How often should you clean your office desk?

Office Cleaning

Why a desk can be a hive of bacteria

You spend hours at a time sat at your office desk – and, in that time, you could often switch between tapping furiously on a keyboard, keeping a hand held on a computer mouse and cradling your phone. It’s no wonder that germs, bacteria and microbes can spread quickly on this desk, as your hands and fingers can touch so many different places there within a short amount of time.

You probably won’t be surprised, then, to learn that we would advise you to clean this desk regularly. Nonetheless, you might be none the wiser as to exactly how regularly you ought to do that. The answer depends on various factors – including the size of the office and how many people occupy it. A further factor you could easily overlook, however, is the specific type of office desk.

Different categories of office desk

In your office, there might be just one desk permanently assigned to you – a desk that you, and only you, use daily. However, if there are often people coming in and out of the office, meaning that the makeup of its occupants is rather fluid, you might instead have a “hot desk”. This is a desk where people will, during the day or week, switch places using it – and perhaps switch pretty regularly, too.

Unsurprisingly, a hot desk would warrant cleaning and sanitising daily if you want to help avoid bugs and illnesses spreading throughout the office. However, even a personal desk should be thoroughly cleaned day after day. The likes of food crumbs, coffee stains and even bacteria from collected parcels can too easily gather on that desk, potentially leaving it more bacteria-ridden than a toilet seat. What about the desk in the conference room? As that desk is likely used only occasionally rather than daily, you can get away with simply having it cleaned whenever it has just been used – and making sure that this desk is clean whenever it is about to be used again. We can turn up at your London office to clean that desk at least monthly and the main desks more frequently.