Your office is a place of peace, focus and motivation. Uninvited guests can disrupt the ideal work environment and thus make your effort of being the best you can at what you do that much harder. Every office, even seemingly the cleanest one, sometimes becomes shelter for pest, from bugs, ants and spiders to cockroaches and mice. Warmth, food and water are what attract them to your working space. There is no reason to despair, though, by following some simple steps and adapting your routine to possible hazards, you can prevent this annoyance from ever happening to you.
Most Common Places Where Pest Appear
Firstly, you should know with what you are dealing with. Identify what could be the problem areas in your office, and inspect them regularly and make sure that they are always clean and dry. The usual spots where they are making their “nests” are around the trash can, fridge, food cupboards, close to the heat (computers, heaters, radiators) and humidity (sink, windows, etc.) sources, hidden corners, holes in the floor and the wall, etc.
Proper Cleaning
Almost everything that you don’t clean is a snack for pest, and they love a good snack. So make sure to sanitize the floors, furniture, telephones, desktops, computers, keypads on a daily basis with disinfectant polishes and sprays. Regularly dusting is a must, because spiders and bedbugs are attracted by dust and spider web. Clutter is also responsible for piling up the dust, so remove it whenever you notice it is going too far. Recycle old newspaper and unnecessary documents. All the rubbish bins should be emptied regularly, and you should have at least one trash can in front of the office.
Dealing with Food
Food is the element that attracts pest the most, so you should be careful with ways of storage. Cleaning the fridge once a month or even better, once week, is mandatory if you intend to work in pest-free surrounding. If you have an office kitchen, keep ingredients such as sugar or coffee in plastic containers. Wash the coffee cups right after their use. If you don’t have to, try not to eat in the office at all. Having lunch in some nearby restaurant or bakery will save you a lot of trouble.
Keep the Office Dry
The most annoying pest of them all – cockroaches are attracted by moisture, so it is crucial to keep your office dry in order to avoid these unpleasant crawlers. Never leave full sink in the office kitchen (if you have one), wipe puddles of water in the toilet. If you discover there are leaking pipes, toilet fixtures, appliances or sins, fix that problem immediately.
Healthy Habits – Safe Office
Nothing of these advice matters if at least one of your employees doesn’t obey the rules, everything falls to pieces. Try to share all of this with them, by organizing weekly clean-ups, where everyone will dust the furniture, sanitize the floors, remove the clutter, etc. If clean and pest-free office is not enough of a motivation, try encouraging them by giving them “reward stars” for tidiness, and for each three they get an additional day off.
Pest Control
Besides traditional cleaning, if there is need, you should turn to professional products for getting read of these nasty unwanted guests. You can save yourself a lot of problems, by using quality pest control supplies depending on the animals you are facing with. First you need to inspect what kind of crawling or scratching creature you are dealing with to know what you should use to exterminate them. By applying the correct products, chemicals, pesticide, insecticide, rodenticides, you can tackle with pest invasion really quickly. If everything else fails, call the professionals.
A sanitized and clean office, free of annoying pest, is a way to keep workers’ productivity at the max and that is, after all, the goal of every employer.