At Measuremen, we have a cleaner. Sometimes when I’m working late, I’m working at my desk as he enters the office and starts to clean. He cleans everything, and he cleans it very well. By going through all the spaces and desks in the building, he spends a lot of time, effort, and cleaning supplies on each space, desk, chair, computer, and toilet.
As I’m sitting there at my desk, I know that some meeting areas are hardly used, while other spaces are always packed. This of course affects strongly the level of dirtiness of each space. However, the cleaner doesn’t know this. He cleans everything thoroughly and equally. Even the spaces where he, himself, was the last one to use it.
Of course, there are some visual cues; stains and crumbs that signal whether the spaces were used. Personally, when I’m cleaning I like these cues, they make the cleaning process feel purposeful. As I wipe the crumbs off my desk, I really feel that I clean it. But a lot of traces are also invisible to the naked eye. Microbes and viruses are traces of use that no cleaner can see. But they are there. So the only way to be sure that everything is clean is to clean everything. A cleaner can only assume that everything is being used equally. As mentioned before, this costs a lot of effort, cleaning supplies and time, which translates to costing a lot of money. If a cleaner could know how much a space was being used, he could proportion his efforts. Skip spaces that haven’t been used, and intensify the cleaning effort of spaces that are intensively used.
Sensor technology
But when a cleaner enters an often empty office in the evening, he doesn’t know how much each space is used. He can only follow visual cues which can be misleading. Sensor technology can help the cleaner here. Providing cleaners with a heatmap of the desk occupancy gives very useful information for them. By selecting timeframes a cleaner can see occupancy and utilisation since the last time he cleaned a space. Dark red spots on the heatmap indicate higher occupancy equals a more thorough need for cleaning, Dark blue spots indicate hardly any occupancy equals places to skip or only a quick wipe.
Together, this can reduce the effort of the cleaners, reduce the time spent on cleaning, and reduce the use of cleaning supplies. Which together results in a significant amount of energy and money saving. Of course, the information from the heatmaps goes hand-in-hand with the visual cues and the expertise cleaners have when it comes to cleaning spaces.
Useful for employees too
While providing cleaners with heatmap dashboards is useful, it is also very useful for employees to use the office space effectively. With our iBASX sensor solutions, we give employees the opportunity using an app, to book spaces and they can see occupancy using a live dashboard in the office space. This same dashboard can be used by the cleaners as well, but then looking at historical data. This means that there is no need to provide them with their personal tablets, they can just use the dashboard in the office space.
