Lots of office cleaning service providers make the same kind of promise — to clean everything in your office from top to bottom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but while it sounds good on paper, you might rapidly determine that ‘top to bottom’ also means ‘more expensive than you really want it to be.’ A couple of our Santa Monica clients have asked us what the ‘core’ list of office cleaning needs are, and here’s what we came up with:

Restrooms and Kitchens
If there’s any space in the building where moisture, potential bio-hazards, and humans all mix, it needs to be deep cleaned weekly, and preferably touched-up daily. This is absolutely the most common vector for disease transmission, and also one of the easiest ways to gross out a customer, so if you can clean nothing else, clean these places first and best.

Carpets/Flooring
The number two concern for almost any office is that hard floors show dirt and dust bunnies almost instantly, and carpets may hide dirt for a little bit, but that just means that by the time they become noticeable, they’re entirely unacceptable and will turn off any customer who sees them. Especially in any environment where children will regularly be present (which always means sitting or lying on the floor), a minimum of quarterly deep-cleaning should be absolutely mandatory.

Windows
Windows are crucial to morale, comfort, and health — because sunlight is crucial to morale, comfort, and health. (Seeing living, green things and Santa Monica’s bright blue sky helps, too.) That means that your windows should be cleaned at least twice a month — or once a season if you’re several or more stories above street level. That’s on the outside, by the way — they should be cleaned on the inside once a week, regardless of other factors, for health reasons.

Workstations
Finally, the workstations — in particular, the ‘touchpoints,’ including keyboards, mice, desk surfaces, drawer handles, and control panels on the office equipment — need to be cleaned weekly. During the cold and flu season, cleaning them daily is wiser.

If you’re not sure what your Santa Monica office’s cleaning budget can afford you, start at the top of this list and work your way down — the other details will need attention at some point, but these are the genuine minimums you should aim for.

You all know Janice. She’s the hardcore, type-A redhead in Accounting who never misses a day of work, even when her node is so plucked up she cad barley talk at all. And this is the story of what happened when Janice sneezed. It happened on Friday morning at your company’s Santa Monica office. Cleaning crews could have been scheduled to come in over the weekend and this never would have happened, but they weren’t. Instead…

Janice’s sneeze blew several billion haemophilus influenzae bacteria into the air just inside the break room door, where the ventilation system mercifully sucked about two billion of them up, and because the HEPA filter had been recently replaced, they stayed far away from human bodies. The other five or so billion spread rapidly through the room on the air currents caused by Janice walking promptly through her own invisible sneeze cloud. She re-inhaled a quarter-billion, and about four billion settled on the floor where they did no harm.

But of the three-quarters-of-a-billion that landed on tables, chairs, and Dan’s half-eaten submarine sandwich, a good 20% were lucky enough to get picked up by people’s hands as they pushed in their chairs, grabbed their papers, and so on. And the 5% that made it into the fridge when Dan put his sandwich (unwrapped!) back on the top shelf, well, they were the luckiest of all.

See, the employees whose hands got Janice’s sneeze-germs on them mostly washed their hands before they rubbed their eyes, picked their nose, or licked their fingertip to better separate two annoying papers. Only three of them caught Janice’s flu in those moments.

But over the weekend, the cold of the fridge slowed down the haemophilius influenzae — but it didn’t stop them. The moisture in Dan’s sandwich helped them thrive, and come Monday, when Sally knocked Dan’s sandwich over and bits of bacteria-laden mayonnaise and pickle juice splashed all over the paper bags and Tupperware below, the entire Marketing department was taken down for three days straight.

Moreover, the small water spill that Mark left on one table and the small coffee spell that absolutely everyone left on the counter next to the sink operated as breeding grounds over the weekend as well — and while the water only affected Jeff, the coffee knocked out about a quarter of the office at random.

Don’t let Janice’s sneeze blow up your Santa Monica office — cleaning is a low-effort, high-yield activity, and if you can’t get organized enough to do it yourself, hire someone who will!