When people come to work they need to have a clean environment to work in. If the place is dirty no one really wants to be there. This not only makes them miserable it can cause stress and ill health. Regular cleaning is important to maintain a germ free environment and a dirty environment encourages germs to grow and spread from person to person. This can lead to more absenteeism through coughs colds and viruses, which can be more widely spread generally across the workplace.

The work place is a common source of stress in our lives and working in a dirty environment can contribute to the stress of the job, making the employee less likely to want to be at work. If you visit someone who’s house is untidy and dirty it is human nature not to want to stay too long. You get out of there as fast as possible and this is how people feel about a dirty workplace.

A clean environment with a fresh atmosphere makes people feel happier. Happier staff are much more productive and inventive, than unhappy staff. Happy staff will also give a better image to your clients and suppliers when they communicate with them, their happiness shows. Just as unhappy staff are likely to be more sharp and matter of fact, making them feel unapproachable and not easy to communicate with. Basically a good work environment has been proved to raise efficiency, cooperation, initiative, and moral which results in people being more focussed achieving results faster and generally being more productive.

If people feel they have to come to work even if they are unwell, this can also have an adverse effect on other staff moral and hence your bottom line. A study has shown that ill worker can be more of a distraction to the staff than a benefit, as no one can fail to notice them coughing and sneezing and this can be disruptive in meetings and also spreads the germs to other staff, causing a whole department to become ill. These germs will also spread so much more easily if the workplace is not properly cleaned

If you are not sure how well your cleaning program is affecting your staff, then it is time to find out. If you are a small company talk to them, if you are a large company then maybe an email survey with room for suggestions. It is important you get the right answers not the ones you want to hear so make sure your contact is in a way that your staff feel they can be honest. They may have been complaining to their managers for some time about the state of the place but if the managers are also of the mind that cleaning is an unimportant cost, then the complaints, suggestions and ideas may have gone unnoticed. Walk around the offices unannounced and observe for yourself how clean the workplace and how happy the staff are. Then you can see with your own eyes if your cleaning regime needs revamping to make your productivity improve, or whether you think you have it right