Five Cleaning Activities That Impact Health And Safety

This article was originally published in Clean Link.

Improving the health and safety of the public is one of the primary missions in custodial operations. This recent article on Clean Link identifies the top five activities cleaning workers can do to impact health and safety of the public. 

1. Train and re-train Hygiene Specialists (custodial workers) that their role is not cleaning for appearance sake, but for health’s sake. Workers should be trained on the science of cleaning and disinfecting.

They should understand that the custodial department performs both the clinical function of removing and inactivating/killing pathogens that could cause a preventable HAI (Healthcare Associated Infection). Workers also must understand the practical function of cleaning (no dust, no spots, no smudges, no smells all equals clean).


2. The cost of not performing their job as directed could cost the employer millions of dollars by way of lawsuits. Our patients enter our facilities worried about germs and about getting an infection. We can impact patient satisfaction by allaying those fears while communicating, “While I am here today, I am going to disinfect all the high touch surfaces in your room and then disinfect your restroom before I leave.”

The Hygiene Specialist can also impact HAI rates by doing a good job of providing a safe, clean and disinfected facility that could save their employer millions.


3. Train those who clean that there is a pattern for cleaning. That is, clean the room from top to bottom, and from the cleanest part of the room to the dirtiest, leaving the restroom for last. When cleaning the “patient zone” (the 3-foot area around the patient’s bed, including the bed rails), use a new, clean cloth. When done performing that task, ask the patient, “Is there anything I missed?”


4. Never double dip a cleaning cloth. Set up a clean bucket of properly diluted disinfectant at the beginning of the shift and then add 10 to 15 microfiber cloths to the solution. When it comes time to disinfect hard surfaces, merely reach into the bucket for a clean, disinfectant-charged cloth. Fold the cloth in half and then half again. As a surface is cleaned, unfold the cloth to the next unused portion. Keep doing this systematically until all eight sides have been used. A good microfiber will “catch micro-soils, but not release them."

Never return (double-dip) a soiled cloth into the clean solution because the disinfectant will become contaminated and less effective as time goes on. By utilizing this method, the same properly diluted disinfectant could last an entire 8-hour shift without having to be changed.


5. Using a quaternary ammonium disinfectant with retired cotton cleaning cloths (such as surgical towels, terry cloth towels and washcloths, T-shirt material) and cotton, string mops is counter-productive and dangerous. Unfortunately, this quat and cotton combination is used in most hospitals and hotels.

Cotton inactivates quat disinfectants by binding the active ingredients to the cotton rather than releasing them to the surface. This happens within 5 minutes of introducing cotton wipers or mops to the bucket of properly diluted quat disinfectant. In fact, you might as well be using water after 5 minutes because the ppm (parts per million) of active ingredients in the quat disinfectant is out of specification and in violation of US federal law.

What You Can Learn About Job Satisfaction From a Janitor

This article was originally published on Inc.com. 

What’s the worst job in the world?

Answers certainly differ based on personal preference. But cleaning up after hospital patients would surely be towards the top of most people’s lists. So what could janitors possibly have to teach entrepreneurs about career satisfaction?

A fascinating recent study uncovered a surprising answer.

Amy Wrzesniewski, now a professor at the Yale School of Management, had the radically simple idea of talking to the custodial staff at a hospital in detail about their jobs to discover what strategies they might employ to find satisfaction in their admittedly low-skilled, low-paid jobs. The wisdom she uncovered should serve to humble anyone who has ever made the error of thinking of those who work in the profession with condescension or not at all.

Turns out, they have much to teach even the most high-flying professionals about maximizing career satisfaction. The essence of this wisdom, author David Zax reports, is the idea of "job crafting." That doesn’t mean changing your work, it means carefully crafting how you think about your work. Some of the custodial staff, he reports,

Felt their labor was highly skilled, they described the work in “rich relational terms,” says Wrzesniewski, talking about their interactions with patients and visitors. Many of them reported going out of their way to learn as much as possible about the patients whose rooms they cleaned, down to which cleaning chemicals were likely to irritate them less. “It was not just that they were taking the same job and feeling better about it, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and whistling. It was that they were doing a different job.”

This second, happier group didn’t see themselves as custodial workers at all. One described forming such a bond with patients that she continued to write letters to some of them after they were discharged. Another paid attention to which patients seemed to have few visitors or none at all, and would make sure to double back to spend some time with them... What these workers were doing, Wrzesniewski came to realize, was quietly creating the work that they wanted to do out of the work that they had been assigned -- work they found meaningful and worthwhile. Wrzesniewski and her colleagues call this practice “job crafting,” and they think it could be the key to happiness in all sorts of jobs.

The idea of job crafting is available to everyone, Wrzesniewski believes. Though there are obviously times you should quit a terrible job, the impulse to always look for the perfect career situation rather than try to find ways to thrive in your current one and connect with the value of the work you already do, makes a lot of people unnecessarily miserable.