Cleaner offices are more appealing to customers and employees, easier and faster to clean, and contain fewer environmental pathogens and harmful particles, resulting in lower costs and increased productivity.
Dirty Facts on Office Cleanliness
The average person will spend approximately one-third of their life--roughly 90 thousand hours--at work.
Each year, office workers miss approximately nine days of work due to illness--much of which can be tied to poor workplace hygiene and low indoor air quality resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in losses to U.S. businesses.
According to pre-COVID data;
Integrated Benefits Institute (IBI) released an analysis Tuesday morning that found employers spent $575 billion on employees' poor health in 2019.
According to the study, for every dollar of the almost $950 billion spent on healthcare benefits, “another $0.61 of productivity is lost to illness and injury."
Days with illness-related absences which led to "lost productivity" totaled almost 1.5 billion days annually for all employees, the study found, and cost employers $3,900 per employee.
Germs in the Workplace
A typical office desk hosts more than 10 million bacteria colony-forming units (CFUs)--roughly 7,500 of which are commonly found on keyboards.
There's also a host of pathogens and bacteria on the:
- Office doorknobs and handles.
- Elevator and vending machine buttons.
- Coffee pots, and;
- Phones, communication equipment, computers, and tablets.
The germs can survive on those surfaces and remain infectious for up to 24 hours--sometimes longer, depending on environmental conditions and the type of pathogen or bacteria.
When office workers touch the contaminated surfaces, the germs are transferred to their hands and then, inevitably, to other surfaces throughout the facility or to the employee's eyes, nose, or mouth, where the germs enter the body and infect the new host.
The process is surprisingly fast.
A commonly cited study conducted by researchers from the University of Arizona reported that roughly half of a business office (both commonly touched surfaces and facility occupants) was contaminated in just a few hours with an inert test virus placed on one test subject's hand.
Conducted in an office on the UA campus, the study included about 80 participants, some of whom received droplets on their hands at the start of a normal work day.
While most of those droplets were plain water, one person unknowingly received a droplet containing artificial viruses mimicking the cold, the flu and a stomach bug.
Employees were instructed to go about their day as usual. After about four hours, researchers sampled commonly touched surfaces in the office, as well as employees' hands, and found that more than 50 percent of surfaces and employees were infected with at least one of the viruses.
Street Dirt on the Floor and in the Air
Germs on surfaces aren't the only problem--there's also the soil on the floor and in the carpet.
Studies have shown that up to 24 pounds of dirt and soil is tracked into busy offices over a 20-day work period--more during inclement weather.
Unfortunately, the street soil does not remain in the carpet and is recognized as a significant source of indoor air pollution--a problem that costs the U.S. economy more than $160B annually.
Additionally, low IAQ harms businesses and workers in several other ways.
A recent study conducted by The Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, SUNY Upstate Medical University, and Syracuse University, found that there is a direct link between air quality and worker productivity.
The effects of poor indoor air quality and worker productivity can be measured by absenteeism, decreased worker productivity, and economic costs.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that sinus infection sufferers miss an average of four workdays per year.
Studies show an average productivity loss due to IAQ between 3 and 7 percent (or higher), with individual productivity losses of 33%.
Indirect costs from asthma, make up $5.9 billion.
References & Resources
- Dirty Facts
- Face touching: a frequent habit that has implications for hand hygiene
- One third of your life is spent at work
- How a Clean Office Can Boost Productivity [Infographic]
- Beware of Workplace Germs
Takeaway
Studies have shown that indoor environmental quality (IEQ) has a direct impact on human health and performance.
Moreover, one study underlined short-term turnaround on investments into IEQ improvements.
Published experimental data indicate that conventionally acceptable indoor working environments may be affecting human performance by various mechanisms by as much as 5-15%.
Cost-benefit analyses which assume an impact on overall productivity of as little as 0.5% show that the payback time for a general upgrading of currently unhealthy office buildings, defined so as to include about 40% of the building stock, would be as low as 1.6 years.
Further, increasingly, facility occupants--both customers and workers--want high-quality cleaning performed more frequently by trained professionals.
However, onboarding and managing the requisite labor and material resources in-house may prove cost-prohibitive for many organizations.
Outsourcing is a proven method for onboarding highly in-demand cleaning and sanitization services and experience for a fraction of the price of maintaining a similar service in-house.
If you would like more information regarding the effectiveness of high-performance infection prevention and control measures, or if you would like to schedule a free, no-obligation on-site assessment of your facility's custodial needs, contact us today for a free quote!
In Bakersfield, CA, call (661) 437-3253
In Fresno, CA, call (559) 206-1059
In Valencia, CA, or Santa Clarita, CA, call (661) 437-3253
In Palmdale, CA, or Lancaster, CA, call (661) 371-4756
