While waiting for the trusted vaccines and safe therapeutics to relieve Covid-19 fears, building owners, asset managers and facility managers must work to get occupants confidently back into buildings now.
Even with the advent of the vaccine, we will have to learn how to live with the virus. As flu vaccine, which has been around for years, has not made the flu completely disappear, the same way the Covid-19 vaccine cannot be considered as the magic pill that will immediately restore occupants trust to return to built environments.
Therefore, building owners and facility managers across all different asset types have been tasked to create new plans that inspire occupants’ and customers’ confidence that a building is safe to be used and that the facilities they might enter have done the best possible to reduce risk of contracting the virus.
This means facility managers are turning to their trusted partners to create those plans and to get guidance and answers. This is a key tipping point for cleaning professionals who now are cleaning to remove or deactivate the virus causing the current pandemic and to reduce the spread of the disease.
We need to shift our perception of clean. Shifting from the visual inspection of “does it look nice and smell nice” to ensuring that we are cleaning hygienically, removing and eliminating dangerous pathogens.
Cleaning and proper disinfection are therefore important as they are making people stay and feel safe.
But how do you define the level of cleaning and disinfection that is necessary to make people stay and feel safe? How do you most responsibly address your facility reopening and ongoing occupant protection?
In this respect, ISSA, the worldwide cleaning industry association, advocates for an approach called “Confidence cleaning”— a process involving proper risk assessment, followed by implementing all necessary steps for cleaning and, if needed, disinfection, providing assurance that the cleaned area is safe for use and occupancy.
Confidence cleaning should not be confused with what many people have been calling deep cleaning or hospital-grade disinfection. The latter, which is advanced levels of disinfection, is not necessary for routine operation of a facility if there are no confirmed cases of the virus. These more advanced tactics are best reserved for when an actual case of an infectious disease has been confirmed in the facility, at which time, experts with specific forensic cleaning training can decontaminate the area.
A critical part of confidence cleaning during a pandemic is assessing the risk of the virus entering the facility and being transmitted to additional occupants. A proper risk assessment will identify the important areas, touch points and usage by customers, clients, visitors, etc. Then depending on the results of that risk assessment, a scalable protocol will be implemented.
This will include the cleaning tasks, processes, procedures, frequencies, tools, and training that is required to effectively mitigate that risk for your specific facility.
However, it is important to understand that risk mitigation is not risk elimination. No system in the world can guarantee that an infection will not occur, but every system in the world can undertake strategies that reduce the risks of infection.
In this respect, the training and the education of our cleaning, disinfection, and response personnel are critical to conduct that risk assessment and to ensure preparedness in responding, reacting and recovering from biohazards.
This applies to our in-house service providers, our contracted service providers, residential service providers, and more.
Training and education are necessary to empower personnel to do their jobs well, both in their technical areas of excellence, and also in soft skills (communications, time management, teamwork, etc.). Well-trained staff are more effective and efficient in their job responsibilities. Plus, they feel respected and tend to stay longer.
The current pandemic has made it clear how critical is for organisations and their teams to be responsive and resilience and the need of a well-trained workforce that can be flexible and able to adapt and change.
In addition, both facilities managers and cleaning services providers need to prove they are the expert in the field and that they bring the know-how required to position themselves as the leaders in the field of cleaning for health.
They need to be transparent on their strategies, tactics and activities and be able to communicate, and prove that they can deliver and achieve that level of professional cleaning for health that it is needed to ensure a safe return to the facilities in their communities.