Workplaces5 min read

What office cleaning is actually buying you.

Cleaning is one of the few building costs where the return is real and almost never measured.

01The three things it actually affects

Your visitors' first impression: Reception, the washroom and the kitchen are what a candidate, a client or an investor forms a view from. They are also the three rooms that fail first, because they take the most traffic and the least attention.
Whether your staff want to be there: A workplace people are willing to come into is part of why they come in. It is a considerably cheaper lever than most of the alternatives usually being discussed.
The life of what you fitted out: Carpet, upholstery and hard floors fail from soil left in them, not from being walked on. Grit acts like sandpaper at the base of the pile every time someone steps on it.

We are not going to quote you a percentage productivity gain. Those figures circulate widely and we cannot stand behind any of them, so we will not put them on our own website.

02Where the money actually goes

Recarpeting a floor costs multiples of cleaning it, plus the disruption of moving everyone out for a week. Scheduling extraction inside a contract is the cheap version of a decision you will otherwise make suddenly, in year six, when the floor looks tired and someone asks why.

The same is true of upholstery and hard floors. Periodic works inside a contract cost less than the replacement they prevent, and they land on a date already agreed rather than becoming an urgent quotation.

03What a well-run office actually gets cleaned, and when

Daily: Desks and touchpoints, bins, washrooms, kitchen and breakout.
Weekly: Floors, internal glass, meeting rooms.
Monthly to quarterly: Carpet and upholstery, high-level dusting, vents, storage areas.
Annually: A full deep clean, usually scheduled around a quiet week.

The frequency matters less than whether it is written down. A specification both sides have signed is the difference between a standard and a habit — and habits leave when people do.

04Cleaning around IT equipment

Modern offices are full of things that do not respond well to moisture. Our approach is anti-static cloths, no moisture near hardware, COSHH procedures for every product we carry, and operatives briefed on which zones are hands-off in your building specifically.

It sounds obvious. It is also the thing most commonly got wrong by whoever is cheapest.

05What this looks like in practice

We clean a technology company's West End floor daily to a signed specification — washroom servicing, consumables, reception, meeting rooms and periodic works scheduled inside the contract.

The scope has more than doubled since it started. Not because we asked, but because the account kept absorbing work the client had been arranging separately. The team on the building has not changed since the first day.

See the Great Portland Street account →

06Questions

How often should an office be deep cleaned?

Beyond the daily specification, most offices need carpet and upholstery attention every three to six months and a full deep clean annually. Traffic, not floor area, is what drives it.

Should cleaning happen out of hours or during the day?

Both, usually. Out of hours for the main clean, plus daytime washroom and kitchen cover if the building is busy. A floor cleaned on a Tuesday afternoon is a floor nobody can use on Tuesday afternoon.

Is it cheaper to employ cleaners directly?

Sometimes, at scale. What in-house rarely covers well is absence — holiday, sickness and turnover are the whole difficulty, and they are what a contract is actually buying.

What happens if standards slip?

You should have a named person to call and a documented response time. If a supplier cannot tell you what happens when something goes wrong, that is the answer.

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