How to Tackle Unhygienic Workplace Habits
20 September 2020
Habits in the workplace develop over time and their negative impact in the office can go unnoticed once they are normalised by employees in the work environment. By highlighting common unhygienic workplace habits, your company can begin to take the necessary steps to prevent staff members from continuing unhygienic practices and work together to build a safer work environment.
Not Washing Dishes After Use
With many offices now providing a kitchen area to prepare lunchtime meals, a build-up of dirty dishes used by various employees in the sink can become a haven for dangerous bacteria.
By leaving dirty dishes in the sink, you can risk allowing germs to multiply in one area before being spread throughout the office through touching other germ hotspots such as door handles and keyboards.
One way to help discourage this dangerous transmission of germs is by encouraging all staff members to fully wash and rinse their dirty dishes as soon as they have finished using them.
If your office has a dishwasher, you can also ask staff members to rotate cleaning responsibilities through a simple cleaning schedule and enforce tasks such as putting washed dishes into a hot wash at the end of a working day.
It is also crucial to ensure that the kitchen area is well stocked with cleaning supplies such as sponges, cleaning liquids and dishcloths to help encourage the use of clean materials when washing up.
Not Washing Hands
Now, more than ever, it is vital to encourage all staff members to keep washing their hands for 20 seconds with warm water and soap, or to regularly use an anti-bacterial gel to prevent transmission of germs around the office.
One way to encourage handwashing is to put up some posters to act as a visual reminder that employees should wash hands as often as possible to reduce the spread of bacteria across shared surfaces.
You could also implement numerous hand sanitising stations across the office in order to remind staff members to disinfect their hands frequently.
London researchers (cdc.gov) estimate that if everyone washed their hands regularly about 1 million deaths per year could be prevented and one way to help encourage this positive habit is through constant reminders in the workplace.
Eating At The Desk
With employees spending most of their time at their desks, it is unsurprising that a survey by Viking found the bacteria Staphyloccos (which causes Staph Infection) on 60% of desks in one workplace.
With many employees choosing to take their lunch break at the desk, there is a greater risk of transmitting dirty germs from the keyboard to the mouth, particularly when studies have shown that your computer mouse and keyboard can contain up to 800 germs per square inch.
Keyboards should be regularly sanitised and cleaned to avoid the build up of grime and germs.
One way to accommodate this is to encourage employees to have lunch away from their desk, or at least to move computer equipment away from them when eating and to wash their hands immediately after doing so.
Not only can this help improve productivity levels by encouraging staff to take a proper break, but it can also help keep surfaces in the office clean and encourage staff members to take care of shared computer equipment through regular disinfecting.
At MMCS, we provide regular office cleaning services
which are flexible around your working day to ensure that you always start the day in a clean, sanitised environment.
We also offer a disinfectant fogging service (which has passed the EN14476 Standard for Coronavirus) to help put your employees at ease during these uncertain times.
Contact us
today to find out more about how our friendly team can help you focus on your workload and reduce worries about an unhygienic workplace.
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