This is a collaborative post: After months of working from home, of transforming your bedroom, living room or kitchen into your home office, you’ve been asked to go back to the office for a couple of days a week. Perhaps you run a small start-up and want to make the workspace safe to encourage your employees to slowly come back to normality. Whether you are an employer or an employee, don’t forget the hand sanitiser!
Hand sanitizer helps prevent the spread of germs, bacteria and viruses, the common culprits of infections and sickness. Therefore, placing hand sanitizer around the workplace and keeping a travel-size hand sanitizer with you will encourage hand hygiene.
Office spaces are a germ hotspot – elevator buttons, bannister railings, door handles, crowded closed spaces… and don’t get me started on the journey to work because that’s a real bacteria-packed experience. If you think that bacteria, germs and viruses are mainly found in bathrooms, think again. The Open Medicine journal published a study that discovered that 61% of elevator buttons were contaminated with bacteria, while only 43% of toilets were.
As Philip Tierno, director of microbiology and immunology at New York University Langone Medical Center, stated in this article on Time Magazine, “high-touch areas are the main reason people get sick.” So, every time you touch one of these high-touch areas, including lift buttons, door handles (from the front door handle to the refrigerator door handle in the break room) and light switches get the hand sanitizer out.
Don’t forget to use properly use hand sanitizer because if you don’t, what is the point? Ocean Free, one of the UK leading hand sanitising and disinfectant product manufacturer, published a guide on how to effectively sanitise your hands, when soap and water are not available.
If you are an employer, make sure to place hand sanitizer around the workplace, near entrances and exits, on top of desks and near those high-touch areas to promote good hand hygiene which will lead to a healthier work environment.
This article was written by lead copywriter at Ad Lab, Carolina Neves.