If you’re like many companies, you consider your employees to be among your most valuable and business-critical assets.
With the importance that employees play in the smooth running of your business, imagine the disruption you’d face if a large number of your team were off at the same time with an illness.
It would most likely lead to disruptions to your productivity, missed deadlines, unhappy customers, and organisational chaos.
To help avoid this scenario, it’s important to take the right approach to infection prevention - helping to reduce the risk of illnesses spreading, and ensuring that employees remain healthy.
In this article, we’re going to take a more detailed look at the importance of infection control in the modern workplace, and introduce some tips to help you approach it effectively.
Before we explain what infection control is, it’s important to understand what causes infections, how they spread, and the concept of incubation periods.
Infections are caused by pathogens like bacteria or viruses entering your body. Once they are inside your body, these pathogens multiply until they reach levels that can cause illness.
Most bacteria and viruses spread from person to person through touch, sneezes, coughs, and close contact.
Modern workplaces often have many people working together in close proximity, along with shared equipment in conference rooms and communal areas like kitchens. This makes workplaces the ideal environment for infections to spread quickly.
With this in mind, the obvious step to prevent infection from spreading is to prevent people from coming into the workplace if they are ill.
But it’s not that simple.
A lot of infections have an ‘incubation period’, which is a delay between becoming infected and showing symptoms. This means people can spread infections without knowing they are infected.
So, businesses face a significant challenge with an environment that is ideal for infection spread and a workforce that may not realise they’re infected until it’s too late.
This means the best approach to infection prevention is for businesses to assume that everyone is potentially infectious, and take steps to contain and manage the spread of any infection in the workplace.
And that is where infection control comes in, which is a broad term to describe the processes and procedures you have in place to help prevent the spread of illness from one person to another.
If you’re looking for ways to help prevent the spread of infection in the workplace, the good news is that there are a number of simple and proactive steps you’re able to take as a business.
It’s estimated that around 80% of infections are transmitted around the office by touch so it is important that all members of staff understand the importance of regular hand washing.
Installing a motion sensor dispenser for antibacterial soap in the washrooms and kitchen is an effective way to improve overall hygiene in the office.
Hand sanitisation stations also became commonplace during the Covid-19 outbreak and remain a great additional measure for infection prevention.
Providing hand sanitiser throughout the workplace, especially at entrances and near communal areas, can significantly reduce the spread of germs.
One of the most important things you can do to manage infection control is to implement a regular cleaning routine that covers all areas of the workplace.
It can be easy to focus on the obvious areas within your business, such workstations, desks and kitchens. But it’s equally important to include washrooms, carpets, light switches, door handles, conference rooms and even carpets and soft furnishings.
If you’re planning to encourage your internal staff to contribute to your efforts in infection prevention and control, setting up a clear rota that clearly outlines their responsibilities is crucial.
You also need to be careful in your choice of equipment and products for office cleaning - making sure the solutions you choose are effective at killing bacteria and viruses, at the same time as being kind to the health of your employees, and the environment.
We’d generally recommend the use of green cleaning products, which can be equally effective as traditional products for cleaning and disinfecting surfaces - but don’t contain harsh chemicals, making them a better choice for both employee wellbeing and the planet.
Shared areas like kitchens, washrooms, break rooms, and conference rooms can be hotspots for the spread of infection in the workplace.
When you think about how many different people come and go into each of these areas every day, it’s easy to understand why.
For example, in kitchens and break rooms, the same table might be used by dozens of employees throughout the course of the working day - not to mention the different people touching shared appliances like fridges, microwaves, coffee machines, and sinks.
To help tackle infection control in these areas, it’s important to clean and sanitise them more regularly than in other areas of your workplace - especially during peak usage times like lunchtime.
It’s also a good idea to make sure communal areas are fully stocked with supplies like hand sanitisers, paper towels, and disinfectant wipes - and that employees are encouraged to follow good hygiene practices by cleaning and sanitising surfaces after they have finished using them.
When businesses create their own cleaning schedules, it’s common for them to focus on larger areas - but overlook smaller infection transmission touchpoints like door handles, light switches, and the buttons on your lift.
When you consider how many people put their fingers and hands on each of these areas, you can appreciate why they are high-risk when it comes to the spread of infection.
So a key tip for infection prevention and control is to make sure that all these high-traffic touchpoints make their way into your cleaning schedule, and are cleaned regularly.
If you’re a business that wants to take a more robust, longer-term approach to infection control, you might consider motion-activated lighting, which reduces the need for employees to touch light switches (and saves on wasted electricity!), and even motion-activated doors that don’t require employees to touch door handles.
Disinfectant wipes are an easy way to sanitise hard surfaces across your business and help prevent the spread of illness
By providing easy access to disinfectant wipes, encouraging your employees to wipe down their desks regularly, and wiping down tables in shared spaces once they’ve used them - you can reduce the risk of infections spreading among employees.
A key part of effective infection control is making sure your employees are engaged and committed to helping you achieve your goals.
A lot of the responsibility for following hand hygiene practices, and keeping desks and shared areas clean and sanitised lies with them.
Providing training courses about the importance of infection control can help keep everyone informed and vigilant, and improve compliance with policies around hand washing, wiping down desks, and sticking to sick leave policies.
Another important part of infection control is creating clear sick leave and infection control policies that encourage employees to stay home when they are unwell or showing symptoms of illness. This reduces the risk of spreading infections in the workplace.
In addition to making sure your policies are clear and understood by all employees, it’s important to ensure your company culture and HR processes follow suit.
For example, if employees are discouraged from attending the office if they are coughing and sneezing to prevent the spread of illness - it would be unfair (and cause issues with compliance) if the days working from home were used to inform their Bradford Factor.
So making sure employees feel safe and supported when taking time off is key to ensuring adherence to sick leave policies.
With employees being the most important asset for many businesses, protecting their health and wellbeing is crucial if you’re going to avoid disruptions due to illness and absences.
By implementing the tips in this article, and encouraging proper hand hygiene, desk cleanliness, the regular cleaning of shared spaces, and adherence to sick leave policies - you can significantly reduce the risk of infection spreading across your business.
However, in some circumstances - such as during flu season for example, it can be beneficial to work with a commercial cleaning company to help deep clean and sanitise your business premises.
At Green FM, we’ve been helping businesses across London with their infection prevention and control for more than two decades.
We recognise that every business is different. We will provide a comprehensive cleaning plan tailored to your needs, covering all high-risk areas and high-traffic touchpoints.
We’re also incredibly flexible and can arrange a deep cleaning and disinfection schedule that causes minimum disruption to your daily operations.
With our ISO-certified cleaning methods and commitment to green cleaning products, you can have complete peace of mind that you’ll get consistent, high-quality results that are kind to the environment.
Find out more about the Green FM approach to infection prevention, or book a free cleaning assessment today.