Office Maintenance Calendar for Portland Businesses

Building maintenance is one of the most important aspects of owning or managing a commercial property in the Portland area. Keeping your building clean and in good condition protects your investment and ensures you’re providing a safe and professional environment for your employees or tenants.

This goes far beyond just sweeping the floor and cleaning the bathroom once a week. For best results, pay attention to every inch of your space. Make sure you understand what cleaning need to be completed and at what frequency.

Proactive vs. reactive building maintenance

There are two ways you can tackle your building upkeep…

1. Waiting until there’s a problem and taking care of any issues as they happen
2. Being proactive about maintenance and establishing a regularly scheduled maintenance calendar

Can you guess which approach we recommend?

There may be times when reactive maintenance is necessary to maintain a safe, efficient, and OSHA compliant workplace. But adopting a proactive cleaning approach will help you prevent issues in the first place!

The benefits of proactive building maintenance

Take a moment to soak up all the wonderful benefits of adopting a proactive building cleaning and maintenance approach:

• Increases your building maintenance service or team’s transparency and accountability.
• Leads to fewer large-scale repairs or maintenance projects.
• Since planned work can be scheduled, it minimizes disruption.
• Planned work also improves budget control.
• Improves OSHA compliance with health and safety requirements.
• Increases overall staff/tenant satisfaction and helps encourage efficiency and productivity.

Did you pick up on a familiar theme here? Proactive maintenance saves you money!

Conversely, taking a strictly reactive approach is very costly. Fixing problems is almost always more expensive than preventing them. Plus, there’s the overall faster wear and tear of your building to consider. And don’t forget about unpredictability. You’ll never know when something might go wrong and completely upend the flow of business.

Tips for creating an office maintenance calendar

So how do you create a proactive cleaning and maintenance schedule that’s right for your office? What tasks should be included on this calendar? And how often should they happen?

To come up with a plan, you’ll first need to consider the unique factors of your business…

• Size of your space – How many rooms and floors does your office have? What is the square footage? This will play a part in how much time will need to be dedicated to cleaning and maintaining the space.
• Number of employees and people in your space – How many people do you have working in your office? And how many clients or customers visit your office every week? This will make a huge difference in how much daily wear and tear your space experiences and how quickly the space will get dirty.
• Type of work being performed – Similarly, the day-to-day operations of the office can affect how often a cleaning or maintenance task needs to be performed.
• Materials and spaces that need cleaning – Does your office have wood floors? Carpets? Multiple bathrooms? Reception area and kitchen? Other heavily trafficked areas?
• Operating hours – Consider what hours your office can be made available for cleaning and maintenance without disturbing the daily operations of the business.

Keeping all these things in mind, it’s time to start working on creating a cleaning and maintenance schedule.

Pro Tip: Aim to make a preliminary list on your own to give you a better idea of the scope of work. Once that’s done, consider enlisting the help of a professional Portland building service company to dial in the specifics of your schedule and put your plan in action.

Types of office maintenance needed

What does keeping your office in tip-top shape involve?

There are some specific tasks that every business should have set on their preventive maintenance calendar. We’re laying them all out below. It’s kind of a lot, but bear with us — these are all very important for keeping your space in great condition.

General Interior Cleaning/Maintenance

• Empty waste bins and replace liners
• Dust and disinfect desks, chairs, tables, and other furniture and horizontal surfaces
• Vacuum carpets, mats, and sweep hard floors
• Mop all hard floors
• Clean away fingerprints and marks from around light switches, door frames, internal glass, and doors
• Clean elevators and stairwells
• Clean lighting fixtures and replace bulbs as needed
• Clean all glass windows and doors (both inside & outside)
• Vacuum vents and chairs
• Test smoke detectors and service other fire protection equipment (sprinklers, alarms, etc.)
• Clean and replace air filters, fans, and ventilators as needed

Bathrooms

• Stock toilet paper, tissue, and hand soap
• Clean and polish mirrors
• Wipe down hand towel dispensers and hand dryers
• Clean and sanitize all sink basins
• Remove splash marks from walls
• Mop clean floors with disinfectant
• Clean and disinfect toilets and urinals

Kitchen or eating areas

• Toss old/moldy food left in the fridge
• Wipe down and disinfect fridge, inside and out
• Clean counters, wipe down cupboards
• Polish appliances

Exterior Cleaning/Maintenance

• Pick up trash around property
• Mow and weed lawn
• Mulch and landscape
• Trim shrubs and trees
• Perform pest control
• Pressure wash building
• Monitor parking lot condition, restriping when necessary

Your full maintenance list may be longer or shorter than this, depending on your situation. And of course, not all of these tasks need to be completed every day. Many are once-a-year responsibilities.

The exact frequency of each task will be determined by the factors we discussed earlier in this article and based on the recommendation of your building service company.

We recommend creating a spreadsheet that includes every maintenance task needed and outlines its frequency. You can also use this spreadsheet to log the last time the task was performed and keep tabs on upcoming projects.

Let’s develop your custom office maintenance schedule

Taking a preventive approach and staying up-to-date on office maintenance tasks takes a lot of work! It’s why so many property managers and business owners partner with a professional building services company to outsource the tasks.

Cascade Building Services has been providing complete building cleaning and commercial janitorial and specialized services since 1961. We help Portland-area businesses prevent issues by keeping their space clean and polished.

Talk to us about a recommended cleaning schedule. We’re happy to review your situation and provide our professional opinion on what tasks should be completed and at what frequency.