Expanding from your home to your first professional office space is a huge step for any small business to take. You suddenly have bills to pay such as rent and utilities for your new business premises. Expansion usually comes with additional staffing costs and bills for furniture, computers and other office equipment. At this point you may have to look at your cash flow to see where you can make savings, what services you need and those to consider further down the line.
There are certain services any business would consider an essential such as ensuring you have decent IT support, after all, your business would not function without it. You will also need the services of an accountant, unless you employ someone to take care of your business finances. One area you might consider a luxury would be office cleaning. If your team and office are small then you might think that it’s a simple to manage the duties yourself. You could bring in a vacuum cleaner from home and ask your team to dust around their area but what happens when it comes to keeping the loos and kitchen clean. Will your staff overlook their keyboards and telephones and who will remember to empty and dispose of rubbish and recycling? Will disagreements become the norm as some people appear to be less thorough than the rest? Will your professional staff start to resent having to leave their ‘day job’ to do this additional task and what affect will this have on their morale? All these issues will have to be considered and resolved as you want to ensure your staff remain loyal and motivated. It’s difficult to inspire a team if they feel they are not being respected.
It is sometimes an unfortunate fact of life that first impressions count and the state of your office is no exception. Your business has to have impact on new clients to stand out from the crowd and keeping your office immaculate is vital to create a good professional environment that reflects your company’s vision and values. You will be judged on how you do business from the moment your clients enter your premises, from the way they are welcomed to how your office looks. If you want to look like your run an efficient business and are a professional organisation worth doing business with, then a clean office is essential.
It’s a well-known fact that bacteria thrive in warm, damp areas and as levels of bacteria can double every 15 minutes, kitchen cloths and sponges become germ hotspots. Using a contaminated cloth could spread bacteria all over your office helping the spread of illness, especially if there are colds and flus around. Statistics indicated that your kitchen sink is dirtier than your loo, that there are 49 germs on every square inch of a toilet seat but 25,000 in the same area of an office telephone! Other areas prone to germs are door handles, light switches and keyboards. Loosing staff to illness will put a dent in productivity as well as turnover, making cleanliness an essential consideration when at least 60% of all time off work is related to a dirty office.
So in terms of office expenditure, productivity, your reputation and your bottom line, it would be fair to say the expense of commercial office cleaning should be seen as an essential rather than a luxury. The health and safety issues that may arise when your office becomes unhygienic are incomparable to the small amount of money saved by not hiring a cleaning contractor. By outsourcing office cleaning services business owners not only reduce the overall risk of contamination from germs but the systems and procedures that will be set up as a result, will ensure their business operates best practise in line with legislation. Maintaining an immaculate office is one expense that no organisation can afford to evade.