Dirty Floors May Be Your Biggest Source of Customer Complaints — Here Are 5 Things You Can Do About It

Most people think restrooms are the biggest source of complaints about facilities, but what if floors are to blame?

In a survey of building service contractors, 35% listed restrooms as the #1 source of complaints. Right behind restrooms, 27% listed floors as the #1 source of complaints¹. But let’s take a moment to think about why people complain about restrooms the most. When customers complain about restrooms, they are mainly complaining about the smells. I have worked with facilities that receive restroom complaints, and their janitorial teams show me the great products that they use on the toilets and urinals, but what they don’t show me? Products or practices to tackle restroom floors.

While floors are under our feet every day, they are often overlooked. But making just a few changes to floor cleaning in restrooms can help solve the problem.

Floors are a huge source of complaints and contamination in facilities

Floors are one of the first things that people see when entering a facility. And because floors represent the largest cleanable surface area in a building, when floors look dirty (either with actual dirt or just cloudy residue left behind by cleaning products), people may form a negative impression. Floors are also of the final resting place for germs, dust, and other contaminants that can make buildings unpleasant. Anything that enters the air ends up on the floor — droplets from sneezes and coughs, sweat, and droplets from breathing and talking all fall to the floor and other surfaces. People place their purses and backpacks on floors, and phones, pens and keys are often dropped on floors. Any germs from the floor easily and quickly contaminate hands, which then touch doorknobs, keyboards, faucets and worst of all, our own faces. Some early studies found that floors may be the source of up to 15% of airborne bacteria².

Floors are gross; here’s what to look for in floor cleaners

Cleaning floors well requires removing germs, covering a large surface area, and being compatible with multiple different flooring types. Therefore, the best choice for a floor cleaner should offer:

• Multi-surface versatility. Replacing damaged floors is a huge expense and headache. Cleaning floors regularly can help prevent damage from scratches, but it’s important to choose one that is proven compatible with multiple flooring types (especially vinyl, tile, laminate, and sealed hardwood).
• Effectiveness on multiple types of soils. A floor cleaner should also be effective at removing different types of soils. Restroom soils will be different than greasy kitchen soils, and your versatile cleaner should be effective at removing many kinds of grime, including dirt, grease, and soap scum. In restrooms, it may be helpful to kill germs on floors too — so having a floor cleaner that can also disinfect in one step is a good option.
• Cost effective. Concentrated products that can be diluted to create a cleaning solution will go further and be more cost effective at covering large surfaces like floors. Additionally, concentrated products take up less shelf space while yielding more usable cleaning solution.
• Pleasant smelling. A good floor cleaner should leave a light pleasant fragrance. Many people like a light nice fragrance to signal that a space is clean, but not one with an overwhelming odor. In fact, 75% of building occupants associate a pleasant smell with a clean space³.

5 things you can do to get the cleanest floors possible

1. Place mats or sticky pads at building entrances to stop dust and debris from getting into your facility. This may also reduce the amount of tough cleaning you have to do at the end of the day, saving your team time and money.
2. In restrooms, use a two-sided mop bucket and a flat mop. String mops hold onto germs and are full of crevices where bacteria and odors can thrive. Mop buckets that have only one compartment are immediately contaminated when a dirty mop is dunked back into it. Using a mop bucket with two compartments, one for wringing out the dirty mop, and one side with prepared clean floor cleaner, ensures that floors are actually getting cleaned and minimizes recontamination of the mop. Without a two-sided mop bucket, dirt is just being pushed around to different parts of the floor.
3. Use a versatile cleaner to clean hard floors once per day. Since most facilities have multiple different hard floor types like tile and vinyl, it’s important to have a cleaner that is compatible with many different surface types, so you can avoid stocking different products for different floors. For large areas, diluted floor cleaner can be used in an auto-scrubber.
4. Make sure your teams have the right training. Cleaning floors properly removes dirt and germs and keeps surfaces looking nice and facilities smelling fresh. Unfortunately, without the right training, your team may just be moving dirt and grime around and not actually removing it. Devoting a small amount of time to training cleaning staff will improve the cleanliness of a facility and is a good investment for their careers too! If you are not sure where to start with training, we recommend Clorox HealthyClean, which can be taken online and provides a good baseline training for new and experienced cleaning personnel.
5. Ensure you get the right dilution every time. Whether you need light cleaning, powerful cleaning, or disinfection, manual dilution gives you the flexibility to use one product for multiple different tasks. Wall mounted and automatic dilution control systems are attractive options for ease and cost savings, but may be harder to modify the dose for different cleaning purposes. If you have a dilution control system, calibrate it regularly and ensure it dispenses the right amount of cleaning product and ensure you have been trained and know how to change the dilution amount