Five spots your office cleaner is probably missing

Most offices are cleaned to a routine that nobody has reviewed in years. Here are the areas we find neglected most often when we take over a site, and what a proper scope of works should say about each one.

1. Desk phones, keyboards and shared peripherals

Hot-desking made this worse. Shared keyboards and headsets carry more bacteria than most bathroom surfaces, but they rarely appear on a cleaning schedule because cleaners are told not to touch personal equipment. The fix is an explicit line item: shared peripherals wiped with a compatible sanitiser twice weekly, personal desks left alone unless cleared.

2. Under and behind kitchen appliances

The gap beside the fridge and under the dishwasher is where crumbs, spills and eventually pests accumulate. It needs to be scheduled monthly, not left to whoever notices.

3. Air vents and return grilles

Dust on a ceiling vent is visible from every desk in the room and drops onto surfaces you just cleaned. Quarterly is usually enough.

4. Skirting boards and door frames

These are the classic tell when someone tours your office. They do not need weekly attention, but they do need to be on the roster.

5. Glass partition edges and handles

Everyone cleans the middle of the glass. The edges, the fingerplates and the door pulls get missed, which is exactly where hands actually go.

Fixing it

All five of these come down to the same root cause: a scope of works that is too vague. If your cleaning agreement says “general office cleaning” and nothing more, you have no way to hold anyone to a standard. Ask your provider for a written, itemised scope with frequencies attached to each task.