger work schedules, and wipe down high-touch surfaces. How are you going to clean your building when you’re still working?
Hiring a coronavirus cleaning service is one of the easiest ways to plan for a healthy reopening of your plant. Home Deep Cleaning Services and other commercial cleaning services have been thoroughly cleaning and sanitizing commercial facilities like yours for years. Our standards are high, and we have the expertise to clean and sanitize facilities that require extreme cleanliness, such as restaurants and medical facilities. Cleaning and sanitizing in great detail are what we do best at Faidepro. We work with facilities across a wide range of industries and can diligently care for your space to mitigate the spread of infection. From hard-floor care to regular janitorial services, we work with facilities across a wide range of industries and can diligently care for your space to mitigate the spread of infection. Our workforce is well-versed in managing infectious diseases and maintaining facilities as secure as possible.
How Long Does the Virus Remain Active on the Surface?
When considering the role of commercial cleaning services in disinfecting your facility, it’s important to understand how long the COVID-19 virus can survive on various surfaces. It may play a role in your cleaning routine. You might find that cleaning high-touch surfaces more frequently is necessary to keep viruses at bay.
The following is a list of how long the virus has been known to last on various surfaces:
- Five days in a glass
- Four days of wood
- Three days for plastic
- Three days for stainless steel
- 24 hours for cardboard
- 24 hours of fabric
- Surfaces made of copper: four hours
Although there are usually fewer and fewer instances of live viruses on these surfaces as time passes, they should still be sanitized with an EPA-approved cleaner to reduce the risk of infection spreading.
- Occupants should have access to sanitising solutions
Wipes for sanitizing: Employees and customers will appreciate having sanitizing wipes on hand to disinfect, sanitize, and deodorize surfaces throughout your facility. They are both safe for people and for the environment.
Sanitizing wipes from Commercial Cleaning Services can be found in grocery stores, gyms, offices, schools, office buildings, hospitals, and anywhere else you need to sanitize surfaces on a regular basis or where germs are easily transmitted by touch. Employees and visitors can use them to wipe down public surfaces before and after touching them.
The power of benzalkonium chloride is used to sanitize these wipes (BZK). These alcohol-free, hygienic antiseptic wipes can be used to disinfect both skin and hard surfaces. While there is no proof that BZK can kill the COVID-19 coronavirus (yet), it is an excellent first line of defense against germs in your facility.
Don’t rely on low-cost janitorial cleaning services to keep your business clean and sanitary. For all of your commercial cleaning needs, now is the time to call cleaning experts from FAIDEPRO.
With our industrial cleaning supplies on hand, we’re ready to go.
- Promote Social Distancing in the Workplace
Provide social distancing guidance and reminders at your workplace to ensure that the proper social distancing measures are communicated. If social distancing isn’t possible, make sure to take the necessary steps to reduce the risk of transmission. This might entail putting up screens or barriers to separate employees, staggering arrival and departure times, and so on. Display the government-issued notice to show your employees and outside stakeholders that you are COVID-19 compliant.
Make sure you’re following the most recent government recommendations for face coverings. Retail, leisure, and hospitality employees will be required to wear a face-covering in public areas where they come into or are likely to come into close contact with a member of the public beginning September 24.
- Help to relieve the strain on public transportation
Support employees who must travel to work. Greater Manchester Transport has issued guidance to employers and employees on how to travel safely during the pandemic. If you have a Cycle to Work program, encourage people to use it, or consider starting one. This employee benefits program uses a salary sacrifice process to provide employees with a cost-effective way to purchase new cycling equipment.
- Interacting with the occupants
Providing and explaining the guidance that is available. The goal is to ensure that everyone understands what they need to do to stay safe. Steps that are usually required include:
- If you’re an employer or a government agency, make sure your employees know how to operate safely in people’s homes.
- Prior to and upon arrival, communicating with households to ensure that they are aware of the social distancing and hygiene precautions that must be followed once work begins.
- Arriving at and departing from a workplace
The goal is to maintain social distance whenever possible, including on arrival and departure, as well as to ensure handwashing.
Steps to take in most cases:
- If your insurance allows, consider travelling to sites alone in your own vehicle.
- If workers, such as delivery teams, have no choice but to travel together, the following should be encouraged:
- Travel arrangements should be made with the same people and the number of people per vehicle should be kept to a minimum.
- Ensuring adequate ventilation, such as keeping windows open and passengers facing away from one another, to reduce the risk of transmission
- Cleaning vehicles with gloves and standard cleaning products on a regular basis, with a focus on handles and other areas where passengers may come into contact with surfaces
Wherever possible, employers or agencies match workers with local households to reduce transportation costs. - When entering the house, wash your hands and maintain social distance.
Also, Read Is Your Commercial Cleaning Service Delivering What They Promised?