Most, if not all, offices cannot do without a kitchen or pantry. This amenity is where employees and staff converge during their breaks to re-heat their packed lunches, prepare small meals, store perishables in the office fridge, make a cup of coffee, and other food-related endeavours.
Therefore, the kitchen pantry needs to be cleaned consistently to avoid attracting insects, pests, or moulds that can spread diseases to your employees.
Here are some tips to help you keep your office pantry clean.
1. Assign someone to supervise the pantry’s condition
Given that the majority of office employees go to the pantry every day, it’s going to be of tremendous benefit if you have someone to look over the condition of the pantry because if not, its cleanliness can easily be neglected.
If you have a team of office janitors, assign one or two of them to the pantry so that there is someone who can immediately take care of some accidental spillage or leftover mess that your employees can cause.
2. Implement a CLAY-GO policy
Getting your employees to practice CLAY-GO or Clean As You Go will help maintain the cleanliness of your office and help promote accountability, because whatever traces of food or wrappers they leave in the kitchen, they’ll be the ones responsible to clean up after it.
Sure, the office janitor can easily take care of them. Still, it isn’t ideal to leave it all in their hands because, more often than not, your employees outnumber your janitors, and you wouldn’t want to overwhelm the latter with the amount of cleaning that needs to be done.
3. Have the floors mopped several times
Because of the number of food items and frequency of human traffic within a pantry, mopping the pantry floors only once a day isn’t a wise move since employees take their breaks at different times and varying intervals.
Dust from the soles of their shoes and minor spillages can be incurred at any given minute; that’s why it’s best to have the floor mopped multiple times a day so that its cleanliness can be maintained.
4. Regularly clean out the office refrigerator
Because the office refrigerator is a shared commodity, it’s prevalent for some employees to accidentally leave their perishable foods in the fridge for longer because they forgot about it.
Even if your office is fitted with the most high-end refrigerator, nothing is going to stop that sandwich from moulding up; that’s why it’s good practice to have the office refrigerator cleaned out once a week so that old food items can be thrown out to make room for new ones.
5. Thoroughly clean the pantry at least once a month
Surface cleanups can only go so far because they often can’t attend to hard-to-reach surfaces. If you can, set a monthly recurring date for a deep cleaning of the office pantry so that you can get rid of dirt and grime buildup that regular mopping is powerless against. Also, thorough cleaning from a professional can take care of anything in your office that attracts pests.
Conclusion
The pantry is one of the most important and often-used areas of the office, as it is where many employees go to retrieve to prepare their food and beverages, giving them the energy to work for the rest of the day.
Since the pantry contains perishable food items, employees are likely to get sick if the pantry isn’t cleaned often. Thus, employers concerned with keeping their employees healthy and productive will need to ensure that the pantry is clean at all times.
If you are looking for a company that provides affordable office cleaning services in Singapore, we at Abba can help. We offer services that can help you keep all aspects of your office clean, from the lavatories and office pantry, all the way to the air conditioning units. Contact us today to learn more.
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