Maintaining a Safe and Clean Warehouse Environment

Nobody wants to work in a space covered with grease, dust, and grime. A lack of regular warehouse cleaning leads to a buildup of dirt and grime that can harm workers and significantly hinder productivity. Maintaining a clean warehouse keeps employees safe, increases efficiency, and improves your bottom line.

Continue reading to learn about maintaining a clean warehouse and how it can benefit your business.

Why Maintaining a Clean Warehouse Is Crucial

A clean warehouse is required to protect workers as they carry out their essential tasks. Employees cannot perform to the best of their abilities when they’re surrounded by dirt and filth. Work conditions can also become unsafe, as clutter or spills present tripping and slipping hazards and accumulated germs cause illnesses. An unkempt warehouse also looks unprofessional to visitors, tarnishing your company’s reputation.

Benefits of a Clean Warehouse

On the other hand, maintaining a consistently clean warehouse brings numerous benefits, including:

Safer Working Conditions: A clean warehouse free of tripping hazards, spills, and harmful bacteria can protect the health and safety of workers. This also limits employee sick days, which helps maintain productivity and profits.
Greater Employee Motivation: Employees are more motivated to work in a clean and welcoming environment that lifts their moods as opposed to a grimy, dusty warehouse that leaves them dreading coming in each day. Increased effort, better results, and a more profitable business come with higher motivation.
Increased Productivity: It’s easier to remain productive when there aren’t obstacles or messes that need to be navigated. A clean warehouse makes getting from one end to the other much quicker, allows inventory to be retrieved in a timely manner, and reduces the chance of picking mistakes.
Lower Maintenance Costs: Workers aren’t the only thing affected by a dirty environment. Equipment left covered in dust and grease tends to degrade faster. This can make maintenance costs unnecessarily high, lead to unwanted downtime, and potentially cause injuries due to faulty equipment. A clean warehouse increases the longevity of equipment and prevents costly repairs.

Warehouse Cleaning Checklist

If you want to make sure none of your warehouse’s essential cleaning duties go overlooked, establish a checklist. This can include cleaning tasks that require attention every day, every week, or even just once a month. Review the following duties to create your list:

Clean warehouse loading docks, entrances, and exits
Take out trash and recycling and replace bin linings
Scrub and wipe down walls
Sanitize and disinfect high-contact surfaces
Complete power washing for parking lots, sidewalks, and exterior walls
Wipe down tools, equipment, and heavy machinery
Remove and organize clutter
Dust shelves, storage areas, and other grimy surfaces
Clean and inspect floors
Restock high-quality cleaning products
Conduct floor cleaning, including sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, and vacuuming
Polish concrete and add floor coatings
Maintain clean warehouse bathrooms by restocking soap dispensers, paper towels, and toilet paper and sanitizing surfaces

Clean warehouse floors are essential for protecting workers from slipping hazards and littered obstacles. However, maintaining acceptable floors can be challenging with constant foot traffic. Learn how Brenner can keep your warehouse floors safe, sanitary, and welcoming.

Commercial Floor Ceaning Services

While no two warehouse cleaning checklists are completely identical, many duties are sure to overlap. So long as your list has the essentials, you can maintain a clean warehouse.

Tips to Keep Your Warehouse Clean

If your internal cleaning crew is having difficulty delivering a consistent quality of work, there are a few tips and tricks you can implement to improve their process.

Prioritize High-Touch Surfaces

Warehouses are full of high-touch surfaces that quickly become grimy due to dirty hands. These surfaces—shelving, equipment, tools, light fixtures, door handles, buttons, and more—are breeding grounds for harmful bacteria that can spread among employees and cause sickness. Prioritize these surfaces with regular disinfecting and sanitizing to protect your workers’ health.

Establish a Cleaning Plan

Without an established cleaning plan, your janitorial staff likely has no sense of direction until an emergency requires their attention. You can develop a plan in several ways, such as dividing certain tasks to specific cleaners, following a checklist, or following a strict schedule. When everyone has an action plan that promotes productivity, you’re more likely to maintain a clean warehouse.

Keep Cleaning Supplies Stocked and Nearby

Maintaining a clean warehouse is difficult when you don’t have a full stock of supplies on hand. Make it a point to check the status of on-hand cleaning supplies and equipment at least once a month. It’s also a good rule of thumb to keep specific cleaning equipment nearby in case of an emergency, like a chemical spill, so it can be promptly dealt with. Having nearby cleaning products is the best way to clean a warehouse floor quickly and prevent injuries.

Provide Proper Training

You can’t expect your cleaning staff to do immaculate work without proper training. If you haven’t already—or if they aren’t meeting expectations—show them the correct way to tackle specific cleaning tasks. It may take some time, but the payoff can be tremendous. With the right mindset and proper training, you can create an internal cleaning crew that keeps your warehouse personnel safe and healthy and is proud of the work they do.

However, this requires an immense amount of time and potentially wasted effort—let’s face it, cleaning staff generally have high turnover rates. If you want to keep your warehouse consistently clean without worrying about quality or employee turnover, consider hiring a professional—that’s where Brenner Facility Services comes in.

Rely on Brenner Facility Services for a Consistently Clean Warehouse

Brenner Facility Services is the commercial warehouse cleaning service you can count on. As a family-owned cleaning provider, we’ve been sanitizing, tidying, and disinfecting our clients’ facilities for over 35 years—and we don’t plan to stop anytime soon. On top of providing a clean warehouse, we also take care of commercial offices, fitness centers, educational facilities, banks, manufacturing plants, industrial spaces, medical offices, government buildings, and more.

Our commercial cleaning services are entirely customizable, allowing you to pick and choose what tasks you would like performed, when they should be done, and how often. We exceed expectations at every facility we visit by leaving it spotless and fresh.

If you’re ready to transform your warehouse for the better, contact Brenner Facility Services today—we’ll handle the rest.