It is easy to make a daily check by looking around an office. The surfaces are clear of clutter, the floor has been hoovered, and the bins are empty. The kitchen has been wiped down. Maybe there is a faint smell of lemony air. So far, so good. It looks clean. Is it, really?

The problem lies between making an office look clean and actually making it clean. It is the gap between these two things that accounts for the difference between how an office looks and how problems of hygiene actually exist there.

Visible cleanliness refers to the cleanliness of surfaces, the overall order of an office, and, to a degree, the smell. You can take in the visible cleanliness of an office in around thirty seconds of walking around the space. Visible cleanliness is reassuring. It is a good sign of other matters that count in an office. It creates signals that the office cares about its staff and its visitors – and by extension, the environment that they occupy.

Hygiene, on the other hand, refers to the level of cleanliness of surfaces and the types of bacteria, viral particles, and other biological residues that can accumulate there. Straightening chairs or emptying bins does not remove these bacteria, viral particles, and biological residues from surfaces. In fact, the uncomfortable truth is that those surfaces in an office that look fine are often the areas that are most hygienically compromised. When you need Office Cleaning Gloucester, contact //biggreencleaning.co.uk/contract-cleaning-services/office-cleaning-near-me/office-cleaning-gloucester

Toilet doors and the seats themselves are cleaned, and the seats are wiped down. But, more often than not, this is the area of an office that receives the most attention because we expect it to be dirty. What about a keyboard, used by forty people during a busy week? How many times has the door handle been touched? Is the communal phone handset disinfected after use? Or is the hot desk wiped down by staff on their way to their meetings – likely with a sanitising product that is insufficiently concentrated or not left on the surface for enough contact time?

Studies consistently found office keyboards to be home to more bacteria per square inch than the average toilet seat. Such scaremongering could be dismissed, but the situation likely reflects a general misunderstanding of priorities because things don’t look bad when they actually are.