Cleaning for appearance and cleaning for hygiene are different activities. A visibly spotless office can have every high-touch surface untouched, and an office that looks average can be genuinely low-transmission.
The surfaces that matter
Ranked roughly by transmission relevance rather than visibility:
- Door handles and push plates, every person, every day, both directions
- Shared kitchen appliance handles, fridge, microwave, dishwasher
- Tap handles, touched immediately before and after hand washing
- Light switches
- Lift buttons
- Shared keyboards and mice, hot desks, meeting room PCs, reception
- Phone handsets, shared or reception phones
- Printer and copier control panels
- Handrails
- Meeting room tables and chair arms
- Eftpos and payment terminals
- Water cooler and coffee machine controls
Frequency
| Surface | Minimum |
|---|---|
| Bathroom high-touch | Every visit |
| Kitchen appliance handles | Every visit |
| Door handles, main routes | Every visit |
| Light switches | Every visit |
| Lift buttons | Every visit |
| Shared keyboards / phones | Every visit |
| Meeting room surfaces | After use, or every visit |
| Handrails | Every visit |
| Desk surfaces | Every visit where clear |
During an outbreak, high-touch surfaces move to twice daily and the sequence changes, affected areas cleaned last, with equipment not reused.
Sanitising vs. wiping
A wipe removes visible soil. Sanitising reduces microbial load, and it requires contact time, the surface must stay visibly wet for the period specified on the product label, typically 30 seconds to several minutes.
Spraying and immediately wiping dry does not sanitise. It’s the most common mistake in commercial cleaning, and it means an office can be "sanitised daily" with no hygiene benefit whatsoever.
Ask your provider what contact time their product requires and whether it’s being observed. The answer tells you a great deal.
The hand-hygiene infrastructure
Cleaning can only do so much. What actually moves the numbers:
- Soap that never runs out. Empty dispensers are the most common hygiene failure in any building, and the cheapest to fix.
- Paper towels rather than warm-air dryers where you have the choice, better drying compliance, and drying matters as much as washing.
- Sanitiser at entry points, refilled reliably.
- Bins at the bathroom exit, so people can open the door with the towel.
Kitchen specifics
The office kitchen is the highest-risk shared space, above bathrooms, because food is involved and cleaning is casual:
- Dish cloths replaced or laundered daily, a damp cloth left overnight is a bacterial culture
- Sponges eliminated entirely; use disposable or launderable cloths
- Sink and plughole cleaned daily
- Fridge cleared weekly, cleaned monthly
- Dishwasher filter checked weekly
- Bins washed weekly, not just re-lined
- Separate green cloths for kitchen only
What makes a measurable difference
If you’re trying to reduce sick days rather than just look clean:
- Soap and sanitiser that never run out. Highest impact per dollar, by a distance.
- Genuine high-touch sanitising with correct contact time.
- Daily kitchen cloth replacement.
- A culture where people stay home when unwell, worth more than everything else combined, and not a cleaning issue.
- Ventilation. Also not cleaning, also more impactful than most cleaning interventions.
Be honest about that ordering. A cleaning contract can help with hygiene, but it can’t substitute for sick leave policy and fresh air.
Auditing it
You can’t see sanitising. What you can check:
- Are soap and sanitiser dispensers full, on a random check?
- Are kitchen cloths clean and dry, or damp and grey?
- Does the record show high-touch sanitising as a separate task, or is it bundled into "wipe surfaces"?
- Can your provider tell you the contact time of their sanitiser?
If high-touch sanitising isn’t a separately recorded task, it’s probably not a separately performed one.