By J&L Perfect Cleaning Team

• Last Updated: September 2026  | Estimated Reading Time: 6 min

Selling cleaning as a way to make people work faster makes the budget harder to defend. Here are three things it actually protects.

Plenty of cleaning companies promise that a clean office will make your team work faster. That promise is too simple, and it backfires. It makes the budget harder to defend, not easier.

Think of it this way. New software and better training raise how much your company can produce. Call that the ceiling. Cleaning does something else. It protects the floor you stand on while you do the work. If you sell cleaning as a nice-to-have for staff morale, it will not survive the first budget review.

So the better question is not "how much faster will my team work if the office is clean?" It is: what problems am I letting pile up by not taking care of this building?

That turns the spend into three things you can actually manage: sick days, air, and wear. Each one can be priced.

The Ceiling and the Floor

The problem usually shows up the same way every time. One week the office looks fine. The next week someone has to check the bathrooms. Someone notices the kitchen. Someone asks why the hallway carpet looks worn out.

Bit by bit, the person in charge of the office ends up in charge of the cleaners.

As the first article in this series argued, hiring people who work harder does not fix that. Steady results come from written standards and routines that do not depend on one person's effort. But once you accept you need a real system, you still have to defend what it costs.

• Software raises your ceiling. Good cleaning protects your floor.

A cleaning budget does not have to promise more output to be worth defending. It has to control the costs that show up when the building stops working.

1. Sick Days

Nobody can honestly say that a cleaning company will cut your sick days by a set amount. Here is what the evidence actually shows.

Researchers ran a study across sixteen office departments, testing a hand-washing program. Staff in the program reported about a third fewer colds and stomach bugs. The study also found fewer missed work days — but that second number was small enough that it could have been luck. Researchers call that "not statistically significant." In plain terms: they could not rule out chance.

So the honest reading is this. Likely helps with illness. Unproven on the number your accountant cares about.

That study is worth more attention than most things in this field, and not because of what it found. It was small, and it was paid for by a university public health department with no ties to industry. That is rare here. A lot of the research you will see quoted about office germs was paid for by companies that sell cleaning products. The study also tested hand washing, not surface cleaning. And surfaces matter more for stomach bugs like norovirus than for colds and flu, which mostly travel through the air.

What is left is still worth doing. WorkSafeNB tells employers to keep up measures against contagious illness, including cleaning and disinfecting, and notes that the risk goes up in some seasons and varies by area. For an office in Moncton, Dieppe or Riverview, the answer is not to turn cleaning into a health promise. It is to name the spots that matter — door handles, shared surfaces, washrooms, kitchens — and cover them every time instead of by accident.

Then price the disruption, not the illness. Someone paid $60,000 a year costs about $231 in wages for each of roughly 260 working days. That is before the cost of covering their work, the deadline that slips, or the co-worker who picks up the slack. Run that math on your own payroll. Then run it for three people out in the same week in February. You do not have to blame one sick day on a dirty desk to see that missing people costs money.

2. Air

Air quality does affect how well people think, and the numbers are big. In the best-known study, people scored 61% higher on thinking tests when the air was better, and 101% higher under the best conditions.

Be careful with anyone who puts those numbers next to a cleaning quote. That study changed three things: how much fresh air came into the room, how much carbon dioxide was in it, and the level of certain chemicals in the air. Those are all building systems — your heating and air conditioning. Cleaners do not control any of them. Quoting a 101% figure on a cleaning proposal is the exact move this article exists to warn you about.

What cleaning does affect is what it adds to the air. Cleaning products give off chemicals that turn into gas and float around the room. The trade calls them volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Cheap products with heavy perfume add more of them, and they cover up smells instead of removing what caused them. A vacuum with a bad filter picks up fine dust and blows it right back out.

So the standard here is not "better air." It is that the cleaning is not making your air worse. That is a low bar, and a surprising number of arrangements fail it.

How to check: look at the vacuums on your floor and find out what filter they use. Ask whether the products are certified as low-emission by an outside group. Ask whether the crew measures how much product goes in the water, or guesses at the sink. And if the office smells strongly of cleaner the next morning, ask what is in it.

3. Wear

Here the cause and effect is simple, and nobody argues about it.

Dry dirt and grit get tracked in on shoes. That grit works like sandpaper. Once it settles down into carpet fibres, every footstep grinds it against them, and the fibres wear through. Good maintenance programs are built around that one fact: get the grit out often, keep as much of it out of the building as you can, and set the schedule by how much traffic a floor gets.

This matters more in Greater Moncton than in most Canadian cities. Moncton is one of the snowiest places in the country, and winter road crews use salt and sand, so what comes in on people's boots changes completely from season to season. Your entrance is not the first room in the building. It is the first line of defence for your floors. The same goes for hard floors, where grit dulls the finish on vinyl tile just as fast as it wears out carpet.

One thing to keep in mind: most of the published advice on floor care comes from companies that make flooring and cleaning products, and they have a stake in the answer. The cause and effect holds up anyway. But how long a floor lasts depends on the product, the traffic, how it was installed, and the building. So nobody can honestly tell you that a neglected floor lasts five years and a maintained one lasts twelve.

The money question is not whether the carpet looks dirty. It is what replacing that floor would cost you today, and how much longer good care can put that off. Get a replacement quote for your actual square footage. That number is what you are protecting. Less grit, less wear, longer life, fewer replacements. That is not a promise of savings. It is a way to delay a bill that will arrive eventually either way.

How to check: ask how often they deep-clean the carpet, not how often they vacuum. Then ask what that schedule was based on. A fixed date on a calendar, in a building with heavy traffic, is a decision somebody made without looking at the traffic.

Putting It in the Budget

Three questions make this easy to defend in a review. What does it cost when work gets interrupted? Which conditions can I actually control? What would it cost to replace what I am trying to protect?

Those are management questions, not promises. That is why they survive.

They also explain why cleaning turns into a price argument so easily. The invoice shows up every month. The carpet you did not have to replace shows up on no invoice. The time nobody lost shows up in no report. The problem that never happened is invisible. But invisible is not the same as free.

So the better question is not "how much does this cost?" It is: what is this money protecting? For a small or mid-sized business in Greater Moncton, the answer is usually some mix of a decent office for visiting clients, fewer interruptions, less risk during flu season, and a building you would rather not have to redo early.

Software will keep raising your ceiling. Nothing about a cleaning contract changes that. What good cleaning does is hold the floor steady underneath, so the capacity you already paid for does not quietly wear away. The choice is not between cheap and expensive. It is between paying for steady upkeep now and paying for the mess later — and the three questions above are how you tell which one you are being offered.

Published by JL Perfect Cleaning, which cleans commercial offices in Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview. To work through these numbers for your own space, you can  Request a Free Quote

About This Article: This article was prepared by the J&L Perfect Cleaning Team as part of our commitment to helping businesses, contractors and homeowners across Greater Moncton make informed decisions through practical cleaning expertise and industry best practices.

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