If you manage an office building with several employees, you may be concerned with their health and safety during times of viral outbreaks. Viral illnesses can spread fast through an office building when people sit close together and share equipment. There are steps you can take to support the health of your employees, and one of those is the regular disinfecting of the building. Here are some suggestions to consider.
Use Commercial Disinfecting Services
Just like you may have a cleaning service come in after-hours to keep your building sanitary and tidy, you may wish to hire a commercial disinfecting service to target viral outbreaks. A service like this uses cleaning solutions approved by an agency such as the EPA, FDA, or CDC to disinfect hard and porous surfaces in your building.
The cleaning service may use a fogging device or liquid sprayers to disperse the disinfectant and then let the product remain several minutes to work. Your employees will probably need to be out of the building for the disinfecting process, which is different from typical cleaning and sanitizing you may have done routinely in your building.
You can discuss the need and frequency for disinfecting your building with the cleaning service. You might want periodic disinfecting done during times of major outbreaks in your city or when a virus is affecting a number of your employees.
Keep Your Building Sanitary
You may be instructed to clean your building before it is disinfected so surfaces are bare, clean, and ready to be treated. In addition to thorough cleaning before a visit from the disinfecting service, you should strive to keep your building as clean and sanitary as possible on a daily basis. Work with your regular cleaning crew to ensure bathrooms, door handles, and surfaces in your building are cleaned daily. Instruct your staff to clean up after themselves, wash their hands frequently, and socially distance when possible to limit the spread of illness.
You may need to rearrange your workstations, stagger working hours, or have some employees work from home when you're combating a viral outbreak. When you need help and advice, look to local and state authorities as well as the CDC for ways you can keep your employees safe while keeping your business in operation. This could involve steps such as requiring masks, improving office ventilation, and installing hand sanitizer stations depending on the nature and severity of the outbreak.
These steps combined with disinfecting your building with liquid spray or fog might make it possible to keep your building open while limiting the spread of diseases such as colds, seasonal flu, COVID-19, and other contagious viral diseases.
