5 Tips to Keep Your Office Clean Through the Winter
With all of the extra snow, salt, ice, and general slush outside, wintertime is a messy time of year. It can be even harder to keep the mess outside when you have employees and clients walking in and out of your office all day every day. When it comes to wintertime, facility cleaning companies know a trick or two to keep your office clean. Your cleaning company can’t be there every moment of the day. These 5 tips will help you keep the mess from building up when your cleaning service isn’t there. Keep the Ice Salt Outside Ice salt…
6 Types of Commercial Cleaning Services
Every business deserves a unique cleaning experience. Each building has a unique layout with different building materials that require a different approach. Does your commercial cleaning service provide you with all the services you need for a clean building? Or do you just receive the same exact service every time? Here at the Wilburn Company we offer a wide variety of commercial cleaning services to meet all of your needs- no matter what. Green Cleaning If you follow our blog, you’ve heard about this particular commercial cleaning service before. Wilburn decided to offer a green commercial cleaning service to provide…
Why Your Commercial Cleaning Should Be Green
As we move ahead into 2019 and plan the year ahead, take a close look at your building’s commercial cleaning services. Are they green? Environmentally friendly? Do they benefit your employees? Commercial cleaning should be green. Green commercial cleaning provides your building with huge benefits- but it also provides benefits beyond just your building. Environmental Considerations At this point in the year, we’ve heard it all. The latest headlines make terrifying claims: “World’s Worst Climate Change Disasters Cost 50bn in 2018” “’Please Don’t Kill Us’, Maldives beg ‘failing’ climate conference” “UN Chief Warns Failure to tackle Global Warming ‘suicidal.’” Climate…
A Year of Cleaning in Review: The Biggest Lessons We’ve Learned from 2018
2018 has been a big year at The Wilburn Company. We’ve continued to provide premier commercial and secure cleaning services to a growing number of clients. We’ve pushed further into green cleaning, implementing more GS-42 services across our portfolio and championing the importance of cleaning for health. And we’ve focused on building up our people, with training designed to empower our employees for success and improve our level of service. It’s been a good year, and we’re grateful for all of the people who have impacted our company along the way – our employees, our clients, and our communities. Yet…
Top Three Commercial Cleaning Trends in 2019
As we move through December and look ahead to what 2019 will bring us, the cleaning industry continues to change and evolve as the years go on, continuing to move forward, grow, and evolve. In 2018, we predicted the year would bring an increase in green cleaning, cost control, and employee training programs. This year, our predictions are a little broader with up and coming smart devices entering into the market, the growth of specialty cleaning services and the continued growth of the industry overall. It’s ironic that last year our blog post started off with a Geico commercial featuring…
How Commercial Cleaning Quality Assurance Should Work
When you’re paying for a commercial cleaning service, you want a quality product. After all, the cleanliness of your buildings can either improve or harm tenant happiness and health. If you receive a poor quality clean, you’ll also get more complaints from tenants, decreased employee health, and your building could even require more maintenance. But how do you know when you’re receiving a truly high quality clean? Sure, you can talk to previous customers and take a walk around your building after the cleaners have come through, but there’s more to a high quality clean than just a cursory…
How Commercial Cleaning Prevents Winter Colds
According to Villanova University, over one year Americans will suffer a collective 1 billion colds. That means 1 billion stuffy noses, sore throats, coughs, and sick days from work. Keeping your employees healthy doesn’t just benefit them, it also benefits your company with increased productivity, more uptime and fewer sick days taken. Green commercial cleaning, among other commercial cleaning services, can help keep your company running by reducing the spread of illness and preventing those nasty winter colds. Bacteria-Caused Illness Colds are spread by touching infected surfaces and then touching your eyes, ears, nose, or mouth. Colds can also be…
What to Expect from a Commercial Cleaning Company
Knowing what to expect from a commercial cleaning company can be tricky. Especially if your cleaning service comes at odd hours, you may never see them, and you’re probably unsure how to tell if you’re getting what you paid for. Sure, you can check to see if the trash cans are emptied and at what time they come and go, but without context you may not know exactly what you can expect from a commercial cleaning company. More goes into a quality commercial cleaning company than just a spotless clean. Your provider should also give you great customer service,…
Why Communication Matters in Commercial Cleaning
Some commercial cleaning companies are big fans of the idea that “silence is golden.” They communicate with their clients as little as possible. The line of thought is this: the only time that clients want to communicate with their commercial cleaning company is when there are messes, mistakes, or complaints. Those are all bad things. Therefore, communication will probably be a bad thing – so the less of it there is, the better. After winning a contract, these companies do their best to fade into the background at the sites they serve, until, ideally, people forget they even exist at…
Top 5 Skills Cleaning Employees Should Have
The job of an environmental hygienist involves much more than cleaning up spills and taking out the trash. As a matter of fact, that’s why we prefer the term environmental hygienist over janitor. As any good commercial cleaning service knows, our employees have to know a lot more than your typical house cleaner. Let’s take a look at five skills top cleaning employees should know how to do. Handling of Bodily Fluids Depending on the clients of your commercial cleaning service, you may have to know how to handle bodily fluids. In order to handle bloodborne pathogens, you have to…
10 Commercial Cleaning Tricks of the Trade
Have you ever spent a weekend cleaning your home or your office only to come in on Monday and be dissatisfied with your work? It can sometimes be difficult to have a spotless clean that lasts and is as pleasing to the eye as you want it to be. Luckily for you, we’re here today to divulge some top secret tips based on our commercial cleaning experience. Are you ready to fully experience the clean? Check out these ten commercial cleaning tricks of the trade. Don’t Forget the Little Things Getting an amazing clean is all about the little things.…
It’s Time to Move from “Janitor” to “Environmental Hygienist”
There’s a scene in the early moments of the movie Goodwill Hunting where Will (the main character played by Matt Damon) solves a graduate-level math problem in the hallway of MIT that’s been left on the blackboard as a challenge to students. Within minutes, he’s completely resolved a challenge that’s been unattainable for an entire class of brainiacs. It’s compelling to watch – not just because genius in action is fun to see, but because Will is not, in fact, a student at MIT. He’s actually a janitor at the school, responsible for scrubbing floors, not solving complex math problems.…
How to Evaluate a Secure Cleaning Service
When you own a secure building, you need to know that everyone who walks through your front door is trustworthy and cleared to handle sensitive information. If not, you could be putting your clients at risk – or, your front door leads to a government building, and you could be risking national security. This can make it hard to find secure services such as HVAC, construction, and cleaning. We’ve got good news, though: you can rely on Wilburn for secure cleaning services. But don’t take our word for it. How do you evaluate a secure cleaning company? You need the…
5 Ways to Tell if Your Building is Really Clean
The first time you hire a really good cleaning service, you may feel like your office building has never looked better. Maybe you can actually see your reflection in your conference room tables or your offices glass doors are finally free from fingerprints. But over time, you start to notice that the little things are going by the wayside. Are you imagining it? Or is it time to hire a new building cleaning service? Here are five ways to tell if your building is actually clean. Garbage cans “Really?” you might say. Isn’t checking the garbage cans being a…
How to Decide if Green Cleaning is Worth It
Avocados, coconut oil, acai berries. They’re all health fads that are being trumpeted as the healthiest new thing one minute and the devil himself the next. For example, one week coconut oil pulling is the “cool thing to do” and the next it’s full of saturated fats. Green cleaning may sound like one of these Pinterest-style fads but, unlike these “superfoods,” it’s here to stay. Like most things, green cleaning has its advantages and disadvantages. When you’re considering what is best for your company, you may be tempted to stick to traditional cleaning methods that seem easier and less expensive.…
Why Your Cleaning Company Should Be Growing
Often, there’s a certain level of opaqueness to business-vendor relationships. A vendor is hired to do a job, and they either do it well or they don’t. The curtain to what’s going on behind the scenes is never lifted. That makes sense. Performance in-role is what matters, for cleaning companies as well as for any other vendor. That’s the lens through which a cleaning company should be judged. Yet, what goes on behind the scenes can impact a vendor’s ability to perform a job. If your cleaning company isn’t doing well internally, there’s a good chance that you’ll soon see…
The Definition of Green Cleaning
What is green cleaning? An executive order in 2009 defined green cleaning as: “the use of those products and services that have a lesser or reduced impact on human health and the environment when compared with competing products or services that serve the same purpose.” But the reality is that green cleaning is much more than that. Green cleaning means reducing the harmful toxins that cleaning staff, customers, and employees are exposed to throughout the day. Normal cleaning products contain endocrine disrupters, phosphorus, nitrogen, and volatile organic compounds. All of these chemicals harm wildlife, the environment, and the people…
What to Look for in a Union Cleaning Service
What is a Union Cleaning Service? Union cleaning services may not be commonly talked about by your average business owner. Simply, a union cleaning service is one that hires only union workers. Many facilities, and even counties, require the cleaning service that you use for your commercial building to be unionized. Why is that? A unionized cleaning service can benefit workers in many ways. These include ensuring fair wages and hours, as well as safeguarding equality in the work environment. Counties and commercial facilities require union cleaning services as a way of ensuring that workers are more likely to gain…
The What, Why, and How of Flood Response
It’s been an unfortunate month for emergency response in Maryland. In the aftermath of flooding in Howard and Frederick Counties and the destruction caused by historic water levels in Ellicott City, many in the area have been left struggling to repair and recover. At the Wilburn Company, we’re grateful to see rebuilding happening at these sites. And we’re thankful that the sites we serve were unaffected by recent flooding. As you might expect, we aren’t often tasked with responding to historic emergency events. However, we do serve over 9 million square feet of space, and we do provide emergency response…
How Green Cleaning Benefits LEED Scores
Commercial green cleaning uses environmentally friendly and sustainable materials and methods to maintain your commercial property. Green cleaning can benefit your business by saving money, creating a healthier work environment, and by giving you the satisfaction of knowing that you’re helping the environment as a whole. And, if you’re a business owner or facility manager interested in boosting your business’ LEED score, green cleaning will benefit that as well. What’s a LEED Score? First, a quick recap on LEED: LEED stands for leadership in energy and environmental design. It is a grading scale created by the U.S. Green Building…