by Matthew J. Geiger

Created on: January 26, 2010

Next to tidiness, cleanliness is one of the most essential elements in maintaining a healthy, safe work environment.  Not only does a clean workplace reflect the professionalism of a company and help motivate employees, it also promotes healthy workers as a clean environment prevents accidents and the spread of illnesses.  For some work environments like an office, maintaining a clean environment is usually a fairly straight forward endeavor, especially with the aid of custodians.  Manufacturing firms, however, face greater challenges, yet all work environments can benefit from some good habits.

Personal hygiene plays a key role in how attentive individuals are to cleaning their environment as well as what effort they put forward to prevent their work area from becoming dirty in the first.  With epidemics like swine flu, it should be clear that hand washing and other personal cleaning habits help keep shared work areas free of germs and filth.  Whether dealing with grease or a dirty refrigerator in the break room, all businesses can help maintain sanitation by further educating workers and enforcing policies on personal hygiene.

Meanwhile, each employee should be responsible for keeping his or her individual work area clean.  To work effectively, a clean work space is necessary; however, cleaning does take time away from work.  This is why companies should train their employees to clean as they go, because this method takes less time and can be done during small breaks in activities, if need be.  Granted, compulsively cleaning can hinder work performance and different business operations create different kinds of messes, but cleaning during work, when practical, can help reduce filth in individual work areas, if all employees pay a little more attention to cleaning.

Furthermore, it is necessary for all employees to share in keeping common work areas clean.  While some workers should probably take a greater role depending on work responsibilities, an effort on behalf of all employees to stop a mess from being made and cleaning up as they make a mess will help maintain a clean workplace.  Obviously, some messes are necessary results of business operations and compulsively cleaning is a waste of time, but common areas are the responsibilities of everyone and everyone can help clean up their mess.

Moreover, maintaining a clean, work environment is the responsibility of everybody.  By decreasing the need to clean and employees cleaning as they work, this goal can be met. Although custodians and cleaning crews are paid to clean up a work area at the end of the day, they can only do so much in so much time while an unclean work environment affects business operations all day long.  Preventing messes, as well as cleaning them up, helps create a safe, healthy workplace and this is the responsibility of all employees from executives to janitors.

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