Keeping your place of business neat and tidy can be a daunting task, especially if you’re pushing around more than just papers and memos all day.
A warehousing environment does not lend itself to the white glove treatment. Between packaging and unpackaging, operating heavy machinery, racing around on forklifts, and oozing oil and grease that’s being tracked about by bustling employees.
Let’s face it… keeping a warehouse (especially its floors) clean can be a full-time business all on its own.
Modern-day warehouse managers and owners have some advantage over the old “mop and broom” days, with the availability of advanced floor cleaning equipment.
These industrial sweepers and scrubbers have become easier to operate, simpler to maintain, and even more eco-friendly than ever before. Likewise, the advantages of using the machines to keep your floors spic and span have become more and more important as both client and employee satisfaction have grown to greater importance in the modern business world.
More companies are coming to understand the advantages of cleaning equipment, and how they can help maximize an operation’s productivity, reduce expense, and diminish health and safety issues.
Here are 5 advantages of warehouse floor cleaning machinery that your business could start profiting from immediately:
1. Health & Safety
Air quality can become a major health factor inside a warehousing environment, where airborne pollutants can be 100 times greater than in the outdoors. The effect of air quality on respiratory health and allergies can have an equally powerful impact on your employee’s ability to do their jobs and maintain optimal performance levels. It can also lead to an increase in health insurance rates and medical leave costs.
In fact, these types of advanced janitorial equipment are far more effective at trapping and removing dust and other potential pollutants and allergens than hand sweeping – which, ironically, puts more of this debris back into the air than it collects and removes.
Floors that are cleaned at a professional level, using commercial floor cleaning machines, improve health and safety in the workplace by minimizing the risk and slipping and falling accidents.
Dirt, grime, and debris cluttering floors and walkways is not only unsightly, but it also poses a danger to both workers and visitors by creating slipping and tripping hazards and obscuring directions and warnings painted on the floors. If the floors are not cleaned properly, and often, dirt and grime can create serious danger zones in your workplace. Slips and falls can lead to injuries, temporary or even permanent loss of valuable staff, and possibly even expensive legal action.
Heavy equipment like forklifts are hard to stop quickly even on a clean concrete floor. Add to this a greasy buildup and grime, and you’re introducing a (completely preventable) risk of injury, or worse, to workers and other foot traffic. Not to mention expensive damage to equipment, building structures, and inventory.
Clean floors are not only more attractive, but they also enhance the safety of everyone in the workplace, help maintain a healthy work environment and, in doing so, boost employee confidence and productivity.
2. A Neat and Welcoming Environment (IE: Reputation)
When customers, or potential customers, enter your building one of the first things that they tend to notice is your floors. Floors that appear dirty, streaky, have a grimy build up along their edges or in corners or emit and noticeably unpleasant odor, negatively impacts a visitors perception of your building and, by extension, your business, services, and/or products.
True or not, dirty or stained floors send a message that your business is unprofessional, negligent or just doesn’t care about your appearance or their opinion. Allowed to continue, this type of reputation can have a devasting effect on your company and its future.
In the business world reputation can mean everything, and something as simple as a clean and shiny floor can instill confidence, trust, and an image of character and professionalism for you and your company. This goes for your employees as well.
When you welcome a potential new employee into your workplace for the first time, they see those floors too, and they will make the same mental judgment calls as any other guests. It may seem like a trivial thing, but the cleanliness and overall appearance can go a long way in answering an interviewee’s question, “Do I really want to work here?”
When it comes to current staff and employees, that fact is that they are, on averaging, spending at least 8 hours a day in their work environment, and a happy employee is a walking, talking testimonial for your business. Unfortunately…so is an unhappy employee.
The difference is the way that your business is being portrayed, for good or ill, outside the walls of your workplace. And all because your floors are dirty? That’s crazy!
3. Regulatory Standards
The better your ability to maintain a consistent level of cleanliness and order in the workplace, the better chance of meeting or exceeding state, federal, or industry health and safety regulations, and to pass required testing and inspection standards.
OSHA alone has 28 state-wide occupational safety and health plans, each with industry standards and enforcement programs. These are in addition to state issues health and safety plans that often match or exceed OSHA requirements.
Referring to sanitation requirements, OSHA’s provisions (1910.141) include mandates that all floors must be kept dry, and that refuse and sweepings must be cleaned up and disposed of.
Violations may be issued (but not limited to) the following:
- Wet/oily floors
- Accumulations of debris or waste
- Improperly discarded food, containers, or wrappers
- Trash build-up
Maintaining OSHA requirements is only one reason to have a clean and orderly workplace (but it’s an important and potentially costly one!)
4. Superior Cleaning
Again, would your warehouse or workspace pass the white-glove test? Of course not. No working warehouse is going to.
Some business owners, however, still low-ball the importance of cleanliness and go for the less costly, more traditional broom and mop approach instead of the more expensive, more efficient, and more advanced use of industrial sweepers and scrubbers.
Unfortunately, old-school cleaning solutions like hand sweeping and mopping still leave behind dirt, dust, and germs, negating the massive amount of work required to hand-clean huge commercial spaces.
In simpler terms: cleaning by hand can be a giant waste of time and money.
Industrial sweepers and scrubbers are a far more efficient and cost-effective option for many reasons, including:
- Floor cleaning with manual tools like brooms often results in simply moving dirt around and launching dirt particles back into the air, as opposed to an industrial sweeper scrubber machine that actually traps and removes dirt and dust.
- Airborne dust and allergens particles are detrimental to the respiratory systems and the overall health and well-being of both employees and visitors.
- Dust and grime floating around the workplace can also negatively impact the productivity and lifespan of your hardware and machinery, leading to costly repairs and replacements of vital equipment.
- Cleaner floors mean a safer workplace, as dirt and grime can make it harder to see yellow navigation and warning lines that have been painted on the floor.
- Scrubbing machines use a constant flow of clean, sanitized water, regulating “dirty” water into grey water tanks instead of returning it to the floor like manual cleaning options (mops) do… It’s a much cleaner and more hygienic method.
You see, when using the old mop and bucket method, the more you mop, the dirtier the water in the bucket becomes, and then you dip the mop back into that bucket and spread the dirt to a new area of the floor. This method can make areas of your floor surfaces dirtier than they were before you mopped!
What it really boils down to is this…do you want your floors to be kept as clean as possible, or are you okay paying more for less than average results from basic equipment?
5. Consistency & Time/Cost Savings
For business owners who still rely on these traditional cleaning tools, the expense involved in upgrading to professional floor cleaning machines can be a big psychological barrier to overcome. There’s no getting around it, the upfront cost to buy an industrial cleaning machine is much higher than the cost of a mop or broom. We all want to decrease costs, right?
What forward-thinking companies and warehouse managers are now realizing is that advanced janitorial equipment is vastly more effective, more efficient, and in the long run saves a lot of money when replacing outdated cleaning tools.
One of the most apparent advantages of floor sweepers is their consistency in delivering high standards of cleaning. Built with powerful engines, and heavy-duty, deep-cleaning brushes, these advanced floor cleaner machines not only do the work faster, but they achieve a level of floor cleanliness that allows for less frequent attention.
Also, businesses that have a vast warehouse, or huge parking lots or garages can reap the benefits of using industrial floor cleaner machines. Areas that could previously take an entire work shift (or even multiple shifts) can now be cleaned in a much shorter amount of time, by using these types of cleaning tools.
The cost savings of employing fewer staff members for a job that takes less time can add up to significant savings over even a short period.
Being able to do the job of a single broom or brush will provide the opportunity to clean a large surface area in a single pass. Thus, an industrial floor sweeper scrubber can significantly reduce your cleaning time and increase efficiency compared to manual sweeping and mopping techniques.
Malls, hospitals, big-box stores, schools, grocery stores, and even general office spaces can also use industrial sweepers and floor scrubber machines to their advantage. There are a wide variety of models and sizes of the machines available, allowing companies to choose the best machines to fit their overall size, hallway wide, door size, etc.
Warehouse floor cleaning machines are built for long-term, heavy use. They are designed to get big jobs done fast, requiring a minimum of time and labor. Their ability to achieve a deeper, longer-lasting, level of cleanliness ensures beautiful, spotless floors that promote safety in the workplace, reduced repair and replacement cost and overhead, a healthy environment, customer satisfaction, and employee retention.
That’s a lot of good stuff for a one-time investment.
One might say it’s a clean sweep!
