Melbourne is one of Australia’s biggest cities, and is also home to countless offices that take up a big chunk of Australia’s most recently reported total 25.3 million square meters or more of office space. People think of offices as open and light spaces housed within towers of pristine glass and steel. We also think of the offices themselves as being clean and tidy, with expert night crews of cleaning staff coming in and getting everything spic and span before the next working day comes along.

If that’s what you reckon, then think again. The reality is quite different. Far before the health conscious times of the pandemic, people were actually becoming aware of just how dirty our offices are. The need to find a trusted Melbourne cleaner with top ratings has never been greater in our workplaces.

But still when you walk into the office it does look clean. So where are the dirt and the germs hiding themselves?

1. The Lift Buttons

This one makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Wiping over the metal or plastic surfaces makes the buttons look clean, but just think of how many people press these buttons every single day. In the pandemic times, our lifts are disinfected more than once a day, usually, but that still leaves long gaps during which bare fingers are pressing up against the buttons, imparting lord knows how many germs.

2. Door Handles

Office doors are increasingly automatic glass doors that require no physical contact, but interior doors aren’t always the same. Doors to executive offices, the conference room, and even to bathrooms typically are still ones you have to open via a handle or a push surface/pull handle. There’s no escaping physical contact there.

3. Desktops

A shocking fact of working life is that the typical desktop has 400 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. This news is difficult to take, especially when we endeavor to keep our desks tidy, and our office spaces are cleaned each night (we hope), but the fact remains. The exact amount of germs on a typical desk numbers 20,961 germs per square inch, plus another 3,295 on the keyboard, 1,676 on the mouse and 25,127 germs on your office telephone.

4. Kitchens

Alas, office kitchens are no better, with taps showing readings of around 1,331 germ types per square inch. The kitchen space is even more disturbing since it’s where people prepare their lunch, rinse out their coffee mugs and water bottles, and generally hope that there are sanitary conditions there year round. Once again, it’s the concealed germs that are the problems.

5. Fax, Printer and Photocopier

If your office uses a communal photocopier, printer and fax, which many do, then these are also another hotspot for germs. Just look at the buttons to find most of them, but on larger items like the photocopier, people also have a habit of leaning on the machine while they are waiting for multiple copies or for long print jobs to finish if it’s a printer/copier dual machine.

A Real Problem

As we touched on above, the real problem in many offices isn’t just that there are germs, but that the germiness and griminess is not apparent to the naked eye. Most surfaces look perfectly clean, and indeed they are clean of overt stains and marks, but they are not free from contamination.

Office cleaning is quite a specialised field now, and offices in Melbourne that are concerned for the health and safety of their workers and the general hygiene reflected in their workplace can benefit from accessing these services on occasion, as well as training staff in daily cleaning rituals that can help control the worst of it.